Flash Fiction 1st Place: 15-C-47662 by Patrick Holloway

1.

Your teeth are smudged blueberry. You hold one in between finger and thumb as if it were a world. Your foot flirts with my leg under the table. You say something and I miss it, lost to unformed futures. Your leg pulls away. You drop the blueberry to the ground and sigh— I can see the air and something else leave your exaggerated mouth, something earthy.

2.

In the moments after, your fingers are too soft, tracing veins up and down my arm. There is a rare silence to you and I think you are happy. There are a hundred of you and only now do they move in unison, kicking two hundred perfect feet free from the blanket. All those mouths echoing, so much breath against my neck.

3.

Your teeth grind, feet tapping the concrete. Pupils the size of blueberries. Whatever we left is something already altogether different. You hold the wall and vomit splatters against your legs. I look down and there are so many shadows fighting for space on the grey stage of memory. 

4.

You bite my lip too hard and draw blood. You say sorry and shrug as if you are not sorry. You crumple up like a sweet wrapper. A few crimson drops drip from me as I lean down and stain the carpet floor.

5.

I call you. Drive to the apartment you rent. The day is enveloped in the night and opens out above me. You are gone and I tell everyone you will be back. Inside of me there are only chambers I cannot come out from. Each one a morsel of time with you.

6.

A year passes.

7.

Fifteen more.

8.

They find your car because a part of the registration is still visible at the bottom of the tide. The smell of the car comes back to me, the smell of pine that used to remind me of Curraghbinny woods, and how frightened I’d be on school trips there, or looking out at the trees under the moon, knowing people were hanged there back in the war. We walked there once and I watched how your head bent so far back to take in the sheer height of the oak, the birch, the ash.

9.

They find no remains for the first few days. Inside of me acute edges try to fit themselves into something the shape of your eyes. At night I cannot look at my wife.

10.

A molar. A broad surface for grinding. For breaking things down. That doesn’t break down. I think it must be the one from the top right of your mouth, the only one that didn’t have ugly, copper fillings.

11.

All that time down there in the depths of yourself.

12.

I see you smile, moving like a silk scarf falling from the pier. I see it ripple the surface, imbibing all the air and softly drowning, beautifully.