FLASH FICTION--ED TAYLOR

SHORT FILM ABOUT SEEING

 

A cow and horse, then a sudden flurry of small horses—ponies. Sioux boys up, but old enough that legs almost touch the ground, bareback, with whips.  They gather at a fence staring back across the continent.  What they see is eclipse, a shadow passing slowly over the light, till the sun is a black crescent, or the headlights are gone.  Now it's a searchlight, a finger poked into sweat lodges.  They huddle in there, chanting, pouring water on the rocks.  Piling on the skins. The vision is sharp, feathered, silent.  There is howling.  They dream the dark, and it's too dark.  So, they howl until they can see red clay, water, water birds.  Then they are the birds, high over.  And the wind from their wings dissolves the smoke of darkness.  Light grows back, and there's a world, human beings and animal beings and plant beings, and a little cool water to splash on the faces, to drink.  Boys on ponies cock their heads, looking back at the long ground rolling to the oceans looking back at them, the ponies antsy, ears flicking at katydids, chirring twilight, the aspen leaves singing, and finished with the medicine, they take off, racing a single stallion running beside them, and now just ahead of them suddenly, riding out, everything hungry and laughing, boys not using the whips, talking to the ponies, who listen now.

 

SPECULATIVE FICTION

 

A bell rang.  Serving began.  There was clashing over the platters, steam rising. On the windows, ice.  Glass was once so precious it was handed down the ladder of years like an old gun or money. But now just a glaze over the confection outside.  Dark. Handfuls were grabbed, hot meat and bones, whole helmets of boiling soup in which floated greens, roots.  Tussling even among the children, some learning better from their elders how to take out enemies, use their momentum or empathy against them. Families huddled, kids in the middle of circled adults facing out, forks and knives instead of horns, what's left of their teeth exposed.  There was music, a harmonium or organ with a ripped bellows, pumped by a white- haired man in black with startling white froth of collar at the throat as if it were slit and bleeding cloth.  Then bells from elsewhere, higher in the air, outside, black and white birds blurring around the sound, frantic.  

Then bells rang images--service revolver, revolving door, door prize, prize auroch, mock fossil trifle surprise, displaced persons and demilitarized zones, crossing the spine of a humped bridge, guards, smoking, some without shoes, eaters shining with grease, glitter from sparks in the air, sluggish flies in cold mist, rush of wind, asphalt, bells again, bells, flung open doors, yellow light in the dark toward which the shadows drain pouring in, some crawl, some sleep breathless in the street, out of air fallen, footprint on face, polished mahogany of long benches like fences, gray chutes and ahead the final man with hood and the hammer, and bells, steps, the touch of grace, bells, silence. 

One by one approaching, kneeling, some needing to be held up.  Weeping.  Something like sunrise staining the snow in the smoke.

 

 

WOLF HOUSE

 

Red instead of left goes right ends at a dark ivied low door sudden in low scrub & brush pushes aside the things in her face like hair tickling startling the way she hates webs & shivers 

& the door a slab of oak worked to a sheen how do they do that with paws & claws she thinks a mouth opening on brown dirt room & light in short supply & careful things on shelves & pictures hard to make out but nicely framed & reading material it seems just like us she thinks this might be anyone's room 

& then she notices eyes shining like teeth in the night of everywhere & low quiet growls over a bowl of something steaming

 

Ed Taylor (he, him) is the author of the novels Theo and Sebastian's Ladder (forthcoming), the poetry collection Idiogest, and 3 poetry chapbooks. His poetry and prose have appeared in a variety of U.S. and U.K. periodicals and anthologies, and his most recent multimedia performance work was the 2020 1-act play "Black Nikes" (Alleyway Theater, Buffalo NY).