Flash Fiction

Working Through

/ C. L. Clark / 2 Comments

Afternoon sun seared the exposed skin at the back of her neck in much the same way that she had broiled the steaks the night before. Although Connie knew the sunburn she was receiving was going to give her a great deal of pain that evening, she couldn’t stop what she was doing. If only she had remembered to replace her wide brimmed gardening hat after the wind had stolen it away from her a couple months back, then she wouldn’t have been forced to wear his useless ball cap that only kept the sun out of her face. He, of course, would have reveled in her forgetfulness, pacing around the patio behind her, berating her endlessly for her stupidity.

That thought caused her to stab the trowel into the sandy soil with more anger than she thought she was still capable. After all, she had made her way through all of the stages and had come out the other side with a healthy amount of acceptance. That’s what the therapist had told her was the finish line.

“There are five basic stages of grief,” the therapist had told her with a matter-of-fact nod. It was that nod more than anything else that had convinced Connie that all she needed was to get through those stages and she would be okay.

“The first,” the woman continued, “is denial, which I’m sure you can agree you have already experienced?” The therapist’s voice had risen at the end of the sentence, as if it had been a question that Connie herself should have certainly agreed with, but then she continued talking without waiting for a response. “The second stage is anger, the third bargaining, the fourth is depression, and acceptance signals the end of all that misery. There are no steadfast rules or timetables for how you will work through all of these stages. Some may last longer than others, but I am here to help you work through them.”

Connie hadn’t actually gone back to visit that woman again. That therapist had had a look in her eyes that Connie had seen endless times before coming from her husband, Mitch. The one that said, “You’re dumber than a box of rocks, Connie Stanfield. If it weren’t for me here to clean up your messes you would be sniveling in the corner wiping your nose on your sleeve like the baby you are.” No, she was done with that look for good.

Setting the trowel down, she pulled her heavy gloves on again and taking as much care as possible, moved the prickly pear cactus back into position. It was difficult working the sandy ground, but she managed to get it into place without any serious scratching through her long sleeved shirt. Wiping the beaded sweat from her forehead, she picked up the ground cover plants and tucked them in around the base of the cactus before filling in the rest of the soil. Her sense of accomplishment swelled as she looked around at all she had done since beginning that morning shortly after dawn.

“How’s that for not being a sniveling little baby?” She muttered, moving her kneeling pad down the line to continue the planting.

Of all the stages, anger had been the longest and hardest to get through; not unlike the sandy and somewhat rocky soil she had been digging in all day. In fact, since the night that Mitch announced that he was divorcing her, she realized that she had danced back and forth between the various stages and anger on multiple occasions. An emotional waltz that had left her at times begging him to reconsider and at others curled up under her covers in tears and misery, only to swing back around to such seething hatred that she was certain steam must have escaped from her ears.

It was during one of the seething moments, when she couldn’t bear to hear one more nasty word come from him, that she had sprinkled his steak with rat poison before then covering it with sauce. He hadn’t noticed a difference and had eaten with gusto, stuffing his face with the tainted meat and veggies. Connie had watched him as she slowly ate her poison-free food, thankful that he had stopped talking for once. Mitch had seemed to really enjoy his meal, at least up until the moment he began choking and blood had begun dribbling from his eyes. He had looked up at Connie with a pleading face, but was unable to put his voice to his request. Connie had smiled at him and took another bite of her steak.

Shaking her head slightly to disperse the gruesome memories along with the last vestiges of anger, she looked down into the hole before her. With a wry grin she pushed some soil over the dead face of her ex-husband and settled the last cactus on top of that. With a quick nod she thought, “acceptance is a beautiful thing.”

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A Winter Scene

/ C. L. Clark / 1 Comment

As the sun rose enough to peek through the trees, she stopped what she was doing to admire the beautiful winter scene before her. Like glittering diamonds on a jeweler’s velvet, the snow sparkled with gleaming brilliance everywhere the sun touched. Even in the areas where shadows still held sway, the snow took on blue and purple hues, as if the darkness wanted nothing more than to join in on the glittery dance. For a moment she was completely enchanted, enjoying not only the perfect, untouched areas, but the heavy laden branches of the evergreen trees as they stood like stately women covered in white mink coats.

When she had trudged through the heavy mounds in the dark, her feet and legs numbing to frozen sticks the further into the forest she plowed, she had only seen the menacing black beyond her flashlight beam. Now, with the sun and sparkle, her emotions lightened exponentially as she continued to dig beneath the snow, no longer focused on the cold. Of course, once she reached the frozen ground, she knew she didn’t have the strength to break the mantle, but that no longer mattered. No one would find his body for months under all the glorious snow and by then she would be long gone.

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Hobbies for Psychopaths

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Conner had marveled at how the kid met his demise with at least a degree more civility than one might have surmised from his outward demeanor. That in and of itself was somewhat redemptive for him, since very little ever shocked Conner anymore, but it didn’t change the end result.  The world had become a series of monotonous pursuits that carried the endless weight of predictability and threatened to drive him to the edge of insanity in slow, plodding steps.  As a matter of point, he had taken up his latest hobby in an effort to find the threads of fantastic that he suspected were still woven through the fabric of every day.  The fact that the kid, who was actually more along the lines of young adult, had displayed behavior outside of what Conner had expected brought the slightest hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

Although the punk kid – often called thug by society as if it were a title of some renown – hadn’t actually embraced the process, as perhaps his sour disposition and black-clad, death mongering attitude might have suggested at the start, he hadn’t cursed it either.  He had certainly been surprised, an emotion shared by the larger portion of Conner’s victims, but there had also been a small portion of regret and that was the thread that Conner could not help but embrace.  For a solitary moment in time, the idea hung in the air like the scent of flowers at Spring’s first blush, that perhaps the world was not as calculable as Conner had feared.  The fleeting thought faded as quickly as it had appeared when, as he slid the knife further into the punk’s ribcage and angled it upward, the reprobate had the audacity to utter a blood splattering, “why?”boredom-boredom-demotivational-poster-1225259054

Basking in the Afterglow

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She watched him lying there next to her, as she did most nights since the first day he brought her to live with him. Given that he always slept closest to the window, she was afforded the view of his well appointed, naked body in the shimmering moonlight. The silvery beams caressed his hard plains and masculine contours in a way that seemed almost gentle and loving. Beads of moisture from their recent actions glinted off his skin and brought the slightest, almost demure smile to her face. Unable to stop herself, she reached a tentative finger out to barely trace the curve of his jaw. He didn’t stir.

How long she had been there, how often she had watched him, she could not recall at that particular moment. Knowing that this was their last night together brought a strange mixture of fear, sadness, and quiet joy. Moving forward was always good, but the relative safety of a well-rehearsed routine had its merits as well. Some part of him would always be with her, she knew that; his voice, his touch, his very demeanor would haunt her for years. Yet still she had that fear of letting go, that inkling of ‘what now?’ she was forced to deal with.

Sliding out of bed, she flipped the light switch on and surveyed the mess she had made of him and the only room she had known for well over two years. Since her abduction, he had kept her in this tiny basement room, but he should never have started to trust her. Now he lay on the filthy mattress, covered in his own blood, with the sharpened stick still jutting out from his neck.

“That’s how your baby’s doing,” she mumbled, as she worked the lock open to escape.romance,black,and,white,kiss,love,couple,erotic-0e645b6970157827b190775e6e3817b3_h