Worthing Flash

‘It has to be perfect,’ she murmurs. Liz smooths the comforter, as she does every day, brushing off fluff that does not exist. Satisfied she moves around the room, straightening prints that do not need straightening, rearranging figurines that do not need rearranging and tweaking doilies that do not need tweaking. She smiles. It is perfect. As always. The room is ready. A few minutes later Liz collects her car keys and heads out the door. A marquee is the first clue that this is not an ordinary day at the reserve. It hovers awkwardly on the boundary, its stark whiteness contrasting with the dark jungle of trees and bushes and curling paths that stretch over two acres A small clutch of people hover outside the marquee, twittering among themselves. Birds flit overhead. Liz, spots her parents immediately. Her father, Frank, still tall and broad, even in his mid-eighties, is rolling his brushed check shirt sleeves up, exposing muscular forearms. Khaki cargo shorts show...

Lilac Cerulean Azure Sapphire Cobalt The palette of blues goes on and on in the waters around me This patch of Tahitian sand in the middle of French Polynesia they call a motu. Moorea can barely be seen from the edge of this pristine shoreline. A tranquil paradise. Palm trees and other tropical plants cover much of this tiny island. I sit cross-legged in the wet sand at the shoreline. I dip my hands into the heavenly liquid, spritzing droplets on my neck and chest. I watch our guide, a spry young man of less than twenty. His beaded dreadlocks swing as he moves gingerly in the water, his muscled body tight. He opens the folding table and chairs and digs them into the sand in the shallow water ten feet away from me. His name is Salu. A palette of more than ten different shades of blue swirl around the metal legs of the table. Salu wades back to the Zodiac raft which is parked on the edge of the sand and hoists a vinyl cooler bag over his shoulder. “Fresh fruit and snac...

Here, where the motorway cuts through the ancient hill, where empty bottles, cans and debris lie – a shredded tyre, a baby’s nappy, a lost earring gleaming in the parched grass – here I will fashion a forest of oak trees. Here, where today the noise of traffic is as loud as a swollen river, where toxic fumes belch into the humid air and the verge is bloodied with the entrails of badgers, foxes and voles, I will stitch a thousand lichens, weave patterns into bark and sprout saplings from fallen acorns. Overnight these slender saplings will grow into immense forest. Tomorrow wrens will rustle in the verge’s undergrowth, a colony of ants will build a nest where the hard shoulder now stands and a giant oak will root itself into the middle lane, from where the owl’s eye will survey its domain. Tomorrow you will see twisted branches arching their way across the tarmac, moles burrowing under the cat’s eyes and a fox slinking along the rusted crash barrier. Tomorrow there will be a soft gre...

by Norbert Kovacs Kayla had trouble to decide which foods to have on her new diet. An apple seemed it might be fine but so did a granola bar to the thirty-something homemaker. Wheat bread sounded nutritious, but why not strawberries crusted with sugar, too? Kayla fetched several foods from her fridge and set them on the kitchen table, her hope that she would reckon the easier if the actual items she was considering were right before her. She considered bananas and dark chocolate; she reflected on avocados and tortillas. Research studies that she had read recommended and panned all of the foods. She recalled one that said milk helped build strong bones and muscles, another that said it overcharged our growth hormones. Kayla gained no traction and sat staring at fruit and beverage, a blank of indecision. The housewife fetched and spread the food from her fridge again one day as her husband Pete sat eating breakfast there at the table. A burly, heavyset broker of forty, Pete liked to...