Worthing Flash

by Bronwen Griffiths The car window is open. He listens to the croak of ravens, the soft drop of acorns into the moss. He watches the clouds walk across the sky, the sheep cropping the grass on the distant hill. She has never liked him. ‘ You useless piece of shit.’ The way she throws the words out reminds him of the time - the once and only - his father hit him with his mother’s hairbrush. The sting of it makes him wince even these sixty years on. A smell. The brackish damp of peat. The forest fungi. The wind itself. ‘Are you listening?’ His wife’s voice is as harsh as the knife she once held to his throat. He grips the slick chill of the steering wheel. ‘We’re not lost.’ ‘I’m not talking of that.’ Her voice is the scream of the buzzards high above the trees. ‘What is it then?’ A leaf falls. Just a single leaf. Perhaps a birch. Not an oak. Definitely not an oak. ‘You. Quitting your job. Loser.’ A woodpecker drums on a nearby pine. He is reminde...

A small room, over-heated. The sky outside grey like the man’s hair. A desk. Not quite grey, not quite white. A young man. Hair, black and slightly woolly. Eyebrows also black. Grey-haired man. ‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ Young man. ‘I have been invited to speak at the Festival of Words.’ ‘Words?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘On what topic?’ ‘Words, sir.’ A pause. A raindrop sliding down the window. ‘Words does not describe the topic Mr…?’ ‘Mr. Abias, sir. ‘Mr. Abias please describe the topic you will be speaking on.’ A pause. The click of a radiator. ‘The title of my piece is the impact of the Colonial Mind on the literature of Angola in the late 20 th century.’ The grey-haired man taps his pen on the desk that is neither white nor grey. ‘The Colonial mind. Is that how you see us, Mr. Abias?’ ‘It depends, sir.’ ‘On what Mr. Abias?’ ‘On who is speaking, sir.’ ‘Why do you persist in calling me sir?’ ‘Because I do not know your name.’ ...

The kitchen is stuffy, the window so crusted with finger-marks, grease and dust that it makes the trees outside look like photocopies of themselves.    The floor is scattered with debris - breadcrumbs and fragments of crisps, tea leaves, curled up rocket, maybe a seed here and there – a forensic free-for-all. He hoards food. The table is piled high with bread, some recently bought - others, encased in plastic, bloom with green spots of mould. There are rolls, flatbreads, pittas, cut loaves and pastries. Cookies, cheese biscuits, gluten-free biscuits, chocolate chip biscuits. Gingerbread stars in a large red plastic tin. Two tubs of butter. Tabasco sauce. A large packet of sugar. A toothbrush. A jar of pickles. A honeydew melon. A mug containing cold tea.    Do not dare not look inside the fridge. It is taped closed and dirty whirls mark its edges.    I do not judge. I only wish for rubber gloves, cleaning fluids and rubbish bags. ...

She wanders the fields where the elms once stood. Nothing stands there now, only the winter grass and a cold wind barrelling down the hill to the broken willow. Close to the edge of the stream, she dives into her coat pocket coat for the seeds and crumbs she keeps. She will wait for them to arrive; their fluttering wings matching the fluttering in her heart. No one knows she comes down here, day after day. Especially when the snows come, especially then. She won’t worry. Her feet have trodden these paths for eighty years – they belong to her now. Like the fox that passes each evening, they inhabit her dreams.  This story is by Bronwen Griffiths. Bronwen Griffiths is the author of, A Bird in the House , 2104, Not Here, Not Us – stories of Syria, 2016 , and Here Casts No Shadow , 2018. Her flash fiction, short stories and poems have been widely published. When writing this piece, Bird Woman , she was thinking of the walks she did as a child and a teenager growing up in North ...