Worthing Flash

Plausible Deniability The problem with being sick, she thought, is that everyone wants to take care of you but no one wants to indulge you, and what is the point of being cared for when what one requires most when one is sick is indulgence? She was tired of the flu, so she got out of bed. Her best tactic in dealing with illness, the last weapon against disease in her arsenal, was denial. She would not be sick. She fed the dog, washed the linens, showered and dressed, ate, got Dad’s coffee, emptied the dishwasher, caught up on emails, rescheduled Hugo and Shawna and Mac, asked Brenda and Rita to take the lead in the Zoom presentation tomorrow, which she would attend but would let her voice excuse her from leading. She graded all the papers. Then she woke Kat and told them they would be going to get Kat’s hair done as planned. Kat dutifully showered and dressed, but then they said, “I can drive myself. You look like you still need to rest.” “Nonsense,” she answered, “But if you ...

 Food of Love by Kathy Silvey She could cook when he wasn’t there. She grated ginger without grating her knuckles like when he looked at her. Today the shrimp would nestle in a bath of soy sauce and honey speckled with ginger and garlic and crushed red pepper, happily marinating. They would be delicious, and when she added them to the pan she would not burn them like the pancakes she had made for him. She had made perfect pancakes since age twelve—until he looked at her. Love glowed in her blush of shame when praised for her food by everyone but him.

In the middle of the valedictorian’s speech, the hallucinations began. A giant mushroom cloud reared up behind the lovely, optimistic young woman at the podium. It was strangely beautiful, bright, golden, like the last perfect sunset she would ever see. Nicole Silvers set her face and pretended not to see it.   It had been years, but as a child she had hallucinated often, and for most of her ninth year nearly every night, so while it was unwelcome, and the timing was terrible, she knew what to do.   She breathed slowly and deeply, calming her nerves. She ignored the apocalypse which dominated her field of vision and tried to focus instead on the young woman’s speech.  It was so dull, anodyne, predictable, nearly the Platonic ideal of a commencement speech, full of dreams and ambitions, signifying nothing, that it was difficult to find anything there real enough to cling to.  But in the end its serene mediocrity caused the advancing devastation to flicker an...