Worthing Flash

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. ...

Over time without measure, for indeed time was not yet born, over distance unimaginable, or perhaps densely confined within an atom’s core the attraction grew. In the dark - for light, too, awaited birth In the heat – or in its absence the attraction grew. Tighter and tighter the embrace, deeper and deeper the thrust and pulse, all into nothing, nothing into all until where there was nothing, there was all. The climax hurled stars screaming across the all. When? Where? How? All we know: it was the biggest of Bangs and we are its children. Patricia Feinberg Stoner follow my mewsings at  http://www.paw-prints-in-the-butter.com laugh with the ladies at   https://youtu.be/_70Qys5zOpc see my books at  https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00O36LKRE

“Passengers for flight EZY8691 to Las Palmas please make your way to gate 69. The flight is ready to board”. In my chest my heart was thumping with excitement.   It is incredible that people around me could not hear the noise it was making.   “This is my flight.   I am going to Gran Canaria”. I thought with exhilaration whilst making my way to Gate 69. I had finally managed it.   It had taken me 6 months of savings to afford a break in Las Palmas.   This was my treat for my 50th birthday and I will be celebrating it in Spain. I still had difficulty realising that I was at Gatwick Airport, on my own, ready to board a flight to a destination I had never been to.   If it had not been for the documentary I had seen on the special beaches and the sand dunes in Las Palmas, I would never have thought of going there. Not mentioning the unusual night clubs with the flamboyant characters that performed there every night of the tourist season. I...

by Sarah Starr (Inspired by and in memory of Grenfell) Air It snowed the day I wove her golden braids, black ribbons twisting through her luxurious mane of flax. She held her head proudly, but sadness curtained her dark eyes. The sky, still grey from soot and ash held the further surprise of frosted sugar as I led her prettily from her home. I remembered the day my sister had leant over the railings far above me, her hair the same hue, her laughing eyes obscured from my view. She enjoyed affecting flight, arms outstretched to that same sky, then blue as cornflowers and with the promise of endless summer days. That was when bees had circled the tower in search of nectar and pollen for their hive. Seeds drifted on silent thermals with only the birds for company. She saw me way below her and ran inside to meet me. Fire But soon a dreadful, fateful day exploded. When no rain or snow came forth to quell the burning tongues that mocked and flailed against stone...

By  J. L. Dean Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette’s favourite portraitist, speaks of their last portrait. Roses were her flower. She was right to insist on them for the portrait. They matched her in complexion, in grace and in the appearance of simplicity. It is how I like to remember her. Already her popularity was fading. The Queen of France; forever a foreign princess. She understood and, child that she was, responded by playing straight into their hands. She looks out from the canvas, her expression sardonic, holding her flower, a ribbon between flesh and thorn. Yet it is what I see in her eyes that stills. Did she know ? Was it really such a short step from the libelles to the mob and their sharp-tongued Madame ? What little attention we paid at the time. Yet ten little years was all it took for a mistreated people to rise in support of new manipulators. Should I have taken more care? The dress I had her wear; it was not her shift, as the scand...

By  J. L. Dean The Office of the Dead continued, its ringing tone slipping between the cold stones of the church to settle with those buried below. Agnetha remained inert, becoming to a corpse, even a breathing one, as it passed from the life it had known. Hands grasping in the dark; too many hungry eyes on her, and her fortune. She kept her eyes on the bishop, her uncle, whose oft-professed love for her had taken on a different hue when she had asked her favour. The taste of him lingered in her mouth. Yet the favour had been granted. She had taken her vow; she would remain here, in this cell attached to the church. As anchoress, a living saint, she would be left to decay in piety without the corruption the world demanded. Above the chanting, she heard birdsong. Her heart broke even as it lifted. The natural world thrummed around her in all its sustaining beauty. She mourned, but saw no alternative. Her parents were dead and there were too many wolves in the fo...

By Daniel Holland Slapping wet dirt from her reddened fingers, she stood again, propping a shaky palm on her lower back as the riptide of aches and pains skittered across it. “Why am I doing this?” she asked aloud to no one and pressed her sun-faded bandana to her forehead, catching a runaway dribble of sweat. Her young neighbour passed with a bouncy poodle, the white curls about its collar swirling a little in the new breeze. “Looks like a whole new world,” the girl mused, beaming up at Jamie from the sidewalk below. Resetting her feet on the slope, Jamie contemplated her work—this hillside that she’d been standing and sitting and kneeling and digging on for two days now. Once a mound of dried, brownish ivy that acted more like a wired fence than a welcome mat for her Santa Monica apartment complex, now it was… what exactly? A sea of jade, cactus and aloe of every size and shape--that’s what it was. Some plants had long intricate names that she couldn’t even pronounce, and mos...