fireflash
a fragment:
"A softness of beauty that wells into a glow when I am near you..."
(Found on a scribble in my files)
Angel walk by
lend yourself to my dreams
stardust
gleam in your eye
is it not what it seems?
From the Files
(Written in scribbles on an Elliot Bay Bookstore newspaper dated Summer 1991)
I was standing at the bus stop, trying to stop time
simply with the sternness the look on my face.
No one noticed but a young girl, I saw her smiling
at me in the corner of my eye. I couldn't
acknowledge it, though. This is the nineties
and such things bring one to public disgrace.
Trying to stop time by the sternness of my face.
Why? Couldn't the world stop turning long enough
for me to solve all its problems before she continued?
Here I was, my face was quite stern,
and you sailed by throttling the enormous pedals
of your bicycle. You stopped time for me,
and melted the rough edges of my face into a smile.
The Devil Drives a...
(by Gustav BenJava)
... white SUV. I know he does. How do I know?
The other day I found him tailgating me. Then a day later, when we were sitting in morning traffic, he was suddenly passing all of us that waited for the stoplight (a row almost a block long) going rapidly past us on the wrong side of the street... against traffic.
About a year ago (yes, I'm sure it was him) driving the same car, he was passing by everyone at a different intersection, by driving down the sidewalk on my right, in order to make a right turn at the next light.
But then there was the subaru. The profile was slightly different this time, but the way it happened (three days in a row) I'm CERTAIN it has to be HIM!
I was driving home trying to keep well behind this old beat-up subaru that smelled strongly of gasoline. I didn't want to be too close to the heap of junk when it exploded. But the problem was, he was driving just slow enough to be extremely annoying. So, I finally got into a different lane and quickly passed him.
I didn't want to linger driving alongside that freakish car, but I glance over as I passed and that was him, sure enough: slicked back hair, thick glasses, and, yes, you could just barely make out the tiny little horns on his devilish head.
But the freak thing was, in the ebb and flow of traffic he was suddenly in front of me again, and driving really, really slow this time: driving 25 in a 35 zone, when the traffic conditions didn't warrant that. He could have done at least 30 - there was nobody in front of him.
Well, at last, to my relief he made a left turn at an intersection where I was driving straight. But that slimy beelizbub had made me a good 15 minutes late by all the extra stoplights I caught with his slow driving.
The freakish thing was: same thing on the next night, on my way home from work. Only this time Lucifer is a WOMAN, and she's driving a mini-van. An outline of children appeared through the tinted glass, riding as passengers: but I could tell they were all Freeway Expresslane Dummies. You can't fool me! Besides, what would the Angel of Light be doing with children anyway?
Well, anyway: same exact thing (25 mph in a 35 zone!), and she finally got in the left turn lane and went the same way as she/he had the night before. But not before she made me 15 minutes late.
Then it happened a third night in a row. The Devil lives in Juanita, I tell you. Every night she (or he) drives slow
down 123RD, turns right on 100TH AVE NE, then turns left at the intersection of 100th and NE 132nd. Beware if you live in Juanita! The third time I got behind him/her I couldn't tell whether he was a he or a she. And the model and make of the car: one of those newer model Indo-Euro-Asian things. Made in America, Canada and Japan (or a Singapore sweatshop - yes, that would be more his style...
What the Damn Muzlums Did Tonightby Gustav BenJavaI was driving home from work tonight, creeping up over the top of a freeway overpass in the throb of traffic. Suddenly on my right and left I see a flash of red light just beyond the guardrail illuminating the cars sitting in traffic below. I hear an enormous sound - I can't exactly call it a boom or a crackle, or a crash. It is the sound of the universe collapsing in on itself and expanding. It is the sound of all sounds mingled and mixed. A sound so deafening that the world becomes silent before my eyes, and things march onward as if I'm looking at them from the outside. I notice the overpass ahead of me has crumbled like broken glass. I see chunks of concrete and asphalt flying every direction, and feel myself falling for a moment.
I don't fall for long. Probably less than a couple hundred milliseconds. Just long enough that I can actually feel it - and then suddenly I am moving in the other direction - up, up and up. I realize what has happened - some sort of bomb. Some sort of mega-bomb! Damnd Muzlums! And I am still ascending. The first thing that comes to my mind is: how will my family go on? What will become of them in the chaos that sweeps across the land in the aftermath of this event. And I wonder if it is so powerful that it will kill them too, not far away - a couple of miles at best. Will it scorch the land and kill thousands? Millions?
And then I wonder why I haven't died yet myself. I am still ascending, and my car with me. I expect to come back down in an arch and land nose-first through somebody's roof or go smashing into a field somewhere like a crater, but I don't. I'm still rising rapidly in the air. And just as I'm about to lean over and look out the window to see what is going on down there - and just how high I am, when I am distracted by a passing airplane. The people on this side of the plane are looking out the window at me with gasps of horror on their faces. And I laugh. Yes, can you believe it? In a situation like that: I laugh, make a big grin and wave at them. This must be highly amusing for them to look out the window of their airplane and see a car sailing by. A little girl in the back windows waves back at me - smiling brightly.
And then I remember my own daughter. The airplane is below me now, and as I lean over to look I see a great thrust of wind at first push the airplane sideways so it starts into a roll, but then sheer both wings right off. And my heart goes out to those poor people, and that little girl waving at me... and my own daughter. And I wonder when I will begin my descent, and what it will be like slamming into the earth at a couple hundred miles per hour. And then I notice the light start to go out of the air, and the sky start to darken, and I suddenly realize I am still ascending, and now I'm thinking:
I've left the atmosphere. What will I do? How will I re-enter?And now I'm in the darkness of the star-speckled sky looking down upon the blue-green earth below, and I'm thinking: dear God, how will I get out of this? And at the same time I'm wondering: how will I survive? Can I possibly survive? How much air is there in this car, and how long will it remain before some leak causes all my atmosphere to escape.
And now I am passing a satellite and I remember: I have satellite cellular. So I turn and whip out my lap-top that always sits beside me on the passenger seat, and I turn on my blue-tooth, and hit the connect button on my cell phone and next thing you know I'm on the net. But how can I contact anyone? My wife doesn't read her email more than a couple times a month, and I can't possibly survive that long. And then I remember my blog, and so here I am.
Help me! Can anyone out there do anything to help me? Help me, please!
They Would Be Giants
by Gustav BenJava
I spent the first half of my life living among giants. Of course, I'm only 17, so that might not seem all too bad to you. Eight and a half years? "What's eight and a half years?" you ask.
Well, like I say, it's half my life. And it isn't much fun sometimes living among giants. Take Papa for instance. He's the Head Giant. Don't ask me how he got such a name, but the name itself is so much like him: Big, Robust, Gigantic, Papa. See what I mean? I look up at Papa through a fierce bushy beard. They tell me he's bald, but I almost never see the top of his head, so I couldn't tell you for sure. Everywhere Papa goes the earth shakes, the boards beneath him creak, the whole house trembles. Don't get me wrong, I like him alright, and he's never done anything to hurt me, but it just gets scary sometimes living around someone so Big.
Then there's Mum. Just Mum, that's what we call her. She's a giantess too, but not nearly as formidable as Papa. No bushy beard there, just gigantic footsteps (watch your toes) that make the floor rumble as she passes by.
As far as I'm concerned we Little Ones get too accustomed to living among giants. We take it for granted that we live in a gigantic world, and so all we want is to become a giant too some day. As if that was the goal of life: becoming a giant. Well, I've decided I'm not going to let that happen to me. I'm going to keep on being a Little One as long as I can, and there is no way you can stop me. Maybe I will be tall, but I'll always be a Little One inside - never truly a giant. No, giantism isn't for me.
The Reach
by Gustav BenJava
My poor, poor, baby girl! She had clung to me tight, one arm over my shoulder, around my neck. Snug, still after all these hours of bobbing up and down in frozen waters. Snug enough to hang on, but not choking me. It had taken time in the flailing chaos for her to calm down enough to do that. And then (oh, such a good little sport!) when she'd finally finished crying, and when she finally understood that there was nothing I could do to save her unless she helped: "O... o... okay daddy. I... I'm gonna hang on."
And so she clung to me even now, hours later, and I feared for the worst. Her lifeless arm seemed to be frozen around me. From time to time I thought I could feel her breath on the back of my neck, but in the end I decided that was my imagination. If only a cruise ship would come along! Or could they, by now, be searching for us? But in this fog, would they even see us?
I was pretty sure she had finally given out, and I wondered how long it would be until I no longer had the strength to stay afloat. I had managed to time my breaths so that they would no longer coincide with a splash of water in my face. But I was losing strength. Rapidly losing strength.
And then I heard it, a deep bellowing that resonated from the depths. Was it merely the last traces of consciousness as I groped for life: my mind rapidly ascending to the heavenly trumpets? Or, no, was it a ship's fog horn?
There came the ship plowing through the seas straight toward us, and I with my last drop of strength cried out, only to have my voice drown out by a thunderous bellow. I stretched out my arm, flung it up at the ship. Her wake crashed over my head, taking my final breaths from me. Would anyone see the hand there reaching out from the sea? Sinking into the depths?
Welcome to Fire Flash, home of the Flash Fiction of Arthur Pennybog and Gustav BenJava.
To read more about flash fiction as an art form, I suggest
googling for it.
Regards!
AP
