surrealist flash fiction, 2024
The log at the edge of the woods is plastic.
Barely a foot and a half in diameter, and at most three feet long, it shines at the top of its roughened ridge. She thought of decrepit minimarts in decrepit suburban towns and of rusted kiddie rides near squealing sliding door entrances.
The log after it is plastic too. They are lined up, end to end.
It does not shine, ever.
But before the woods there is Nothing.
So She followed Him, and they followed the trail.
Approaching the first of anything is an exercise in futility for the human animal.
She looked at the face carved into the flat, “chopped” side, and like a lamb to the slaughter He looked too. The softness of moss had never bloomed to ease the sharp edges of the face; water and wind would never peel bark away from the ridges on which it rose. They moved away from Nothing and set off together.
Ten logs, twenty maybe, but likely a hundred, passed them at the waist as their feet kicked low brush and the woody green swallowed much of the light overhead.
She didn’t see much else and they walked without fear of being lost – why turn back if you’ve only got Nothing to return to? So, looking instead: plastic kiddie ride logs, dark and foreboding just like She remembered from an era long gone, one after another, in the woods between all these real fucking trees! She did not speak. Her husband did not speak. There was no “follow me”, nothing to be said or done. After all, they hadn’t partaken in the act of creation yet. Why start now? A conveyor belt is often more at home in the abattoir than the factory.
There is a log made of plastic, and a talisman of an angry man’s face, and… a clearing the size of an Olympic stadium that might as well be Mecca.
Nothing had been left behind that couldn’t once again be found, and so with the sense of absolute certainty that only a breadcrumb trail could impart, She moved to Him as He looked at the clearing. Without embracing His wife he felt Her at his side and after a moment, broke the tether to walk ahead.
At the center of the clearing there is a valley and at the bottom of the valley there is an enormous glass box: the type of thing historians wish they could build over ruins – the type of thing that fiction writers use to house cities that are born to die. Under the glass, the grass was sick and yellow.
Then, a spinal tap had been performed: as the potent paralytic of fear spilled into Her arms and legs into hands and feet, She watched Him approach the box at its midpoint, fifty or seventy feet away. He moved like He did in Her dreams. She did not follow.
What His form obscured from Her vision at first was the telescopic lens pointed down into the valley from right up against the impossibly long expanse of glass. Fast-acting antidote, omnipotence, the facade of love and the fear of Nothing all presented themselves; She appeared at His side a moment later and urged Him not to give into the apple pointed at His eye, speaking from Her heart and not Her head… It came out in two words instead:
“Don’t look.”
At the trough of the valley, there are five beings who neither live nor die: a therapist, a mutilated head on a stick, a safari guide, a fighter, and a writer.
He approaches the telescope and one by one five sets of eyes snap to Him.
She thinks of children, at the moment when innocence fades, frying ants with magnifying glass.
Silence.
As the arrow pierces His left eye, screaming red tip exiting the back of His ruptured skull just below the hairline, She does not cry out, but He does. (The glass, impossibly, remains unbroken.)
“My love, I am safe.
For you have shrunk so small that you are the shadow cast over all the land
Forever casting over me.”
An unholy shriek rips through the clearing rattling every last bolt, log, and leaf for what might be eternity. She has become two things now, impossibly large and impossibly small, but her husband no longer sees.
In two vignettes, she moves:
One: The giantess borne by rage smashes the box with a bare foot, in one motion piercing flesh and grinding glass that fills the valley with dust like sand. Her thundering voice ringing like crystal she proclaims the following, although if you ask her now, she’ll deny it all the same:
“Freaks! Look at what you’ve done to my husband.
Now is not the time for protest!
Now is not the place for change!”
While the living attack the furious body there is another rustle of movement in the trees.
Two: The rest of her, impossibly small (shrunk down to almost nothing, really) runs for cover. No logs, no plastic, no brush, no minimarts, no telescopes, no clearings, no faces, no sounds and she turns a sharp left to see how far she’s come but…
Towering in the shade before her, an elevator, between two redwoods.
As the doors slide open, a broken steel curtain, she hears him speak out, soft and low, as though he couldn’t help but to whisper once more in her ear.
And I still don’t know if it was a coincidence, or maybe by design,
but in hushed and pleading tones, he called her Ειρήνη.
Irene.