Sunday, May 25, 2008

Flash Fiction: Tangent/Ode on a Girl (what else?)

Word Count: 359
Form: Flash fiction
Written in 5 minutes at 3 a.m.
Personal State: Tired as hell and smell like fire. Cat running around apartment nutso-crazy.

There was a young girl, 20, no 21, and she was a barista, or so she said. But really she worked in a coffee place in a rich little town on the leftern half of Connecticut. She burned herself all the time, and she said it was because of her job. She must have been really dedicated. She wasn't. She just burned herself. She was really good at hiding it too. She had creams and ointments. She wanted to be a doctor, a dermatologist. She never slept though, so she did miserably in school. Except in English, because she was real good with words. She never wrote anything down on paper because she was afraid people would read it. Well, she had journals and notepads and her sisters read them and stuff and she hated that but they did it anyway and she said it was because they loved her. And she loved them too much to put an end to it. Or maybe she didn't really hate it all that much. Maybe she just needed to be pried open or greased up (not in that kind of way) or WD-40'd or something like that, I don't know. But one time this boy came over and read her todo list and she had a fit, because she felt so vulnerable. She was really strong and she ripped it away from him. She liked to write in pencil when she had to do schoolwork but she wrote so light that no one could read it and she would get in trouble in grade school. The boy who came over and read her notepad said it was because she was afraid to make her mark on the world or something, but she said it was because she was just in too much of a hurry to press down. Anyway, she started using black pen way before she met him, and he grew up using blue pen. She said blue was yucky and for drafts and he said black was too permanent and that everything he wrote was an unfinished draft. So she wrote in black and he wrote in blue and they never worked it out really.

No comments: