Water Fleas, Dreams, and Rings: Flash Fiction pt. 2

 


Flash Fiction II

Ultra-short stories from my book, "Reflections". Each story is accompanied (in the book) by an abstract picture which relates to the story aesthetically but does not illustrate it.

 

Microcosmos in Wood

Steve filled in colors on the woodgrain to make an abstract painting, and then saw it could represent a tiny world.

It’s there, suggested by the patterns in the wood: an algae world, a tiny jungle of hundreds of thousands of tiny animals and algae particles. A whole microcosmos. There are blobs and spheres of algae, small spheres inside bigger spheres, volvox spheres of tessellated triangles. There is a water flea, a daphnia; a transparent creature. Steve calls her Daphne because she is a daphnia. She has leg appendages retracted under a shell carapace; she has branched, segmented antennae and a two-pronged sort-of tail. As she moves, she agitates the water by flailing her antennae around.

As Steve contemplates the painting, a microbiology professor buys it from the gallery.

In a microscopic world outside, the real Daphne watches the transaction, but she cannot perceive how she was depicted in the art.


The Ring

“The ring is cursed!” said the opera composer.

“The ring is cursed!” said the novelist and professor.

“The ring is cursed!” said the film director.

“The ring is cursed!” said another film director.

The ring itself waited, somewhere in everyone’s subconscious, until these proclamations were lost in time.

 

Two Dreams

Nuvoletta gathered herself from vapors in the atmosphere. She donned her lightdress and drifted over the green world. She saw a tree and a stone. She saw two men arguing by the river. Then the hazy droplets within her became heavy, and she vanished into a downward cascade.

A mile below her, a bat-winged snaggle-toothed monster burbled as it gazed up at the sky. Dusk was growing and the tears of night were falling. That single little cloud — such a small thing, really — had seemed to aim all its rain directly at him. A few minutes of wet misery, and he understood: he had strayed into the wrong dream. He sighed, and headed back to the Tulgey Wood where the weather was more hospitable.

 

Scared

“Look, I drew a monster!” said Larry in fourth grade art class. He showed his picture of black, lurid red, and slime-green to Lucy, who didn’t like horror movies.

“That’s not a monster,” said Lucy. “It’s just some ugly colors.”

“It doesn’t frighten you?”

“Of course not.”

So Larry took his art project home and hung it on the wall in his room. Later that night, he awoke and stared at it. Its ghastly hues and leering bands of shadow were half-illuminated by his feeble night light. He decided these were the colors of grasping tentacles, teeth, and an uncertain number of gleaming, pallid eyes.

He stayed in his brother’s room until morning.


Emergence

The life-form has lain dormant for several years, buried in the brown and red earth by some cause long forgotten. But now the soil has just the right scent, and the life-form feels warmth. It stirs. A single small tendril inches upwards. Encountering a barrier placed there sometime during its slumber, it creeps along, feeling for an opening. There. A tiny crack into the world beyond. The tendril worms itself into the hole, and emerges into the world of light and color.

“Look,” said Tony to his friend. “A dandelion growing through a crack in the pavement. Something like that always reminds me to choose life.”

 

To read more of this book, and to discover who the "Two Dreams" characters really are: Reflections: Abstract Art, Photography, and Flash Fiction: Scribner, Steven E.: 9798249616823: Amazon.com: Books

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