Neighbors noticed the band teacher’s yard sprout unconventional planters over the first month of her retirement: chrysanthemums ejecting from half-buried tubas, sunflowers booming from kettle drum frames tarnished green. It was Mr. Johnson who suggested putting her talent to good use. Soon, every yard played a flower song.
The alligator perched on a pile of magazines and the roof of Ava’s Barbie car, two of many islands in our basement. We discussed building a ramp to the broken window, but it was Ava who wadded up ground beef, lured the thing upstairs, and out the door.
Inside the small spaceship, the commander barks at his army. “Cover the perimeter. We wait until first encounter to attack.”
Morning in Wichita continues. Light from the basketball-sized hole in the Atkinsons’ dining room wall drifts across the broad pine table, where diagonal burns mark the path of the crash.
So, let our shadows do the talking. High noon and the dark circles under me and the saguaro are loud with sweat. By the time my shadow abandons me, it is stubborn, howling, more coyote than man; yours shrugs toward the cirrus clouds, my new horizon home.
I followed the cries deeper into the woods. “Keep talking, little girl. I’m coming,” I soothed. Her yelps bounded into the ABC song. At L, the smell of lemon cake. At S, my lantern addressed a scarlet coat. At Z, we held hands and picked zinnias for Grandmother.
Photo by Francesco Ungaro from Pexels
The orange beast licks my bedroom walls. Its breath blazes through my nightshirt. It is hungry and I am the nearest meat.
Outside, neighbors offer up their palms. Jump, their prayer-smoke rises above treetops. Before you are consumed.
(Photo from pixabay.com)
It was a dark and stormy night—the kind, like war, that mitigated irascible deeds, covering murder with the tintinnabulations of rain on corrugated metal gables; and I, enswathed in my ignominious velvet cape, navigated our city’s ever-slickening streets brandishing a penchant for justice.
This little slice of purple prose was written for YeahWrite’s microprose challenge. Click the badge above to see more examples of intentionally bad writing.
I am unlocked. I paint the ‘closet’ red so there will be no doubt, braid six wreaths weekly—one for each wife, each murder. Still, his specter looms in the wallpaper, the coatstand. Six candles flicker in the darkening room; I whisper to them nightly, thank you, thank you.
A cop informed me that my son was both homosexual and dead. Shot at a bar he had apparently haunted.
“Will you accept the body?” the cop asked.
A thousand bats’ wings pulsed inside me before I said “No.”
Uncrumpling notebook paper, Mr. Hinds found his own face staring back at him: his masseter muscle dissected, needles poking his retinas. A student’s drawing perfectly placed on his chair. He will feel a gaze stalking his nape as he teaches tomorrow’s lesson.
Northwest Journals 