Drop Stitch (a flash fiction)

Hello again! I’ve been told my poetry chapbook has moved into a second round of a competition. So, while I’m working on (hopefully close to actually final) edits to my cookbook, and maybe poking away at a short story about a castle, I’ve decided this a good time to try writing a poem a day, for the rest of the month, in between trips to the vegetable garden to plant things that are not avocados.

I’ve also recently finished reading a random grab from the library bookshelf – Damion Searls’ The Philosophy of Translation – it’s an interesting read, I was surprised to find myself actually laughing in places!

Here is a flash fiction that I wrote early last year. I hope that you enjoy it.

Drop Stitch (a flash fiction)

by me! Kilmeny MacMichael.

This world, with its obscure sense of humour, decided to end on the morning I at last divined the secrets of bringing plucked fruit of avocado to perfect ripe perfection.

Therefore, I was at least on my feet, standing at the counter in the kitchen we shared, about to lift a firm-yet-creamy, yellow-yet-green slice, with a dot of salsa and a squeeze of bottled lime. The lacquered lucky red chopsticks were poised between my calloused fingers, the richness of the fruit was anticipating on my tongue – when the warning system activated.

An accident – there has been an accident. First it rattled my phone against the counter, the phone burying itself beneath the half-completed, half-tangled purple scarf on which we took turns – I yanking, in sometimes steady and firm, sometimes hard and angry, rows of stitch and purl. You unravelling, determined to undo all mistakes.

I just wanted to complete something warm.

The warning – there has been an accident – there has been an accident – repeated from the screen in the next room. An accident, an accident. A lie, you said, there are no accidents, there are only inattentions, and what is deliberate and what is not and when you press a button and close a window, there is no choice. You have to try for all of it.

All of it all of it – But I set what the warning would say, set what I would last hear –

Youngest was still sleepy, muttering from her nest – isn’t that where mommy – and I didn’t bother to reassure her, the sturdiest of us, she was already boiling, a pyro cumulus of my mind. My mind always has time to think – even if I might wish otherwise.

I had time to wonder how long it would be, before someone in a uniform on their outsides or their insides, realized our address, where we promised them questions could be laid – used a different street than the only entrance to our home.

This world’s yesterday, we paused to listen to an old priest, ringing a bell, calling congregants, sweating in a disloyal sunshine, while we argued over an astounding number of ants. Not hundreds but thousands of ants, writhing together around the only tree to survive the flood on this, the street where I am home.

You said we should kill those ants and save that tree, for its fragrance of blossom. I said the tree was already lonely and dying, no matter it’s perfume, and how do we determine the intention of ants, how do we know what they are doing and why, how can we know what will become of it, this jam, if we don’t wait to see, and then I conceded, fighting you not worth it all to me. I retreated. You told me that by the time you went and returned with the poison only a few stragglers remained, the colony somewhere else and free.

Did you say this as an apology before leaving for another night? Somewhere in all these tangles of worlds, you delight in teasing, it all connects. It all locks in place, perfectly, and you are sure, with time, you are sure you have all the time, to find it. You believe in this logic, firm as the threads on the steel bolt in my pocket from the car I will not have time to put away or regret, before slipping and dropping into another time – one where we have never met, I never love and the universe survives.

I know what happens when you let fruit ripen too long. The last thing I do here is flick a perfect slice of avocado into the condensing air, hoping to catch whichever god you are who mocks us, between your compound, blinking eyes.