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Vallie Lynn Watson
Three Flash Stories
Songs and Fury
The curtains of my eyelids started to shift when the stage velvets swept. I wasn’t sure whether they went up or down, if the spectacle was real. It had to be, though, because she’d been there.
Disappeared before the show started, of course, but she did return just in time. There was something about that hiatus that changed me. My concern she’d miss the curtain. The whole thing had been her idea! She was convinced that one of the band’s songs–released before she was born, it should be noted–was about her.
As they sang it, I heard she was right.
Stark Naked Modern Music
Until it got so hot, but really until she saw the little black snake, she spent the evenings askew in the roped hammock, feet dangling in the gardenias, dizzy at their perfume. Then it really did get hot, and for some small amount of time she left.
She left, went as far east as the road would go, and spent a small amount of time where the river meets the sea. She always felt a little more right when she was there. It wasn’t so hot.
When she returned inland, the gardenias had browned, crisped, but lingered, decaying in their pockets, unpleasant and foreboding, and she stayed inside until the night it rained.
The night it rained she curled up in the hammock until the sun came up, and then she gathered her damp nightclothes around her knees, and tiptoed into the yard. In the yard, she let her clothes go, and then her arms and legs, and she twirled and she sang until a hummingbird stopped them both, and stood in the air in front of her face. Then the hummingbird darted into the bushes, lingered, and then away.
Out of breath, she found her clothes, then went to the bushes, the spot where the hummingbird lingered, and there she found one pearly white gardenia, and she breathed.
The Pants
I re-knotted the bow on my sailor blouse, looked in the high mirror, pushed my hair behind my ears, and downed some Dramamine. Closed my eyes and ran my hands up and down my thighs, fingering the plump fabric I couldn’t see in reflection. Wandered back to the restaurant’s small, stone two-seater balcony, where you may have been waiting, or maybe pretending to wait, but either way, you were there. You pointed out a yacht, the boat so smalled by the distance that my hand could scoop it from the water and toss it into the street below, to disappear into the crowd, and no one would know.
“Give it a hundred years,” you said. The city? The ocean? I didn’t ask.
It won’t go away.
“The pants,” you said, and kept your eyes level.
I repeated the phrase, made it a question.
“Yes.”
A passing phase, I wanted to answer, but repeated the phrase again. Didn’t make it a question.
“This can’t continue,” you continued.
“It’ll go away,” I said.
You probably continued.
About the Writer:
Vallie Lynn Watson is the author of the novel A River So Long (Luminis Books); her Pushcart-nominated short stories appear widely in literary journals such as Hobart, PANK, and Bending Genres. Watson teaches fiction in the MFA program at McNeese State University, where she edits the magazine Boudin. She hunts for seaglass in her spare time.
Image: Grosses Variete mit Zauberer und Taenzerin by Max Beckman (1884-1950). Oil on canvas. 45.2 x 59 inches. 1942. Public domain.
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