Flashing

We’re flash-fictioning, prose-poeming in the English classes, so there’s bound to be a flurry, as I write along. The middlings had these words to incorporate in 179 words: impure, ocean of fire, Arabia, tall tales, 3000, a man or woman’s name, and the name Alyssa (in honor of N’s crush). We’d just finished watching “Hidalgo,” hence the words.

All Three Thousand of Them

Impure Martians, an ocean of fiery Spartans, renegades, the question of emulsion as milk, emulsion as milkiness, if you dig deeply enough, perhaps part of the earth’s core is emulsion, milk, the mother’s breast, milk, lost in the emulsion of blather, blathering talk, cheese unemulsified rolling down the hill, Alyssa as the official pancake topping, an abbreviated flurry, all three thousand of them, as if Arabia were not the Patricia of your dreams—my mind, it says something—everywhere and nowhere, salmon upstreaming the tall tales, the platypus mistake, Patricia again, full of the dentistry of evil, the quizzical end storm, Alyssa in the final end game, all the lava of your renegade dreams, clairvoyant night chickens scuttling down the bank, the fistula, trapped in the middle, brain spasms, the hole in your mind, chasms, Argentinean werewolves of the seventh night.

Appalling bridge to nowhere, wherefore art thou, rifling the edge of mystic rivers, endless caverns, the opposite of your freedom flight. End it here, end in there, end it without Bruce, end it without even asking, end it.

(Illustration: “The Blob,” by Amanda. I think it looks like a clairvoyant night chicken.)