flash fiction

The letter to which you have yet to respond was the one that I wished for you to see – stymied expression of feeling that I could, under the circumstances, respect. The letter, which is the last that I shall send, was sensible and restrained, full of curated lines and unspoken words. It was written from the high ground, a lovely, unregrettable view.

Unsatisfying.

The letter that I am writing now, (which, for the sake of my pride, I will not send), is the one that I wished to write. It is not smooth. It is not measured. I am writing on my skin, down the length of my leg and up again, higher and higher, to the hollow places that you kissed. I will start at my hip and scrawl, “To my terrible love,” on that curved, hard bone. I will write of the cruel silences that my tongue could not fill; of the envy that I swallowed to keep your taste in my mouth. I understood your responsibilities, your conditions, your life. I embraced my confinement in a small, lush room.

I was your escape, you said, as you kissed up my thigh. It was creamy and white when you suckled on my skin – a clean, sweet expanse of improbable trust. I rose to meet the specifications required by your precise, exacting love, you alchemist. I became an extension of you.

You worked your chemistry with every murmur and bite. Your fingers drifting over my fine cotton blouse, your hot mouth lapping the salt from my neck, I love you, I love you, I love you, you said. More ink on my skin.

I became an arching back, a twisting neck, a grasping, sucking need hungry for your rich, invisible ink. I folded myself like a paper crane and tucked myself into a pocket room – a bottle and its djinn, a ballerina in her pretty little box….

I sent you the letter that I wished for you to see. Now, I cover my skin in my very own ink, thick and black, from my pen. When every kiss is covered, I will wash the ink away. Perhaps it will stain the claw-foot tub you loved.

You are in me and on me. Your name is in my bones. I will soak and scrub until it dissolves, and the water and ink go cold. I will write until I am calm. Because I am not calm. I am not calm. I am not calm, terrible love. You are an ill-fitting skin.

Photograph of a wealthy abandoned house with broken chair in the foreground, for Memory Palace by Malin James

From Matthias Haker’s Decay series

She looked up at the dripping world. Water dripping from dripping skies only to disappear into the gray-green grass. The water did not saturate. It disappeared into the grass, which was full to the brim with emptiness.

His shoes, worn out New Balances that collapsed, unable to hold their shape without a foot, were empty, unable to bear up. His Apple mug from the eighties was empty, as was his particle physics cup. She wished she hadn’t washed them yet. He’d them bought for nostalgic purposes. Not nostalgia. Nostalgic purposes. Because that’s the way he’d talked.

He’d liked things that had purpose, things that held memories were all right, but better yet if they also information or reminders of coffee or M&M’s. Even things that held memories should do something more than gather dust like his mother’s porcelain squirrels.

Their house full is full of things with purpose. (His mother’s squirrels went to a charity shop, after she died). Now he is gone and his shoes are empty, but she has his mugs…. She has his things with purpose, that have, just recently, acquired a new one. They must organize her memories of him. Half-finished books bought on that trip to Sonoma, the cord to an old cell that he kept in a shoebox, just in case, (“just in case” could be a worthy purpose). She would keep his favorite gin. She would keep his dark-roast in the jam jar. She would not consume them, for to do so would be to steal them from their purpose.

Madeleine James

Writer & Thinker of Things

The Second Letter

Small Fiction: Memory Palace