Flash Fiction by Alan Catlin

  She

 

Her motto was: "The other side of life."

In the eyes of a smiling death head tattoo; matching yellow butterflies.

Lying on the love seat, alone, caressing a wooden crucifix, she watches Kiss of a Vampire.

Reading Keats, she escapes The Chase of The Urn, becomes caught in Le Belle Dame Sans Merci.

In the night, parted ceiling tiles revealing worlds trapped inside.

Watermarks bleed through waxed papers when exposed to the burning light.

Cracked mirrors reveal nothing, shadows hide the emptiness, the soul.

She wakes in the morning wrapped in torn bed sheets whisper­ing of The Mummies Curse.

Broken stakes mark the receding staircase to the sun.

Steam escaping from frozen vent pipes fogs the textured bathroom glass, rasping the air.

Her skin slides from her bones like wax work.

A stopped pocket watch held in a flat palm, bent hands leaking time.

Kissing the lips of a Fata Morgana, sipping the breath of forgetfulness.

She comes in colors like a rainbow, etched in acid, strung out on radio waves.

Sitting  in darkness, watching candles light implode, tiny worlds, declining orbits around a flickering sun.

Crystallized light reflects in the broken prisms of her eyes.

Sipping red wine from the death head, stains leaking from the eye sockets like butterflies escaping.

In the palm, the lifeline extends, the future a thin fila­ment of sealing wax.

Her jagged teeth cuts lines of flesh on glass.

Dust devils touch the wings of yellow butterflies stretched taut as flexed muscles.

Her lips extend, a lamia kiss, a taste of bella donna, sweet as blood in the mouth of a dead poet.

Tiny diamond tongue studs are for traction touching skin.

Smoke hardens like wax skin on bones of flickering light.

A hot shower of quicksilver leaves puddles of pointillist light, carved images in the shape of a cross.

Standing silhouetted against an empty window, her body is a transparency veined by an absence of light.

Negative light at the center of light reveals yellow butter­flies poised for flight.

She whispers in the ear of the hourglass sifting time in­stead of sand.

Behind the silent television glass, the voices of dead poets crack against the unyielding surface.

All attempts at flying met with a sky like ice.

Glowing death heads impaled on poles like street lights illuminate electric butterflies.        Bodiless, she encounters sleep in the waxed eyes of butter­flies pinned to flesh.

"And this is why I sojourn here alone and palely loitering: though the Sedge  is withered from the Lake and no bird sing."

The moon is a field of death heads lit by butterflies.

The red wine of dreams puddles in palms of wax.

She sings  high c notes that crack like ice.

A puff adder in a dream of shallow waters stares through her eyes, splits the surface.

Snow falls inside broken glass, bleeding white hard blue lips, leaving a residue like ash.

Silence in polished stones inhabits the dark, casting melt­ing shadows that come in flocks like crows.

Through the wind screams of a sea of forgetfulness her hair is a kinetic, flashing fire.

The hand cupping a candle's flame feels the heat it cannot expire.

Her hands pressing against cold window glass feel the rain beading inside like wax, like blood.

The lifeline of yellow butterflies extends from the palm to the mind.

Her face painted for a masked ball is a yellow butterfly, each eye centers  an unfolding wing.

Pinned to a love seat cushion a specimen  sealed by wax.

Polishing her crystal ball, the glass becomes a glowing death head, yellow eyes forecasting the future.

Light skins a waxed skull held tightly for dreaming.

Her eyes are split movie screens, one side showing The Hun­ger, the other Bride of Frankenstein; her dreams caught in be­tween.

The full moon, eclipsed sinks in the desert melting like stones, like wax.

Her fingers are bones of butterflies tracing lines like veins on her cheeks, hollowing the bones of her face.

She sees herself framed in a mirror cracked by electricity, glowing, turning black and transparent like a waxed full moon.

She is she.

 

 

Alan Catlin has published in many forms and prose genres from flash fiction to novel length works, from surreal horrific fictions to gritty realistic.  A novella based on his bar work experiences is called “From the Waters of Oblivion”. Despite his adamant insistence people still refuse to believe it is fiction.  It most defiantly is": no one could be that obnoxious and tend bas as long as the main character did.