Flash Fiction by John W. Sexton

Mouth to the Sky

The speckled thrush stepped onto the sunlight conveyer-belt to the hedge-depth and was gone into shadow.  Somewhere in there the thrush became a cat, or was eaten by a cat, or killed the cat and wore it as a coat; but out the far perimeter of the hedge emerged the cat.  The cat approached the opened door of the car, the car shining black like a soul, a soul of darkness so pure that the sun turned it white as a flash.  Out the other side of the car stepped a woman in black coat, a coat so black it absorbed the sun.  She opened her mouth to the sky and out came the song of the speckled thrush.

John W. Sexton lives in the Republic of Ireland and is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent being The Offspring of the Moon (Salmon Poetry, 2013).  He also created and wrote The Ivory Tower for RTE radio, which ran to over one hundred half-hour episodes from 1999 to 2002.  Two novels based on the characters from this series have been published by the O'Brien Press:  The Johnny Coffin Diaries and Johnny Coffin School-Dazed, which have been translated into both Italian and Servian.  He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem "The Green Owl" won the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007.  Also in 2007, he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.