'The Beginning's End' by Yuqing Weng

Some petals have fallen.

I look away, and walk away.

My friends gave me the flowers when I finished my finals.

With a bottle of prosecco that we downed that very night.

We toasted to the end of exams.

The next day, I devoted to myself to beginnings.

Resumes, interviews, apartment viewing and renting.

What is life but beginnings tailing ends?

Yet the chasm between beginnings and ends spins like a black hole.

I leaped forward and clung to the summer ahead.

One day I woke up to find pollen scattered on the windowsill, a tender yellow.

I put some on the tip of my tongue: It was bitter.

Then without much thought I wiped the windowsill with a rag.

I should have collected and spread the pollen into the wind.

Another day, I knocked the vase over while opening the window. Water everywhere.

A subtle smell, so similar to the refreshing fragrance of chrysanths, but ... bad.

After that incident, the flowers seemed to have suddenly aged.

Can one begin without ending? No, the black hole must be seamed.

Yet after lots of alcohol and hugs and goodbyes, I still haven’t bid farewell.

When L said “I will miss you”, my response was lagged and feeble.

When M messaged to say she was leaving, I pretended not to see.

Today is the first day I’m alone in an empty college.

In the morning, I open the window to the strangest familiarity.

Some petals have fallen.

'The Beginning's End' by Lorraine Murphy

Once we're both there, it will be perfect. That's what she said as we argued, again, over the guest list. She wanted close friends and family. I desired the world. 

In seventeen hours, following a three year engagement, and two reschedules, we say "I do". Without Mom, Dad or Uncle Ray but with three of the string quartet. Research shows the smaller the wedding the greater the chance of success. Lucky, considering my phone still beeps with incoming apologies. But we're keeping positive. As long as our antigen tests stay negative. Once we're both there, it will be perfect.

'The dare' by Anita Goodfellow

 

I dare you.’

Jagged rocks lurk in the depths, but that’s ok. I know where they are. I live here, but you’re just a summer visitor like the swifts that nest in the eaves of my parents’ farmhouse.

This year you’ve brought a whiff of the city with you.  When we were children we climbed trees and camped out. Now, you’re all gloss and you dazzle my friends with your fashionable clothes and latest iPhone.

I raise my arms, smile.

‘Go on,’ you say.  

I dive. When I surface you’re peering down at me, sun-bleached hair tumbling. I can tell you’re impressed. Last summer I couldn’t dive. Last summer you were flat-chested, but now you’re beautiful and you know it. I leave a trail of wet footprints on my way back to the bridge.

‘Your turn,’ I say.

You haul yourself up onto the stone wall. A shadow of uncertainty clouds your eyes. The water is duck-pond smooth below. I’m about to tell you the safest spot from which to jump but then I remember you kissing my boyfriend’s lips so instead I say, ‘Go on. I dare you.’

Drowning without water by Davena O'Neill

 

Amy wipes her chest, looks at the clock, there’s time for a cigarette.

 

Red welts beneath sandal straps, she longs for slippers as she rubs her feet. Two hours to hometime, pay the sitter, fall into bed. She runs a finger across her chest, still sticky to the touch; maybe a long shower tonight.

Back in the bar, girls in nipple tassels and thongs bring drinks to tables. They take the cash, the flick of a tongue as they lean over, a finger slipped inside barely-there material. “Can I get you gentlemen anything else?”

Only the stage is bright, coloured lights reflecting off wet flesh. The girl grinds to the beat, teasing, just out of reach of those watching. Looking like there’s no place she’d rather be, she’s living her dream, with her dead eyes and needle marks between her toes.

Amy spots two suits at a small table, wedding bands gleaming on sweaty hands. First-timers, just her speed. She straightens her shoulders, drags up a smile, sits between them, arms draped across their shoulders. The one on the left tenses, but the guy on the right springs to attention. With a lick of her lips Amy has him on the hook. In twenty minutes, they’re heading for the back room.

Once behind the curtain he’s all enthusiasm, hands everywhere, trousers around his ankles. Amy slows him down, gets him sitting, talks business. He throws the money at her, so keen he won’t take long to finish. Folding the cash into her bra, she closes her eyes, pushes thoughts of her kids from her mind, and sinks to her knees, bruises long faded. She doesn’t cry anymore, and the bills keep coming, as sure as the tide.

 

Amy wipes her chest, looks at the clock, there’s time for another cigarette.

'Beauty is Skin Deep' by Joyce Bingham

We were a pair.  A couple, a bargain two for one. We were fawned over, our identical features lauded, our delicious blonde hair, our delightful blue eyes. Our cheeks caressed by random old ladies in twin sets and pearls. 

She pulled my hair and smashed my toes standing on them eager to be the one in front. Faltering thoughts and ideas were often tripped up by my reluctant tongue, so I kept quiet.

My hair became a shade darker and coarser than hers, my eyes a watery blue compared to her Elizabeth Taylor violet. My clothes wore out faster than hers, my knees more grazed. I fell out of more trees, broke more bones. She sucked my life into hers with magnetic force leaving me wan and tired. 

When I left home, I dyed my hair black, wore green lipstick. Blossoming, my hair light and luxurious, eyes bluer than they had ever been. 

I saw her in the beam of my headlights on that cold mountain road, her blonde hair, her violet eyes, shining in my way. I put my foot down and drove past. They comfort me, they will find her they say. I murmur my thanks and look away before they see the gleam in my violet eyes. We were a pair.

'The Uses of an Empty Pet Coffin' by David X. Lewis

There are perks in being a grave digger.

Most people don’t want to hear about corpses in the pub. And the pay isn’t good. So if you have a wife and layabout son, you need a lucrative side hustle. 

Which is what I found three years ago. 

After a funeral attended by dodgy-looking men in sharp suits and women in big hair, one of the spivs came looking for me. I was sitting next to my hut, enjoying the sun.

"Tidy hole you dug for the boss, mate!" he said, proffering a gold-ringed hand. "I’m Dino." 

Dino asked if I could bury special things for him. "Just now and then, for a few months. Don’t ask me what. That way you won’t have to tell no lies."

"What’s in it for me?"

"A share of the pickings if we get them back when the fuzz stop looking."

I quite fancied taking the missus and heir for a holiday somewhere fancy. "You’re on," I said. It was the start of a great little relationship. 

Every month or so, Dino would bring me a miniature coffin, the kind daft women buy for dead cats or those rat-like dogs they carry around in bags. I’d bury it in a recent grave where the earth was still soft. Every month or so, I’d dig up the box and hand it back.

The boxes never contained a dead cat or dog. When I opened one out of curiosity I found bags of white powder.

I said nothing about what I’d seen to Dino or anyone.

We’ve lived the high life the past three years. And I’ve stood more than my share of rounds in Wetherspoon’s.

There are perks in being a grave-digger.

'Cake' by Stella Turner

“I bought you cake”
I looked up. Your face begging me to say something, I looked down.
You shuffled your feet, then the papers on the coffee table.
I read the words again on the postcard. ‘Missing you’
Did I miss her? You were begging to ask but didn’t dare.  
I wished I knew. Sometimes, other times no.
Summer went and so did you. Someone new filled your spot. New ideas, new visions, I felt buoyant. Everything was bright.
Winter came bringing dullness and a void, black and empty.
The process began again. Vacancy for Artist’s muse: immediate start.
“I bought you cake”

'We Are But Ghosts' by Al Davidson

We are but ghosts, after all.  Life, as all things, traipses onward with the pull of time.  The ghosts of our past collide with the dreams of our futures.  Our bodies are houses filled with skeletons both literal and figurative.  They creak with age and decay against our pleading to slow down.  They carry our secrets to graves with slow movements.

Our memories are the residual haunts that roam the hallways of our minds.  Important memories that draw us back to details, places and faces, and moments we are desperate to immortalize in the annals of time.

But, like all structures, they fall.  Our doors become boarded up and the laughter and light must leave.  The details fade, the foundation accumulates dust, until all that’s left is the land we lay on.  The upkeep of living is costly, but life itself is worth living.  So, let us haunt this earth while we can.  We are but ghosts, after all.

'The End’s Beginning' by Annie Bien

When you fly from one time zone to another, from out into the future back into what has already passed but has not happened yet, is there a moment when you can alter the universe from an event occurring that had already happened in Singapore that has not even had a chance to occur in New York? 

She stared out the window now that morning was about to begin again and again over timelines. She might have been able to speak to him once more, longed for him to take her hand like he was cradling a child’s, would she have been able to have emerged from the cave sooner and skipped the packed lunch under headlamps, but they were so deep inside the limestone cavern, enthralled by the cool darkness, absence of familiar sounds except for their feet stepping into the river bed, washing coolness over her socks and plastic shoes, everything so unfamiliar and so full of familiarity that she suspended her usual thoughts. She had not thought of him as anything but how he was, aging steadily but not finally, his hands had fingered those scriptures every day, the same worn sheets of rice paper he brought from Tibet into India to America and every day his fingers turned those pages. She had been so sure, so sure she would see him again. Emerging from the darkness, the Earth releasing her in womb-like safety, the guide returned her phone, congratulating her for walking well. She doffed their borrowed shoes, removed her drenched socks, sat in the car to return to the farm stay, then she read the news: 

…. passed away peacefully this morning, from 4-6am IST. 

In the car, she sensed his presence, thought of replying to the text but wasn’t it too early? When you fly from one time zone to another, from out into the future back into what has already passed but has not happened yet, is there a moment when you can alter the universe from an event occurring that had already happened in Singapore that has not even had a chance to occur in New York?  

NFFD 2022 Prompt #21: The Beginning's End

 

The Beginning's End

This is National Flash Fiction Day's eleventh anniversary, so this year, all our prompts have something to do with the number 11....

*

Eleven is the first number that starts and ends with with same digit (and indeed is the first non-trivial repdigit, if you're into such things).  In this prompt, we play homage to this: write a flash that starts and ends with the same sentence.

*

If you’re submitting this to us, make sure to note that this is a response to Prompt 21: The Beginning's End.

You can submit responses until 23:59 BST on Sunday, 19 June 2022 for a chance to be published here at The Write-In.

 

Or, if you just want to nerd out on some recreational maths, then Fun With Num3ers has you covered on this topic.