Flash fiction Friday # 2

Less quick-as-a-flash this time, but purposely kept to 300 words.  An anecdote, mostly heard perhaps third or fourth hand, so must be considered fiction.

~

'It's astonishing how many people' she said 'don't know how to hem a pair of trousers.  But I don't mind, it means they pay me to do them.'

The man who often came to have his trousers hemmed certainly wasn't skilled like that.  He wasn't very skilled socially either, somewhere on the autistic spectrum, seldom speaking to her or to anyone.  She was easy and accepting round him, not trying too hard to draw him out. She got on well enough too with the young man with Downs syndrome, to whom she gave a regular lift into the town where she had her small business and he attended a day centre.  The few words they exchanged followed established patterns:

She: 'Which CD shall we play?'
He: 'This one.'

He: 'It's nearly the weekend!'
She: 'Yep.  Doing anything nice?'
He: 'Maybe.'

The man who came to have his trousers hemmed would stand silent in her downstairs sewing room as she moved quickly round his feet, pinning and tacking.  He looked away and wouldn't meet her eyes, answered her in monosyllables, paid his couple of dollars on collection and hurried off.

In the week following her sudden and unexpected death, her family - husband and just-grown children - decided to bring her body home for a time before the funeral, trying to give themselves something of the time with her they hadn't had, however little.  They laid her in the sewing room, it was her space, and on the ground floor was easier, looking out onto the garden.

The following day, people came and went, and outside the window of the sewing room, the man who had come to have his trousers hemmed stood, his face pressed to the glass, looking at her and talking non-stop.

Flash fiction * Friday, plus a photo and a haiku.

Cinderella's rat footman, changed back to rodent state at midnight, was, on the whole, not sorry to be so.  He retired to his home behind the wainscotting, occasionally going out to the corner of the yard to dine on the remains of the pumpkin carriage.  Even in his old age, he spoke little of a rather dreary evening evening spent in human form, waiting in the chill night air on the steps of the palace on the drama taking place within, unbalanced by taillessness and discomforted by agoraphobia, the desire to urinate and the presence in his mouth of a set of molars and premolars.  No, he thought, he had little to thank the fairy godmother for at all.

~

Burning cone subsides

an incandescent backbone

fire bends and breaks.  

~

* Flash fiction: when the matter of this came up, the idea came to me to take a piece from the pile of scrap paper of varying sizes we clip together as shopping lists, write something that filled one leaf of whatever size, quickly and with little revision.  So it is very flash (in the sense of very minimal, not as in very showy) flash fiction. I've not kept it up very diligently, and then sometimes it's something I wrote before, rather longer than a shopping list page. But for this month, when getting stuff out overrides lack of conviction - I'll try produce something each week in this category, observing a tradition of an alliterative day of the week throughout November's daily blogging.  This one is very short and inconsequential.