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.
9 comments:
Wow, an incandescent backbone is exactly what the burning pinecone looks like - gorgeous.
See! Already down to half-length! And even puffing that out by using three-syllable urinate when single-syllable pee would have done. And I might even have pointed out opting for a haiku rather than something in trochaic heptameter if that didn't seem, even by my loose standards, a bit churlish. I assume you've been travelling down a romantically misty road, the mist has cleared and your nose has been pressed against a black-on-yellow sign which says Ralentir. And you know it wasn't planted there by the Breton roads authority.
En passant, I should add I've been thinking of giving up blogging because of an inability to control the violence, snarkiness and sheer childishness of my comments. Some recipients have proved to be more resilient than others but I can't help wondering where the breaking point lies.
Thanks Jean, I can't help myself photographing burning pine cones!
Robbie, thanks for taking the trouble to comment. Honestly though, the short really doesn't bear much close examination and frankly smacks of barrel-scraping already; I'll have to do a bit better than this if I'm to keep it up all month. I left posting too late, and resorted to something found on a scrap of paper. But I am hoping that just making myself post something daily, good, bad or indifferent, I will get the rather atrophying blogging muscles working again a bit - sorry, I'm falling into self-pity again. Please don't consider stopping on my account, on this occasion as frequently your comment is considerably more interesting than the post. And I will come over and comment on your Miss Monoglot story, which I liked very much, but went away to think about it then let slide.
Well, I suppose I found the breaking point and I'm sorry I did. That's a very noble thing you said, Luce, and I'll bear it in mind when violence, snarkishness and infantilism next take hold.
Oh Lucy... Don't denigrate your words too much. You had me laughing out loud. As you probably know, shape shifting is my thing. I don't think I ever put myself in the position of a rat turned into a human. I thought you did wonderfully, whenever it was you wrote it.
As for derivative blogs, I am doing "reprise" often now, adding new material and especially images but bringing forward years old posted work because I so highly doubt that anyone who actually goes back into the archives themselves would object. I know for a fact that few do go back, except for certain postings that are favorites as google references.
I loved the story but that photo is incandescent. It looks like a very formally dressed footman bowing to his lady.
The footman and backbone vie with each blink.
Far from inconsequential. I love the tiny graphic-novel-in-words and the haiku. Haiku is the one poetic device accessible to all. Not - although you'd believe otherwise, such is their proliferation across the blogs! But in its balance of vividness and compression this one works very well.
The burning cone looks like it has a demon at its core - I see a grimacing little face, a rippling muscular torso, and molten tentacles in place of legs.
The flash fiction was funny. I haven't come across a piece told from the POV of one of the more minor, overlooked figures in Cinderella.
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