Watched himself recede, as through a telescope wrong-ended. Reduced to a point in distance, a horizonspeck. Disappeared. And even then, birds still sang. And sing still.
Microfiction: “naive”
Caged, and descending. Darkness creeps around corners. Kept awake in a flickering globe of artificial light, listening to sounds of routine motion, metal biting stone. Occasionally, the canary still sings, unaware of what it’s for.
Microfiction: “seasons end”
Winds do howl through bird-hollow bones; winterclaws will find purchase. Children play, in the same snows that in adulthood bury them.
Microfiction: “virtual”
Our eventual architecture was artless: concrete cubes, identical. We needed only basic shelter, to store our hardware. Living in headspace, dreaming through wires. Limited by our bandwidth.
Microfiction: “impasse”
The would’s couldn’t; the could’s shouldn’t; the should’s didn’t. Nothing reached an agreement.
Microfiction: “camouflage”
Photographs failed to capture him; he was a sasquatch blur. Even in direct sunlight, shadows would discover him, and traced across him chiaroscuro abstractions. Solitude-shrouded, he was but a collection of shapes- tiger-striped, and hidden from the world.
Microfiction: “seen through”
He believed that if he only ate clear foods, his body would be built of them; one day to become transparent. Water, broth, the whites of eggs. The last time I saw him he was chewing handfuls of crushed glass, grasping for the purity of the invisible; becoming a ghost.
Microfiction: “no witnesses”
“Video and audio recording is prohibited,” intoned the judge. Members of the courtroom dutifully covered their eyes and ears.
Microfiction: “revealer”
In front of the funhouse mirror he posed and preened, watching his features distort, a maze of twisted limbs. Cheekbones dangled like Dali clocks. The smile fixed on his face, frozen: a growing fear, a dawning certainty – the mirror was perfectly ordinary.
