Then, An Ever Present Now
Flash Fiction by Kelly Neal
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The shuttlecock flits nimbly across the loom with a soft clacking beat. “For every time I’ve told this tale, I’ve told it twice again,” she implies with a sigh as she begins. She speaks of patience and home and slow unsolicited seductions as time unravels across the floor into red pools of forgetfulness at her feet.
He watches her hands shift the threads as if playing upon a lyre. He thinks, “There are so many ways through the woods; so many rivers and creeks to cross; so many hollows and caves to wander lost, always different, always the same as all the ones crossed before.”
For years and years, as he wandered, he watched the waves pulse repetitive hallucinations and horrors towards a horizon he could no longer see. Unearthly monsters churned the waters, feeding one upon the other; with a ceaseless hunger for more, the past devoured the past. While across the sea late at night, she walked the halls without a light, leaned against a shuttered door, and listened to the incessant voices muttering their plots and plans for a life she abhorred.
As the story faltered to its close, there was no soft landfall upon the strand, no wreck scattered upon a beach; no violence in their reunion, nor familial embrace. What had grown between them, tangled like olive tree roots upon a cliff, could not be troubled enough to be called love, if it could be called anything at all.
Kelly Neal was born and raised in South Texas. As soon as he was able, he left for Austin, where he now writes and teaches. He is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. Before he started teaching, Kelly worked as a baker at a local French bakery.