If you missed last week’s flash, it can be found here.This week’s piece was written at Eastercon for the Friday Flash Fiction workshop we ran to launch Illuminations. Not one to ask others to do what we would not, each of us wrote a story whilst the attendees crafted their own compositions.
As ever I’m not sure this works but here’s mine:
Burned
By Neil Beynon
The city burned. Fire like fingers pawed the sky, knocking down buildings in clumsy haste to grab the velvet black. Hot ash danced down alleys, coalesced in squares and throttled the hapless few.
“What happened?” screamed Amanda over the city’s howls.
“I don’t know,” said Pete. His eyes not on her but drinking in the amber riot in front of him, watery orbs listless and lost.
Amanda tugged at his arm.
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
Pete stood there, as if his feet had melted to the atrophying asphalt. Gently he removed her hand from his arm, the wedding band on her ring finger having left a blister from the heat. The silence roared over crashing steel.
Amanda paused, her eyes full of smoke, perhaps. Then she ran.
And the city burned. But she did not look back.
Nice symbolism with the wedding band, and some good imagery of the burning city. This piece reminds me of the second piece I posted this week; I think that thematically they share some common ground.
Can’t quite understand how you managed to conjure that image in so few words. Vivid and compact.
I particularly like the – “Hot ash danced down alleys”.
I like the line: “her eyes full of smoke, perhaps.”
This is a very interesting line:
“Pete stood there, as if his feet had melted to the atrophying asphalt.” Reading this logistically, I get the picture of the fire actually being quite a distance away from them and having already been where they now stand. The asphalt was once hot in this place and now it’s hardening. Or perhaps it’s all imagery, though atrophying and fire are interesting, perhaps antithetical, images to mingle.
You got me thinking on this B-E-A-U-tiful Saturday morning. Thanks, dude.
Brian