I struggled a little this week. Various reasons including my own incompetence. If you enjoy my weekly scribblings, and even if you don’t, you should check out some of the other Friday Flash Fictioneers: Gareth Lyn Powell, Paul Raven, Shaun Green, Gareth D. Jones, Martin McGrath, Dan Pawley and Justin Pickard.

Anyhow here is my little ditty for the offering:

Rainbow
By Neil Beynon

His chest felt tight, so tight it hurt. He’d once been stuck under a bench press, the victim of too much bravado, this felt a little like that. His knees buckled beneath him, his eyes watered and he found himself not looking up but at the carpet.

It was thick and soft beneath his knuckles. As the room span he focused on each individual piece of carpet, a pile jungle waiting for microscopic explorers to encounter. It’s funny the things you think of in a crisis.

There was a movement from the other side of the room, quiet but there; pulling him back to the present. The 10am sun filtered through the window in swirls of rainbow-flavoured light. There had been a rainbow on the day he got married, he’d gotten soaked on his way to the church and had looked out on it from the stone porch, his best man nudging him in awe; the bridal car pulling up just as it faded.

He looked up at his wife watching him from the end of the bed, she had her knees tucked up under her and she was hugging a pillow. She brushed an errant strand of hair nervously behind her ear, unsure what to, uncertain how to act. Her nudity almost made it cute. Almost.

“It’s not what it looks like,” said the thing that had been in bed with her. Its voice was strange, rasping and made him want to vomit.

“Yes it is,” he replied.

Then he turned his back and walked out of the house. It should be raining, he thought. But it wasn’t and so he went and stood under number twenty-nine’s sprinkler. It was easier to hide that way.