Flash fiction

At this link, you’ll find some flash fiction entries from one of Janet Reid’s contests. In these contests, she assigns a small number of required words and then everyone goes to town creating short-short entries that use those words.

Here’s my favorite:

Timothy Lowe

So much depends upon the
Cold
Blue
Shivering shadows

So much depends upon
Tamperproof:
Oxazepam in the morning
Clozapine at night
Beds unmade
In the evening shade
of
My mother’s
Cold
Blue
Shivering smile

So much depends upon
Loss,
That fucking word
The not-heard
Shard
Of
Memory lost,
Of
Years spent
Tossed
By gutless words

(You never heard) like

Cognition
Recognition
Dementia
Alzheimer’s

So much depends upon
Fate
My father
His oxygen taken
Stolen like breath
From a
Cold
Blue
Shivering

Dawn

Wow. Stark.

You can click through to read other entries, all of which are prose rather than poems, and see if one of the others is your favorite.

But I actually pulled out this post for a different reason. Janet adds:

Words I had to look up

dysoxic-Ash Complin
xyresic-Brigid
desoxy-Tess Rook

fasciculating-RosannaM
xanthic-Megan V
rimed-NLiu

And that caught my eye, because vocabulary always catches my eye. How many of those words did you already know? I knew two — Xanthic and Rimed. Two others are really the same word — Dysoxic and Desoxy — and if you think of chemistry, you will at once see what they mean. I didn’t get that at first, but the instant I looked up “Dysoxic,” I said, Of course, duh.

That leaves “Xyresic” and “Fasciculating,” and of the two, I am most likely to use “Xyresic” myself someday. It’s a great word that has a cool meaning.