Flash Fiction and Unfinished Business

This Christmas I have set myself up for a lot of work. I am working with Sean on a new project and getting into more fabric and purse design work.

The quilt in the art@830 gallery has sold and that really gave me a boost but this morning I felt sad that I had stopped working on my novel. It was about 85% done when I made the mistake of  rereading it and finding some (inevitable) serious flaws in the storyline. Even though I knew better, this stopped me cold. What’s that about! Am I scared of the hard work ahead? Hell yes! I fear that it will need a total rewrite because I now think that  a minor character is my true hero. Whatever it is, I have to finish it,  solve the crime because it is a mystery, and then edit the hell out of it.

So I came across this piece of flash fiction that I wrote a while ago.

Messengers

Strangers give me answers to dangerous questions.  We begin and end at the center.  I never miss them when they go.

A stranger warned me that turning 30 would be hell. What she didn’t realize is that I have been trained to dread things long before they occur. But no one warned me about turning 31. What, I thought, there’s more? It took me years to get over 31.

I like to time things to arrive on the nick, the very edge of possible. En route to India with Aaron, I waited for our names to be called before going into duty free and sampling French perfume. Aaron was drunk so it was easy.  By the third call, I had a bottle of well-aged Scotch and a crystal decanter of Je Reviens. They were angry when they drove us to the plane but when we got there the stewardess motioned us to the left. They handed us a glass of fake Champagne. I was on the very threshold of First Class.

When we got to India, I pined for home. I walked to the poste restante  more than twice a week. Once I got a letter from my mother about Anna Nicole Smith’s  death in a hotel room.  The whole letter was about this. She wasn’t giving me a message, I never had drug problems one way or the other, she just didn’t know what to write.

My family has a long history of hooking up with strangers. No sooner do we board than someone strikes up a conversation. Guaranteed. There may be vacant seats all around but still they are drawn to us. Even when I put my purse or a book on the seat beside me, they move it and sit down.  This happens on trains too.

When I returned from India and Aaron left, I took a train to Toronto. I wanted to be alone. I had escaped a roach-infested apartment and brought my knitting with me to discourage conversation.  When a beefy faced salesman sat next to me, willing me to attention, I took out my knitting and found a dead roach suspended in the mohair. I extricated the roach from the wool and snuck it in the salesman’s pocket. I imagined how he would discover it all the way to Toronto. The thought made me expansive enough to talk the whole way there.

I used to be incredibly beautiful. People who knew me then still treat me with reverence.  At the time I thought, good, I have experienced being incredibly beautiful. When my face began to change but before I disappointed my friends, I saw Ava Gardner on TV and she said,  One day you wake up and look in the mirror and an old broad looks back and there’s nothing you can do about it.  Every morning I look for someone new.