#SelectedFlashFiction – June

June’s embrace brings with it the promise of long days and heartfelt reflections. Our gratitude this month is directed towards Lucy Aur and Elizabeth Kemball, whose legacy of literary curation enriches our collective journey. Their parting gift brings us Feathers and Bones by Jessica Walker and Lost: Person by Paul Goodman, two works that delve into the essence of being and belonging.

• Jessica Walker, hailing from Hampshire, UK, explores the nuanced terrains of flash fiction while editing her first novel. Jessica’s storytelling invites us into worlds both tender and profound.
• A writer with roots in Hemel Hempstead and a life carved out in Bristol, Paul Goodman is a qualified social worker whose narratives, such as “Lost: Person,” capture the soul of city life and the myriad ways in which we find and lose ourselves within it.

Feathers and Bones – Jessica Walker

Meadow watched the pigeon flap in circles on the pavement. Broken wing. Dead by morning. She’d planned an afternoon of back to back ‘Killer At The Side Door’. 

And there’s really no more room.

She grimaced to the sky. Grey clouds spat rain at her face.

The pigeon hopped and sat on her foot, sealing its fate to live or die in the warmth of her garden shed. She scooped up the bird, tucked him in her coat and zipped it, snug at her breast.

*

Meadow placed the pigeon on the shed floor, bundled a towel around his ruffled belly and rushed to her kitchen for supplies. The other birds cooed, watching from behind plexiglass, heads bobbing in their warm beds.

On her return, she unlatched the shed door to a naked man laying hunched on the floor. 

‘Hi.’ He said.

Meadow dropped a roll of tape, bottle of disinfectant and lolly sticks. Slamming the door, she clung on to the little iron ring. Killer on my bloody shed floor?

‘My name is Stanley.’ The man shouted from inside. ‘Thanks for rescuing me.’

She wrenched open the door.

‘Get out.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know who you are—’

‘Wait—’

‘I don’t keep money in the house—’

‘You rescued me outside the watch shop. You took me on the bus, you cuddled me in your coat.’

Meadow flung a protective arm across her chest.

The man shifted a swollen ankle and sucked in a breath. 

‘Stanley?’ Meadow said, her stomach lurching at the mottled skin on his forearm, corpse grey and bone bent at a grim angle. ‘You need a hospital.’

‘No. No hospital, please just help me up?’ 

She hoisted him up as best she could and guided his good arm to the table edge.

Backing away, she stared at his grey quiff, wild amber eyes and muscular body. Twisting around she spun into the door. 

Shit, he’s just a pigeon. Bird-man?

She grabbed her hooded anorak from the hook and dangled it towards him with her eyes closed. When he didn’t take it, she opened one eye and flung the anorak over his head. The birdman froze with his hand outstretched, like a serial killer’s coat stand. He shivered and with a mighty crack snapped his arm into place. 

‘Thank you, so much. Couldn’t do that in public.’

Stanley spread his arms, his body contorted and began to shrink. The hood slipped from his head and his skin pricked with feather tips pushing out of pores and unfurling into wings, smoke grey and glorious. 

‘I know we can trust you.’ He said.

Meadow opened her mouth and her words got stuck in her throat. Stanley’s eyes slid apart to the sides of his tiny head. Toes fused into claws. Mouth to beak. Wings whipped and with a graceless take-off, Stanly flew out and into the rain.

Lost Person – Paul Goodman

It comes on WhatsApp, in the ether. An A4 sheet of paper that doesn’t need a plastic sleeve to cosset and blanket it from the elements unlike the ones on the cemetery’s railings and lamp posts for the cats and dogs and shoes.

Lost: Person is looking out at you from one of the pictures: smiling, but just a bit, nothing too smiley or committing. Not a smirk nor a knowing grin, just that smile for all occasions. You know the one. But the other picture is more formal, a full-length, giving more of an objective visual so you’d have a better chance of seeing them on the street. 

It can happen to anyone, honest. One day you’re here and gone the next. And for most of us we didn’t feel we had to worry, didn’t know anything was wrong. Perhaps Lost: Person hid it so well that their nearest and dearest didn’t realise, couldn’t sense the despair, the unease, so how could they have ever helped?

Lost: Person would go to the pub for a drink, perhaps for years on end and then it trailed off and no one thought to ask or assumed it was the way of city life. Maybe Lost: Person didn’t really know they had friends, or they were so scared of revealing why it was they chewed their nails or scratched their skin, that they couldn’t talk to them, or at least deep talk with them; the opportunity lost all round because no one could bring themselves say something, or ask a question that might have lingered past the silence.

Lost: Person had ‘masked’ it, so to speak, not let on; adapted how they were, how they ‘presented’ to the world and kept shtum about the straw(s) that could and did break their back, and lose the will to continue, but not lose the path to becoming Lost: Person.

Lost: Person’s family ask anyone, anywhere, for help and to use WhatsApp groups to expand the search and they leave an email and a mobile number in case.