I watched him fidgeting with his watch. She had stood him up. She was off somewhere, say, walking down the street to the corner store watching the city lights blur and shiver on the wet street, all reds and blues and greens rippling, and a sudden thought pops in her head that he must be sitting there, in this tiny cafe' wondering about her, then the thought is smothered. She has to get milk for the cat. She's left the stove on.

I watched him there sitting eyes sinking and then vanishing. Then I watched him get up. I paid for my drink.

A sudden clinking came from the man's pocket as he made it outside, getting louder as he walked faster, agitated, keys, maybe change, definitely anger. How many times has a woman stood him up? How underdeveloped are his social skills because she never comes, he's never allowed to exercise his vernacular and wit and charm? No vernacular. No wit. Charm evaporated. All gone.

Footsteps were gun shots. Hunched over giving only broad shoulders and the curve of his back. The pin stripes on his shirt bent out like the bars of a cage failing to hold a circus strong man. The keys, or the change, clinking were ricochets. As cars pass, the wheels whispered rumors and hissed and spewed water. A sprinkle on his pant leg, he didn't seem to mind.

He lived close by, turning the corner he pulled out his keys. They were keys. He struggled with his keys at the door perhaps because he was angry, hands shaky unlike mine.

Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's Man of the Crowd

Party People. Flash.

Hunger is a raw feeling. Whether it's hunger for sleep or food. People are obsessed with the pain, but, pain is only the surface. When comes that deeper sensation, pain is puny and shrinking away and then it's nothing. In its place is the devil.

Walking through this desert, I can't tell you on the calendar where I am. I can't tell you for how many days and nights. The number times the sun has slid across the sky, and the bowling moon. The clouds and stars both have bared witness to my walking. Forever.

Several times when the sun and moon are there there with me in the waste, I have contemplated eating sand. My stomach has stopped. My piss is gone. The sun and moon both say, "yes, you should."

The stars shout, "do it."

Sharp wind. I walk and my lips are chapped. I crest a dune. I descend. So many times.

When my neck turns, I hear the crackling of something brittle. All I see is the sand and the heat dancing with the air. The sound was my neck's skin falling away, now there is only flesh and muscle. Across my forehead is another small tear the wind fingers open. The wind grips a flap and pulls, rips and there it is my skin carried away and falling away behind me.

Sharper wind, my head lowers to shield my eyes and my skull is a white cap. A gust finds the groove of my skeleton and rides down my spine, a skin cape is sent off. The wider view of my back shows muscle ropes untying. Falling off in wires.

I look up for a moment and it stings, I raise my hand, I close my eyes. The last thing I saw was the skin around fingers fraying, shredding off. Sand has made it into my bones and every movement there is the grind of grit against gristle.

Like it has been unzipped, the skin along my arm parts in half. Then the stuff it held underneath is loosed. There is no feeling anymore, anywhere.

You can see my radius bone, ulna. The humerus, the long bone, my shoulder blade, both shoulder blades like rough plates. My arms are still raised and my hands are outstretched to hold the wind back but the wind gets through, through the spaces between my bones, into my bones, killing the marrow.

Small bit by small bit those bones in my wrist fly off and my hands go limp. I am blasted back and my legs stumble to keep balance while the whole of my front is ripped away and there is the rib cage, the heart beating behind it, the heart that tears away and joins everything else in the wind, still beating and tumbling into the bright void. I fall to the sand. The last thing I hear is the wind whistling through my bones.

Party People!!!!!!!

Quick premise of the flash story - it's done on the fly. No editing, no real preparation, just putting the skills on the spot and seeing if they can kick ass. My brain got steel toed boots. They better. . .

The Paper and the Ditch

He clenches his fist and he walks from the table to the kitchen window. Back to the table. Morning is cold and the steam from his tea cup is a long tendril. Looks like if he reaches for it he'll grab silk. Instead, he puts his hands down on the table, looks down at nothing.

The morning paper says they found the body in the ditch several miles from home. If he had a time machine, he would have stopped himself from saying anything at all. If he had a hand ax and a name, or even a picture of how that man looks like, he wouldn't be here in the kitchen walking back to the window, turning on the water without knowing why he was doing it. Maybe it would drown his crying. He falls to one knee.