Flash Fiction – Page 86 – Jeff Coleman Writes

Half-Life

By Jeff Coleman / January 25, 2017 November 5, 2021 / Flash Fiction, Horror, Surreal

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Fingers reaching, creeping, curling around my neck like choking vines. Draining my life. I struggle, try to pry it off my vulnerable skin. It taunts me, utters its low, susurrus laugh like dried leaves, like rattling snake’s skin, slithering across dry, desert sand.

I always manage to survive in spite of its debilitating grip, but only just. Mine is a sort of half-life, forever suspended between the dark and the light. And beneath me, the creature in the shadows, beckoning me to give up, to let go, to allow myself to fall into its insatiable jaws.

It knows I weaken, that I have not the strength to escape and fly toward the light. It does not age, but instead bides its time, for it knows I can only go on for so long before I falter.

How long can I live without rescue before my grip loosens? How long can I survive?

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©2017 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.

Picking Up the Pieces

By Jeff Coleman / January 18, 2017 October 5, 2017 / Fantasy, Flash Fiction, Surreal

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She lives at the crossroads of time and space. The rest of her kind left long ago, choosing to search for a new world instead of trying to repair the one they already had. But she couldn’t go with them. This was her homeland, the world that had given birth to her. She couldn’t let it die. Now she stands alone in a barren land, trying to pick up the pieces they left behind.

Trying to rebuild.

She dreams of how things were, focuses her power on reversing the decay. She grits her teeth as that power flows out of her, and she picks the constituent pieces of her reality off the ground like scattered rubble, molding them into something new.

It is slow, lonely work.

Her world was vast, and the universe will nearly be in its death throes by the time she’s finished. But she hopes that if she fixes it they’ll return. Without them, without her world as it once was, she knows she’ll never be whole.

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