Dashed-off flash fiction in response to this prompt at Writers Write.
Title: PM/AM
WC: 700
The big hand on the kitchen clock scoops its way toward midnight.
The minute hand, Vi reminds herself. The house is asleep. She needn’t think in terms of big and little, of now and next, of this or that or nothing at all.
The big hand is the one that counts the minutes. It shovels before itself all the things that still need doing before day’s end like a snowplow. Except not like a snowplow. Vi stares into the sink and longs for something so orderly as hard-packed berms of dirty snow.
The sink is stacked with dishes scooped haphazardly along by the big hand, by the little hand, by even the fragile, needle-like sweep of seconds. Her gaze loses its grip on any one thing. It slips past the slop of scrambled eggs and ketchup just clinging to the edge of the warped plastic plates she’d had to go up on tiptoe to pull down from the very top shelf of the cupboard.
Everything else was dirty by then—dirty before she had breakfast on the table. It ought to have been impossible, but who knows how many plates and bowls, saucers and mugs and the right kind of forks have been lost under some piece of furniture or other. So the warped plastic plates it had been. Defeat by 6 am because everything else made Ezra scream because of the chip in the rim or Sadie erupt into unstoppable tears because anything with purple in it made her sad this week.
The sink is stacked with the day’s failures, precarious and somehow still more prepared for the day about to arrive than she is. She swings the faucet head, dim and smudged with fingerprints over the highest point of the haphazard pile. She balls her hand into a fist and slaps the lever upward. Water spatters the topmost plate and skitters downward. It bleeds pale red. Its weight tips everything this way and that. Forks clatter to the stainless steel bottom. Knives slip free as bowls capsize. The miniature world quakes. Everything clatters. The dirty, cluttered kitchen is alive with nerve-plucking sensation.
Vi’s fist comes down on the faucet lever, hard enough that the bones in the flat of her hand sing out in a hot blue slice of pain. Her teeth come together like fire doors slamming against the cry of pain and frustration. She’s made more than enough noise and the last thing she needs is the whole damned house up, needing, needing, needing something else from her.
She lifts her head. She fights gravity and tries to tip the threatening tears right back into the bottomless well they come from. Something catches her eye through the window just over the sink. It’s a flash of green she must be imagining.
She looks nonsensically toward the clock. It’s early, she thinks with a ragged laugh. In a calendar way, it’s too early for that flash of green, but here it is again. And again. It’s a steady pulse now that draws her to the back door.
She turns the key in the deadbolt and slips the chain along its groove. She’s remembered the secret of silence now.
The big hand on the kitchen clock scoops its way right past midnight as Vi steps through the back door and out into the night that is warmer than it should be.
“It’s too early,” she says aloud. It’s audacious. It’s tempting fate when the last thing she needs is the whole damned house up, but she doesn’t glance behind her. One foot finds the two square inches of wooden stair that aren’t nearly rotted through. The other finds the same tiny patch of safety another stair down. Her two feet together find the garden path—smooth bricks almost hidden beneath the weeds that have grown high enough to topple over.
“It’s too early,” she says once more to the lone firefly clinging to a dry, curling vine wrapped around last year’s tomato cage. “It’s months before your time.”
The firefly makes no answer. Instead, it pulses, steady and green. It poses a question: What would you do in the garden at midnight?
Vi answers, “Breathe.”
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 