Flash Fiction


GOLDFISH by JL Williams

He is riding in a car with his mother and his grandmother. It is smooth, how they ride, like platelets down a vein. The sky is amber or grey. He can’t see the sky from where he is. When the car stops he knows that he has to get out and he is scared. It is like his grandmother’s cottage, a red house with a pine tree at the back and beyond that a running field.

When he was young he used to climb that pine tree and his father would try to wash the sap from his hands.

He walks to the doorstep and knocks on the door. The woman who opens the door is the blue witch. He had met her once before in Pennsylvania when the grown-ups were watching a movie. She had come out of the screen to greet him when he left his bed to find her, summoned by the sound of her voice.

She invites him into her house with a plastic bag in which goldfish swim. He offers her the bunch of flowers he cradles in his arms. It is not an exchange. She lets him into her house, asks him to sit at a small table and places macaroni salad in front of him. The salad, much like his mother often made, is dotted with black spots of pepper. Here he understands that the pepper will infect him with rabies if he eats it. At home the pepper is just another part of the taste of the salad. He fears the frothing of the mouth that this dog disease would make happen in him if he ate the pepper but he wants badly to be polite.

Her bag of fish sits on the counter, the goldfish inside glinting as they swim in tight circles. He realises that the goldfish are not actual fish but crackers in the shape of goldfish, with eyes and smiles drawn on their faces in black ink. Nothing makes sense and he feels very frightened, as if everything he knows is changing into something horrible and beyond his control.

By JL Williams, Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.





Flash Fiction