It was a kind funeral. Black cloth and sweet rolls.
They sang your song and recycled old stories anew.
They spoke well-wishes, treated me as if I was still whole.
They saw your empty body laid to rest then scattered like crows.
We buried two that day, you and I.
Bryson Mooso is still searching for that perfect sentence. He’s resigned to writing millions of them to find it.
“June?”
I turn at the sound of her voice. Same height as me, same build, her face a reflection of my own.
We try to compress fifty years of missed hugs into that first one.
“Look,” she says. “Same coat.”
We laugh, twin snorts escaping at exactly the same time.
Laura Besley writes short fiction and squeezes her writing into the bookends of her day. She has lived in Holland, Germany, and Hong Kong, but now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. Her flash fiction collection, The Almost Mothers, was published in March 2020. She tweets at @laurabesley.
Siblings stood dry eyed and silent, listening to the fantastic fictions shared by neighbors and colleagues.
Depending on the setting, angle, and motivation, seems the stranger in the coffin could have been anything. He was a real work of art, a one-of-a-kind, and not kind at all to those closest.
Lee DeAmali tries her hand at flash fiction in her spare time.
I crept under the front porch, swiped cobwebs, crawled over broken bricks and debris, sat cross-legged, bent, chewing on my braids. Jabbed at tears on my hot cheeks with grimy hands, ignoring the scurrying and slithering around me.
Above me, Mom and Dad were showing off my new baby brother.
MaryJane Nordgren is a retired family practice physician living in the foothills of the Oregon Coastal Range. Founder of Writers in the Grove, MJ enjoys laughing with and learning from fellow authors every Monday morning. Her novel NANDRIA’S WAR will be coming out soon.