Welcome to Flash Fiction Friday and the one hundred and fourth piece in this series. This week’s is a 266-worder by short story author and poet Jade Kennedy. This story will be podcasted in episode 33 (with two other stories and some 6-worders) on Sunday 3rd November.
Eden
She was courting an isolation never known to her before. The walls were humming with a silence that could be felt and seen, she knew she was undeniably alone. Not even a creature or a wisp of something unknown lingered on the air to watch her.
She felt the urge to write and wrote such words of depth and understanding, of the people she watched and reached out to with the bones in her fingers stretching and clicking in her many attempts. They would not hear her or see her grasping hand, she was concealed behind a glass so thick she could trace the bubbles of its impurities with a changing heart
She wrote into the days and nights, needing less and less light to read her words, blocking out the light, shielding away from the windows like a flower closing its face to the dusk. Her finger tips grew soft and pooled out like melted wax, they stuck to everything she touched. She stroked the cool walls with a deep yearning to walk them. Skin untouched by the sun started to pale to a translucent sheen with its visible marbling of blue tinted veins.
Her pupils lost their definition and eyelids as thin as white rose petals claimed their place over her irises.
When they find her shed skin, lost behind a carved chair with its paper thin markings of a woman consumed by herself, with all she left behind, the pages on pages of fiction, prose, poetry and the unknowable love she created on paper,
could they ever know what she went through…
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I asked Jade what prompted this piece and she said…
It is often said that you should ‘write about what you know’ and during a period of finding myself alone quite a lot, I started to write about isolation. This also made me think about how animals are affected when they are in caves away from sunlight, as they develop white translucent skin. This story reflects my thoughts on how this could affect people in the same way.
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It’s a great image. Thank you, Jade.
Jade Kennedy is a writer of poetry, prose and micro fiction and lives in East Yorkshire, England.
She has had her poetry in Poet and Geek, Rain Dogs, Eclectic Eel issues 1,2&3, Ether Books, Brevity Poetry Review, and included in the poetry anthology, ‘The Universe Inside’.
She writes a blog – ‘Borrowed Expressions’ at http://www.jadekennedywriter.blogspot.co.uk.
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