Flash Fiction by Richard M. Ankers

She pools a reflection of the girl I once knew. The gentlest reminder. She flickers through my cerebral functions like the remnants of a dream.
Dreams are all I have now my view has gone. Only hollowness remains where I’d rather have a life. Life is what we live for, I think?
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I fell into a dream once. Did I ever fall back out?
She was the dream. My every sleeping vision. Then, she slipped into my days. A few kind words. Nothing more. Histories are built on less.
History is the term we give to recorded memories. This makes them no more real than a dream just that someone cared to measure them. But how does one measure such transitory portraits?
They last. They span time. Be it the batting of an eye or the flickering of the centuries, dreams have a purpose, a meaning. They show us what we wish before life strips it away. Dreams offer hope to the hopeless, and I’m more hopeless than most.
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The girl blinks, and the dream is shattered. I close my eyes, but it’s gone already. Time has taken that which I would cling to like a constrictor. Time has uncoiled my mind and heart.
I hate these wakeful moments. When the vivid becomes the lurid and the lurid becomes worse, I feel her loss most closely.
It’s just a sideways recollection, possibly one that was never really there. A mind making something from nothing. But the hollows of my heart have never sampled such pain. They fill with a dark ichor that pools like ink upon my life’s pages, and me with no quill with which to write them away. Never have letters failed me so.
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She sits beside me, and she doesn’t even know it.

Text © Richard M. Ankers