Monday, August 9, 2010

Flash Fic: Safe Haven; Hotels for Writers

I could not find a single author/book on my list at the used book store. Came away with some rather odd choices, including a 1990 flip-book of Beijing tourist attractions and a chapbook of strange poetry by a Detroit woman who farmed. I'm not sure what she farmed. I'll let you know when I figure it out. Right now, it appears to be death and afterbirth and pears, but who knows.

*

Safe Haven

Daughter of blue eyes peeled the apple with stubby paring knife: her grandma's, once used to stab a coon in its eye when it crawled in through broken screen over sink. The small room fills with sweet rotted aroma. The apple turns to brown pulp, drips into yellow bowl full of October's fruit. Daughter sloshes brandy over mash. Pulls on her boots. Takes the bowl onto a weak wooden porch and leaves it for overnight fairies and midnight butterflies, visitors such as dragonfly queens and rat kings on their way to safe haven. In the morning, she stills sits beside the bowl, eyes never having closed. Before dawn can touch it, she brings the remainder inside and crawls into the bed of blue eyes. His lips plow through it, and he falls back, drunk on night dreams all the rest of that day. She rests, and wakes at sunset to find there is no more fruit. A whole season's worth of fruit, gone. Spring is six months away.

*

I never get tired of looking at extraordinary hotels all over the world. I am planning my big Book Tour, you see, and at certain points, I will grow weary of the crush of adoring fans and the constant non-stop moving from city to city, and I will need to Get Away. For three days, maybe four, I will be a recluse, even my agent will wonder where I am. Cell off, laptop on but ignoring email. Curled up in cubes of milky foreign sunlight, politely smiling at the random other guest before returning to my tea or glass of wine and my book. And then, Ta dah! I will show up just in time for my next appearance. Perfectly pulled together, Chanel suit and string of pearls, maybe just a slight sheen of perspiration on my cleavage, the only evidence of the passionate tryst I indulged in with the random guest (who was quirky and had a furry chest and smelled like whichever country I was in, and who never learned my name).

Anyway. Hotels for the overburdened author yearning to Get Away, next stop: Norway.

Hotel Mundal.

2 comments:

  1. I once stayed in this hotel in Hamburg:
    http://www.wedinapost.de/en/

    which was nothing fancy but was very literary. They had a huge selection of books that you could read, mostly signed, and although their website talks mainly about German authors, loads of authors who write in English had stayed there too. I practically died of excitement when I saw that Will Self had signed the guest book a week previously.

    Also, Hamburg has a highly entertaining red light district and a museum of erotic art. What's not to love?

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  2. Hi Rebecca, don't see an email addy so: Has 'Loom' found a home? If not and you'd like to discuss publishing it on Ramshackle email me at
    ramshacklereview (at) gmail (dot) com.
    All best.

    Mark

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