(Page 1 of 2) Ellipses by Christopher Alen F.
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SUMMARY: Entry for the October 2009 Flash Fiction contest, "Darkness."The tires crunched softly over loose gravel while the sun slipped ponderously toward the horizon. The car stopped. The rhythmic clunking of the battered diesel engine turned into a cough and tumbled into silence. The headlights flicked out. The passengers stared out into the afterimage of a blurred forest road cast in a hellish inversion of colour.
The chirping of crickets rose from fearful subduction and crept into the car. Their droning monotony a sudden contrast to the soft breath that began to drop curtains of steamy condensation down the finger- and face-smudged windows. Twelve eyes blinked until the little blue-eyed girl gasped, "I don't wanna," with a quaver in her voice.
"It's just a little ways," came the mother's soothing alto, "you'll see." She smiled with her mouth. The girl stared mutely back into cold, quiet eyes, then wrapped her knees up in her arms and began to cry silently.
The driver-side door cracked open, the father stepping out into the premature twilight. He stretched his back, swinging his crotch this way and that, the same way each time, every time, and almost laughed. Yawned, scratched, then leaned into the car with a pat on the roof and said, softly, "Let's go. Everybody out."
The older girl moved first, her jaded sixteenness parading as leadership. She crunched across the gravel to the trunk, slammed it with the flat of her palm in the secret spot -- the metallic thud ringing incongruously into the chirruping wilderness -- and started to pull out backpacks and boxes and ski poles and rope.
The mother pointedly ignored the little girl, pulling the semi-conscious twin boys from the car without objection. They looked up groggily and pointed and, round mouthed, said together, "Daddy, look."
Twelve eyes drew up to the sun, necks straining against inoculation.
"It looks like a cookie in a commercial," said the wider boy.
"Don't look right at it."
"Yeah, a big, big space monster bite," said the other, ignoring his mother. "I want a cookie."
"You can have cookies when we get there," said the father.
"I don't get it," blurted the older girl. Her black hair drifted into her lips and clung there. "Why did we have to leave? Why couldn't we stay with everyone else? With our friends? Why do we have to come out to this stupid old cottage anyway? It's falling apart. You can't-"
The father pulled her into his chest and smelled her hair and remembered talcum while she raged into him. His chin bunched into rose petals and a frog caught in his throat and he breathed and held his daughter. This one the misfit, lost without her mother.
He fought down the shaking and whispered into her baby-soft hair, "Go help your mother get your sister."
She pushed away from him, muttering, "She's not my mother."
The mother's expression was lost to shadow. "Jenny-"
"What do you know? Do you want to be here? Do you? This isn't your place," she spat.
"This isn't the time."
"We thought you'd like it."
"WELL YOU THOUGHT WRONG."
The little girl stepped out of the car and sniffed.
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