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Flash Fiction Effort

Here is my meager effort this week for Flash Fiction:

Sunshine of the Soul

He saw the orange Necco wafer on the counter top and started to cry. It was a simple, small, light orange disk of sugar flavored with orange extract, but to him it represented so much more. It represented all that he had lost and all that he could never regain again.

Wiping his hand across his face, he felt the looseness of his skin, and the bristling heaviness of the hairs of his mustache and beard. Taking off his wire-rimmed glasses, he looked away from the counter and sat in the kitchen chair and looked out the window at the newly fallen snow.

"Life is simply a path of torture." he said to no one, as he was alone. "We spend the first half of our life figuring out how to know and love people, and the last half of our life watching those we have grown to love, die."

The utter void of loneliness he felt froze him into a state of despair. Two evenings ago, life had seemed decent and kind, with him having dreamed a rememberance dream where he was small, and his mother had given him a roll of Necco Wafers as a treat.

"This one looks like the sun!" the young boy of the long gone day said in the dream to his mother as he showed her one orange wafer.

"Yes, it does." she replied, "Life is filled with joy and sunshine, always remember that."

The dream continued in a peaceful and serene manner until he was abruptly awoken by the cat who jumped on him to lay on his chest about 15 minutes before his alarm would have gone off.

He told his wife about the dream yesterday. She listened to his recollection of the beauty of that day.

Yet, last night was not so kind. Instead of a remembrance of joys of the past, he found himself in a nebulous space in his dream. He was of his current age in this dream, and here, there was nothing, no light, no darkness, no one or anything. He was in an utter void.

He screamed in despair and fear in the dream. No one heard him, for no one was there. He did not even hear his own scream, for the void did not allow sound to travel. The only item in the space, devoid of everything else was a screen. The screen was impossible to touch as it was too far away. Upon the screen was displaying a loop of film, over and over and over. The film itself showed images of those loved ones, friends, and animals that he had cared for over his life. But the images of these people and pets were simply still images of each in death. Death had befallen them and all he could do is watch and see and relive the despair.

His father, his mother, his aunts, his uncles, the images streamed past one after another and grew and grew and grew to encompass all that had died. And the loop kept repeating itself, over and over.

This was how life would play itself out from now on, he knew. The realization of this chilled his heart beyond belief.

"There is nothing! Nothing! Everything is death!" he thought in the dream.

The buzz of the alarm clock brought him out of the dream. He was drenched in sweat and exhausted beyond measure.

With a heaviness to his spirit that made his shoulders droop, he slowly got up and pulled on the rumpled clothes he had left in the corner. Walking slowly, he went from the bedroom downstairs toward the kitchen. There, on the counter was a note from his wife who had left for work an hour before. On the note, there was drawn a simple smile and a heart.

He picked up the note, and saw that she had left for him, the one lone, orange Necco wafer underneath.

Meant to cause him to smile, it unfortunately worked in the opposite. The feelings of utter loss and despair he had lived again and again through his dream welled up quickly again, and the tears streamed forth from his eyes down his cheeks.

He picked up the small candy, and took it over to the sink. Turning on the faucet and the garbage disposal, he dropped in the wafer. The whirr of the blades changed pitch as it masticated that disk of sunshine candy into bits and washed them into the sewer system.

Shutting down the faucet and disposal, he reached for his pipe, and slowly trudged out the door to head to work.

* * * * *

Again, that is it for this week.

PipeTobacco