flash fiction | Fred Aiken Writing

February 10, 2023

Misspelled Apocalyptic Thoughts on the Precipice of Pseudo-Intellectual Meaning

You know how close the words ‘anesthetic’ is to ‘aesthetic’. I get them confused all the time. Thank god for auto-correct, amiright.

Yeah, so what?

It means…that beauty was originally an alternative pain killer.

The two men watch as an asteroid heads toward the Earth. It looks like a moving sun getting closer and closer. Their eyes are attached to the asteroid and nothing else. Soft, pale speckles move across their field of vision.

One of the men moves a couple of feet to his right to get another angle on the asteroid. His eyes don’t leave the flames biting through the sky.

I imagine it’s a beauty not to feel pain.

December 5, 2022

Futuristic Familial Armistice

My sister’s eyes are laser-trained on my left arm with a rusted axe hovering above her head. I’m laying on my tropical felt futon in a premium Demerol-Red-Label haze feeling like a philosophical centipede swimming in green Jell-O.

“I’m having doubts,” she says.

“And I’m not. Do it!”

My eyes roll into the back of my head, and I don’t notice her sweating apprehension. She trembles and her vision goes blurry. I show her prints about the cybernetic arm to allay her. By cutting off a part of me, I tell her, I’ll be able to do so much more.

October 25, 2022

Another Day; Another Traffic

Fifteen days stuck in traffic. Fifteen days into the seventeenth year stuck in traffic.

I’m not sure I know anything outside of these steel and fiberglass containers on round rubber. No one has come to save us.

I think any rescue efforts got stuck in traffic, too.

I keep trying to remember what my wife looked like, but I can’t conjure an image.

But I’m certain that she wouldn’t want me to leave the car.

I wonder if she moved on.