Flash Fiction
Colin Miley

Midmorning, Vancouver, BC

The monotony in her life had become some kind of inescapable vacuum. Craving change, she broke up with her boyfriend. Then she stopped returning phone calls. These days, she watches TV and the rain in almost equal parts. Sleeping less but spending more time in bed, she lays there exhausted, waiting for something to find her. But nothing ever happens in the moment before something breaks.

She glances down at the call display on her portable phone, recognizing the number instantly. It’s her friend, the one whose calls she hasn’t been returning for the last six months. She’s still staring while the fourth ring echoes through her one-bedroom flat. “I can’t. I’m not ready yet,” she thinks as she slinks away from the phone and toward the door, “maybe next time.” She throws on a shawl and disappears into the midmorning streets of Yaletown, off to do errands she cares nothing for.

I remember

October, 1979
I remember sitting in a sparse old living room when I was six, my head leaning against the front bay window. The window is cool against my fevered mind. The smudge from my forehead is growing, its greasy borders expanding as I peer from side to side, looking up and down 53rd Avenue. I’m alone and afraid, watching for the man that could make it all better—my never-present Dad.

I remember feeling like time was slowing, every particle in my vision becoming somehow crisper. It’s dusk, the magical time when everything is supposed to glow. Freshly fallen leaves and crumpled papers dance down the empty street, pushed by the same wind that I pray will bring him home. My head is swimming and the next thing I know it’s dark. He still hasn’t come. He isn’t coming. I’m crying.

Dad was always somewhere I wasn’t. I’d heard that if you were lost, you should stay still. That way, help has a better chance of finding you. I trusted this logic. I looked out that bay window, crying quietly and waiting, afraid he would never come, sitting perfectly still and praying for help.

The Glassy Eyed Stare of the True Believer

There is a black preacher man trapped inside me. I feel this thing with a passion like the glassy eyed stare of the true believer. And who believes more than a black preacher man? Have you ever been to a real church revival? Well, me neither, but I have a vivid image of what it would be like—and those people Believe with a capital fucking B. It’s the Blues Brothers plus a James Brown concert in 1974, to the power of any given Sunday in a Southern Alabama church choir. I feel it like I can’t explain. I feel it like I gotta stand up and yell “Testify!” at the top of my lungs (before I explode). You best believe I’m feeling it to the core of my being. I feel just like a true believer, and you don’t know how good that feels. It’s been a real long time since I believed in anything like I believe in this.