Flash Fiction

A new assignment for creative writing, a midterm short. Mine's very rough, but here. It's called "Shannon's Song," and provides some backstory on two of the central charaters I am writing about in "Keep in Touch."

They hit the seat so hard as they entered the cab that the whole thing rocked onto two wheels, listing dangerously close to the traffic zipping by on East 7th. Laughing, she pried open his dripping rain coat and nuzzled into the warmth of his chest. He smelled like faded Polo and stale smoke. The lights from the Venezuelan café blared into the cab’s stiff and acrid interior, casting long shadows across the driver’s neck. From his picture, Sarrif was from Zimbabwe, and, judging from his demeanor, he was in no mood for small talk.

“Where you going?” he said, craning his neck at the massed couple in his back seat.

“Americana. 69 West 38th.” Sean said, easing back and into his soggy companion.

“OK.” And they were off. As they barreled up Park Avenue, Shannon detached herself from Sean, leaning back to fuss her hair away from her eyes, both lost now in the blackness of the cab. He had always loved her eyes. He leaned into her and kissed her, only lightly, before sliding to the window.

“I can’t believe you flipped off that guy in the parade, Shan. It’s Saint Patrick’s Day, for God’s sake.”

She wrinkled her nose and chuckled. “Hey, I thought I knew that priest with him, Father Cooper, from the Art Center. They call him the painting priest. And you can’t tell me you didn’t see that guy flip me off first. It was like he thought I knew him.”

“Regardless, it’s not very lady-like of you. What would Timothy and Sarah say?”
“Leave my parents out of this, you jerk. I’ve given them enough trouble.”
Sarrif rammed the cab through a puddle the size of a small stream on the side of 37th street. David paid him and they tumbled out onto the Avenue of the Americas and quickly up to his hotel. “Will you come up?” he asked.

“Do you want me to?”

“Of course I do. I always do.”

“What will good old Sharon say?”

“Leave her out of this.” He stared at her as she stood debating, the light from the lamppost carving out the chunks of her face above her cheekbones with bright, fluorescent light, and leaving the space below hollow and black. She thought for a long moment before turning and grabbing his hand to enter the hotel doorway.

In his mind, the years between them hovered over him like a blanket, wrapping him in the warmth and dryness of shared childhoods. The rain cascaded down off of the hotel’s canopy in thick sheets now, but to Sean, it was only the incessant pull of the past dragging him back to a time before wife and family and growing up, to that time when the ghosts of our past are still living and warm and soft beside us, as she was now.