A Hummingbird Trapped In an Hourglass By Jeremy Joseph Light

Today, I will fall off of the diving board. I will make a deal-breaking typo, take two or three extra painkillers, slip in the shower, have a micro seizure during sex. I will put my laptop, tablet, and three outfits into my backpack, get dropped off at the train station and go back to California, visit my older and slightly creepy siblings, immediately complain about not being satiated.

It’s never enough.

Please sir, can I have some more? I’m twisting like Oliver, playing the pipe organ with hands full of raw liver and an ill-fitting cape. No one can be quite sure if it’s more of a Phantom cape or a super hero disguise.

I’ll return your look of disgust with a tiny porcelain potato. You can carry it up and down the Pacific Coastal Highway, chew on its industrial strength skin like you chew away at my confidence.

Sky Father hits rewind . . . I’m back on the diving board.

I sit down for fifteen minutes in complete silence. I’m scared and choose to climb back down the ladder into the twelve-dimensional lucid nightmare of shame that is visiting a public pool. The chlorine still burns my eyes. I plug my umbilical cord into the neighbor’s once stylish toaster, and the entire Holy Quran is uploaded to my consciousness.

I feel relieved. For once, I know the truth with a capital T. We dig in the sand. There are now one-hundred sacred names for each of us. A bird takes a single grain of sand from the palm of my hand, slowly flies to the moon, and gently drops it. It then returns to my hand to take another grain of sand, and it turns out that when each grain of sand is taken and a new beach is created that it only takes a blink of an eye when considering the length of eternity.

Eternity is maddeningly seamless.

© 2016 Jeremy Joseph Light

Jeremy Light is a flash fiction and short story writer as well as an editor at two well-known literary journals. His work has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine and is forthcoming in Hindered Souls. Jeremy lives in (haunted) Wisconsin.He can be found at www.horrorlit.org 

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