flashquake Fiction

DEAD END ON RUNWAY THREE
by Ron Gibson, Jr.

Mother and boy cross the threshold. Darkness cannot hide the disarray of their lives. Empty snack food packages, broken beer bottles underfoot. Home to metaphors. 747s greet them with sonorous groans, accompanied by flashpans of light refracting through double-paned windows onto graffiti walls.

Night reclaiming its hearth, mother manages passage around drywall icebergs through a film negative mindscape. Her arms, willowy with rot, quake under the boy's weight. The same weight that once shared a place inside her, now is a millstone. She stalls, breathing labored, until another descending jet lights the way to a partially burnt, broken-armed sofa.

Together they sink into creaking springs — the boy's head resting on mother's thigh. He listens to the strum of blood, the grate of a lighter igniting, the inhale, the exhale, the ensuing calm. He loses count of the number of inbound 747s before mother replaces her thigh with singed upholstery, the itch seducing her back to the night, deserting the boy in a landing light nimbus, on a dead end street that will one day be Runway Three.

Copyright 2003 by Ron Gibson, Jr.

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