Choosing

A woman is moving deliberately towards me.  She has the long of suns, the thin of oceans.  She has the beauty of the indeterminate. Her legs drive aside the grass, bring the air around her near to spinning.  Her arms are full, but what she carries seems to be of no weight. I cannot yet see her burden nor her intentions.  I imagine her to have the mind of a knife thrower’s assistant, the thoughts of a member of the caste that knows the trickery in her one thousandth too-small costume, winking at the evergreen safety of peril.  I imagine I am the audience; but no, she is moving deliberately, economically towards me.  Out of her full arms, with each stride, falls another ghost.  Ghost after ghost, evaporating on the unbent grass, untethered, unrecognized. The loss of each ghost a misplayed potential, tatters of interdimensional opportunity. I reach laboriously down for the first of my silver-dashed knives.

Ken Poyner‘s collections of brief fictions, Constant Animals, Avenging Cartography, Revenge of the House Hurlers, and Engaging Cattle, as well as his poetry, The Book of Robot and Victims of a Failed Civics, can be found at Amazon, online booksellers, and at www.barkingmoosepress.com. Poyner spent thirty-three years in information system management, is married to a world-record-holding female power-lifter, and has a family of several cats and betta fish.  Individual works have appeared in Café Irreal, Analog, Danse Macabre, The Cincinnati Review, and several hundred other places.  He has a fancy for the speculative, and a liking for the surreal and irreal.

A Song for Ken