Grandpop Lives Alone
Then, the ballet begins. Flash fiction by Tim Lynch
On Thirty West Day 8/10/24, this story was read aloud in front of a live audience. The editors and audience voted it as the PitchFest Winner.
A maple’s branches bangle in soft, Spring gusts, late sunlight sifted through its budding arms. The sound is like a distant, breaking wave, that fathomless breath. Dormant for a season, this tree lives on, here, on the block of the city, as in every city, where district lines become apparent, where potholes lead to Hell, and infected guts of rowhomes spread their sepsis down the line, nothing to do but set plywood on porch windows like pennies on a body’s eyes.
In the liquor store window, a cardboard Easter egg goes on getting pale.
His body stands on the strip mall sidewalk between the parking lot and the road. Sunlight through the latticed branches dapples his cheeks, and the shadow of the maple’s bole blankets him below the neck. Nothing-eyed, his lids hover asymmetrically open, the wider hardly open at all. Cars shush loudly, sharply by. Then, the ballet begins.
First, the bending at the waist, slowly. Slower. Slower even than that. A robin in the maple sings entire operas in staccato chirps of two, its cacophonous flock chirping back, while the torso, impossibly counterweighted by each foot, creaks toward the ground, arms slack, legs stiff in crooked balance, until the fingertips hang finally still and kiss the sidewalk grit.
And then, an old story. A white man in his forties leaves the liquor store and lets the door fall shut, even after noticing an older black man reaching for the handle. He isn’t quick enough and can only keep pace, fingers trailing just behind. Who tells the story is what matters now.
Slowly, the body on the sidewalk unfurls upright. A woman clops straight-on, talking down to her phone, saying, “—which is fine but—,” then stutters, glancing up, and steps around, continues, “—but she’ll be weird about it, she’ll be, she’ll be like…,” fading down the block.
His body wavers in place, a ghastly shape glimmering in the unfit shade of a gold-lit tree.
Tim Lynch is a Delawarean whose poetry and fiction appear in StoryQuarterly, Cotton Xenomorph, Cul-de-sac of Blood, Vinyl, and other fine publications. Interviews appeared in The Adroit Journal and Tell Tell Poetry, and his first screenplay was a ScreenCraft Horror semi-finalist.
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