Tag: Imagery

Buoyancy by Chloe N. Clark

By Chloe N. Clark | Flash Fiction, Fiction | September 17, 2021

I carry her in my fingertips when I’m far from home. Feeling the heat of her skin if I press thumb and index finger together hard enough. I can trick myself into her softness if I brush my thumb…

Father/Figure by Andrea Avery

By Andrea Avery | Longform CNF, CNF | August 25, 2021

1. Ambigram In isolation, I mark time by the movement of sunlight across my walls and floors. I awake each morning to the desert sun blazing through the east-facing back door. The sun conspires with the automatic pool cleaner…

Dash by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

By Sarah Fawn Montgomery | Flash CNF, CNF | August 11, 2021

At dusk the light goes diffuse, like slow motion, like simple. The backyard trees are velvet; cirrus swift brushstrokes make the sky seem safe. The railroad rattling through the front yard slows too, whistle filtered through the gloaming until…

Cities and Desire by Hart L’Ecuyer

By Hart L’Ecuyer | Flash CNF, CNF | May 26, 2021

Inspired by Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino—a story of my life Perhaps the farmland becomes industrial yards with barbed wire fences, and then the barbed wire fences become concrete retaining walls covered in graffiti, and you are there.…

Pasaporte F076717 by Bessie Flores Zaldívar

By Bessie Flores Zaldívar | Longform CNF, CNF | May 12, 2021

BOARDING The thing about los Hondureños, es que como dice mi abuela, hablan hasta por los codos. They talk even out of their elbows. I will never get through a Tegus-bound plane ride without holding an…

In the Winter by Puloma Ghosh

By Puloma Ghosh | Flash Fiction, Fiction, FFC | April 16, 2021

I become quite pretty in the winter, in the dim afternoons with sheet metal skies. I line my lips with brown, burgundy, wine and whiskey stains. I crave bright fruits as though they’ll substitute the daylight—sunset persimmons, sunrise grapefruit,…

We’re All Just Trying to Keep Our Shit Together at the DMV by L Mari Harris

By L Mari Harris | Flash Fiction, Fiction, FFC | April 8, 2021

The woman sitting in front of me loudly whispers in her crying baby’s ear, “Sobby Robby, stop it. Shut up, Sobby Robby.” There’s a glob of hard dirt stuck below her right ear. Or maybe it’s a birthmark. Her…

House, in Order by J. Anne DeStaic

By J. Anne DeStaic | Flash Fiction, Fiction | October 9, 2020

“Good bones”, the agent says. “These old houses. See?” We see how the jacaranda haloes purple all around, how tulips cry like tears from out the soil but upside down. We see how the river at the garden’s edge…

Body Language by Tian Yi

By Tian Yi | Fiction, Short Stories | October 2, 2020

My mother has become a shadow. I wake to find her leaning over me, a dark blur, the edges of her just visible in the thin morning light that filters into the tent. It feels early, but I can…

Into that dark permanence of ancient forms by Aileen Hunt

By Aileen Hunt | Flash CNF, CNF | September 9, 2020

I. It’s getting late when we turn into the car park—newly constructed to accommodate the endless tour buses that otherwise clog the country roads. But the late hour has worked to our advantage. The car park is empty; the…

Author’s Note

The right prompt at the right time

My mother died two years ago. I hadn’t written about her death—too soon, I thought—but a prompt from an online writing class spurred this meditation on her loss.

The prompt was fog. When I read it, I immediately remembered my visit to the Poulnabrone Dolmen some years ago and the thick fog that had descended on me there. And I remembered John Montague’s poem, well known to students all over Ireland, “Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.” In his poem, Montague confers myth-like status on the old people who populated his childhood. I thought I might write something similar about the old people in my own life, but it quickly became apparent I wanted only to write about one person, my mother.

I started to jot down memories of her illness and death. The details were foggy—I hadn’t realized until I tried to articulate them. Her confusion was a type of fog, my own grief another. Links began to emerge, but I needed to place my personal experience in a wider context. I began to research the history of dolmens, looking for echoes of my own experience in that of my ancestors.

Some of the connections were obvious. Placing a photograph in my mother’s coffin was part of a long tradition of grave goods, although I hadn’t realized it at the time. Other connections surprised me. Organizing home care was not simply a matter of endless paperwork. It was also as difficult as lifting a heavy capstone into place, with all the attendant risks of collapse.

I knew straight away the essay would be braided. Grief is a type of fragmentation, recovery a type of assimilation. I wanted the essay’s structure to mirror this process: two independent narratives that gradually coalesce, one mythical and universal, the other ordinary and personal.

The various meanings of fog are a unifying element, a direct result of the prompt that generated the essay. A second set of images also creates cohesion. These images relate to walking, or more particularly, to the difficulty of maintaining balance: old people hobbling, twisted ankles, arthritic bones, mobility ramps. The essay ends with my husband and me tiptoeing through the fog, negotiating uneven ground. Grief is imminent. We must learn to walk in the shadow of Montague’s “dark permanence of ancient forms.”

The essay came together relatively quickly, the happy result of the interplay between memory, prompt, and a much-loved poem. I don’t always respond well to prompts—they often exasperate me—but in this case, the right prompt enabled me to bypass my conscious resistance to writing about my mother. I was ready. The word fog helped me see.

AILEEN HUNT is an Irish writer with a particular interest in flash forms and lyric essays. Her work has been published in various online and print journals, including Cleaver Magazine, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Hippocampus, Slag Glass City, and Flashback Fiction. Her essay “The Shell of your Ear” appears in the anthology Oh, Baby! from In Fact Books (2015). She lives in Dublin.