The Rise, by Donna Shanley

Breton Eve, by Paul Gauguin (France) 1889

The Rise
 
The dissolving scales lay on his body like hammered pearls. His tongue, once so lithe, was strange and heavy in his mouth. Mythless. Unworded. Lights flashed--red, amber, green--beyond the slab-littered rise. Invisible monsters rushed and roared there. He followed her as she strode toward them, weaving through the R.I.P.’s and BELOVED OF…’s.  “Beloved.” The word drifted in his memory like smoke; hardened into “Begone.” He shuffled on unfamiliar feet, the cool slither of grass against skin a remembered deliciousness. She didn’t look back; she had never once looked back. Her unbound hair, tangling with the wind, was the same bold brown as the seeds clenched in her fist.  

Donna Shanley

Donna Shanley studied literature and languages at Simon Fraser University, and then (of course!) wild orangutans in Borneo. She lives and writes in Vancouver, B.C., where she can see mountains and sometimes, a half-inch of ocean. Her flash fiction has appeared in Vestal Review, Ellipsis Zine, and Flash Frontier.