Flash Fiction

The sun rose like an oil painting over the swathes of the industrial hinterland. The unsmoking chimneys, the ineffectual turbines in the stay of nature. Amongst shadows cast the poppies of litter drifted with the winds of desolation. Across the oceans of flowing slime and waterfalls of waste. Two figures approached the factory of red bricks and broken wills.

North of the factory across the wasted ground the whistle blew. They walked arm in arm through the mook and the mire. The fading wisps of a Sunday gentle mist lapped at their ankles. The red breasted robbing soldiers followed their every step. They ignored them. Their gaze shifted sideways watching the slow revolving Ferris wheel and the unchaperoned women drunkenly disembarking. In the time of rivers in spate they moved on passed tumbledown dams and landlocked shipping lanes. They drifted back to the grandness of delirium.

When sleeplessness awoke them and the view from the windows offered only blackened coals. The Irk Valley heroes stood, above the detritus and the rubble. The Irk Valley heroes had worked cold and hard to bring relief to the little comfort of struggle. They were reminded of the days that seemed all of buboes and sores. When they remembered they tripped through a stone black coated door. To where the trail of arguments left the sky scarred with filth.

And the factory was the knife, the old, the new, the cut through the heart. The red breasted robbing soldiers collected souls for the breaking and the unchaperoned women took their place in line. The Irk Valley heroes exited the coal black door to battle the soldiers in open defiance. To stand their ground against inertia and cast their spells like dust on behalf of the dispossessed.