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negative harvest
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The Neverlast
A bubble rises. Forty three. The next one forms. Forty seven. Then another, this time tiny. Fifty three. And another one. Fifty nine.
June turns to the other side, closes her eyes, and tells herself once more that she really aught to sleep. Now. Sleep. Now. Sleep. But the little machine in her head keeps calculating, like a program on the run. Sixty one. Sixty seven. Seventy one.
It is hopeless. And the line of prime numbers is eternal. One night, she had reached four hundred something. Her mother hadn’t believed her. “You are faking this,” she had said. Only that June wasn’t faking. She wasn’t forcing it, either. It just happened. Somewhere in her mind. Seventy three. Seventy nine. Eighty three.
At ninety seven, she opens her eyes again. At one hundred seven, she gets up and walks to the kitchen. She pours a glass of milk, adds a spoonful of honey, and puts the mix in the micro wave. Then she opens the window, to look for the moon, but the shape of it isn’t visible. Instead, she hears voices from below. A couple walks by on the street, the man in a black suit, the woman in a lime green dress, her voice as angry and pointed as her steps, yet June can’t understand them. All she can pick up is a half sentence, “I thought that was the last,” before a car appears and drowns the rest of the words.
“I thought that was the last,” June repeats, standing at the window, sipping the warm milk. Time, she guesses. Or maybe chance.
She empties the glass, leaves it on the table, and gets back into her bed. The lava lamp, it is still birthing bubbles in an orange glow. Perfect round useless globules, born to rise and fade. Weekend of July, the machine in her mind suggests, while another bubble forms. Matter to consider. A queer one, next. Sleepless Night.
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N-Notes
Negative Harvest was first published in the magazine negative suck, and is still online in the negative archive: negative sunset + harvest
The Neverlast was first published in Cautionary Tales, which sadly isn't online any more
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A to Z
this A-Z walk through the archives started here: A to Z Blogging Challenge upcoming. The official challenge ended in April, but the overall twitterstream of the challenge is still ongoing at #atozchallenge.
ABCEFGHJKLM.... the collected previous entries are online as life as a journey from A to Z.
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