Flash fiction by Becca Borawski Jenkins
High Noon
Her walk was the traveling dance of the bass man’s fingers. Her lips, dipped in Malbec, parted and closed in time, but I could never make out the song she sang. Her voice a record player from my past as she said something about the place in my brain where my memories lived, how my random access memory needed upgrading, that my temporal lobe was not at an acceptable processing speed. My brain tempo did not match hers. She was all that jazz and I was Prokofiev’s bumbling duck. Cere-bell-bell-bell-um.
She walked away from me, like one of those girls in the Western films with her dusty skirt swinging side to side while I watched her head down main street, the only street, at noon. And that skirt got shorter over the decades since we first met and now I can see the sweat stick to her calves as she leaves. And I pray that the cowboys will emerge from the windows, fire their guns to high heavens and back again, and send my senorita home to me.
Her walk was the traveling dance of the bass man’s fingers. Her lips, dipped in Malbec, parted and closed in time, but I could never make out the song she sang. Her voice a record player from my past as she said something about the place in my brain where my memories lived, how my random access memory needed upgrading, that my temporal lobe was not at an acceptable processing speed. My brain tempo did not match hers. She was all that jazz and I was Prokofiev’s bumbling duck. Cere-bell-bell-bell-um.
She walked away from me, like one of those girls in the Western films with her dusty skirt swinging side to side while I watched her head down main street, the only street, at noon. And that skirt got shorter over the decades since we first met and now I can see the sweat stick to her calves as she leaves. And I pray that the cowboys will emerge from the windows, fire their guns to high heavens and back again, and send my senorita home to me.
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Becca Borawski Jenkins holds an MFA in Cinema-Television Production from USC and has short stories appearing or forthcoming in Menacing Hedge, concis, The Forge, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Syntax & Salt, Ghost Parachute, and Jellyfish Review. She recently received three Pushcart Prize nominations and is also an Associate Flash Fiction Editor at jmww. She and her husband spent the last year living off grid in a remote part of North Idaho, and now roam North America in their RV.
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