Barbara Black

 
Coming in Winter 2024

Overview

Consider this book a mysterious package. Open it, take out your magnifying glass and, in a flash, small worlds will seed your imagination. Curious tales that will haunt you and reverberate far beyond their minimalist size. Who needs the ordinary? Here is wit and wonder and weirdness. Stories inspired by art, music and alcoholic spirits, and the “authentic fabrications” of the author’s own ancestry. You’ll meet a lonely one-eyed monster who wanders the desert; a Medieval saint who delights in her “miraculous ruine”; a spinster in love with a tobacco-smoking ghost…and much more. With wit and acuity, Black expertly orchestrates a fertile microcosm of other-worldly voices: tender, quirky, poetic, elegiac tales told with delicate precision and an eye to both the absurd and tragic in life. A flash fiction collection of daring invention.

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"Where a Dark Heart Burns"

I move forward facing backward. Water drips from the oar tip. There are those of us for whom islands are exile. For others they’re an oasis from humanity, where one can occupy one’s self in seclusion. “Sometimes you have to go dead to be alive again.” As she put it, sequestering on this little island in an old shack built by an artist.

In the distance, a woodpecker rams a tree with its beak. Fish ribbon past under the lake’s surface. They have names like walleye and smallmouth, which seem to imply something about why she wants to be here. To look slant, to speak little.

She’s dressed in white sack cloth. Shapeless. We step around the poison oak. An outdoor table is set for three.

“Company coming, love?” She slits her eyes at me.

“This is Effy.”

A sedge-woven thing. Sitting there on a cedar stump chair. Moss hair, its eyes ghostly snowberries. Twig hands splayed as if stuck in supplication. Straw child. Our lost one. Not the first we lost. “Our daughter,” she says, crazy hair exploding from her head. I never knew my wife could carve. Or weave. No words form in my mouth. Teacups filled, we eat white cake in silence.

“Are you coming home at some point?”

“You mean going home?”

“Well, either.”

“We’re burning Effy first.”

Her soul seems to catch fire, too. Like old man’s beard near a lit match. And when at the ashes stage, she cries, I cry, too. From the northern reaches of the lake a loon pulls down the moon with its three-pitch lament.

I can no longer look to her to see myself. And yet I love her more now than before.
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‘Where A Dark Heart Burns’ was originally published at Vancouver Flash Fiction, November, 2020, as the First Place Winner of the Ekphrastic #FlashPrompt Challenge — “Little Island” by A.J. Casson