Competition Twenty-Three Winning Flash Fiction: A Poet Rejuvenates The Parts Other Treatments Cannot Reach by Caroline Greene
Do you still believe in Keats? she asks me, a sardonic smile playing about her mouth. I put down the Collected Works. They’re brindled with notes in my long-ago teenage scrawl. She can’t believe that Time has taught me nothing, has left me blind to love’s limits and the who-does-the-dishes antidote to a pounding, pacing heart.
But the poet has pulled me back to the shoreline of Twenty, to that edge of undiscovered lands. The dash of his Letters overruns me – the ‘O!’ and ‘Ah!’, the ‘Lo!’, ‘Alas!’, the racing, reaching phrases. I hear the clatter of London and see the rain on the Heath. I listen for birdsong and thirst for grapes. I feel candlelit pages, wax-spotted, curl between my fingers and sense aching limbs from a day’s walking – miles and miles – to search for fellow poets hidden in the hills. And I long to fall, with him, into the lap of a soulmate, the – ‘I cannot breathe without you’ – girl-next-door, the patient, laughing friend, who sees you, really, for who you are.
He knows, he senses, those hovering wings of death, but it’s Youth that bounds from his pen, and the Spanish Steps are still a long way off. And so, my own years fall away like moulting feathers and, ‘Yes,’ I answer, ‘Yes!’ I say, ‘Yes!!’ I shout, splintering the air into dancing exclamation and twirling his Poems in a flight about my head.
Caroline Greene is based in London and has been an editor, features writer, theatre fund-raiser and English language teacher. Her flash fiction has been published online and in several anthologies. Her novella-in-flash, Lessons at the Water’s Edge, won the 2022 Bath Novella-in-Flash Award and is published by AdHoc Fiction.
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Beautiful flash. Makes me want to go read some Keats!