Dear Readers,
I’m resuming my work on fiction after a hiatus in which I’ve been writing only some–not much–poetry, usually featured on my account for the poets’ collective, @PoetsonThursday.
In these two flashes, written within a few days of each other, I am examining two different styles of life through fictional accounts, as I have become familiar with them from fact and fiction.
The first is “‘Internal Difference[s] Where the Meanings Are,'” a title taken from a somewhat mournful poem by Emily Dickinson. It’s about a woman very different from myself, and set in a fantasy, but reality- and history-based landscape and culture and time (some many years ago, I’d think, but not absolutely, as many women in the world today still live in cultural chains). It was my attempt not only to imagine what her life might be like; I also derived some satisfaction and relief from writing about a feeling of deep repression of impulses and emotions that is occasioned in any of the many sorts of cultural captivities and binds that people, particularly women, and emotionally at least myself, find themselves in sometimes.
The second flash, “Aufstein Flimmerschwamm,” is a playful sendup of the spy culture that more and more we come to be accustomed to in our modern world.
I do hope you will enjoy these two stories, two flashes, and won’t find them too cumbersome to read, as they are very short.
Best wishes for now,
Shadowoperator (Victoria Leigh Bennett, 6/12/24)
creativeshadows 