Flash Fiction: The Ice Cream Social
Three more licks of the good cold stuff before it’s time for execution. Caramel tie for the occasion, it fits the unfortunate hypothetical incident that I might drop a nut and stain the silk. I had a name before I can here, I’m sure of that, but for now it’s Rocky Road. Agent Rocky Road, veins cold as ice, and the waffle cone in my grip is somewhere just as cold I’m sure. Strawberry has been eyeing me from the veranda for the last twenty minutes, caught somewhere between the highly sexy party tricks of half-melted Chocolate and “totally-not-staring-at-your-cleavage-and-have-you-read-my-screenplay-yet” Vanilla. She’s not feeling cosmopolitan tonight, she’s got a taste for the rocky road; unfortunately, Rocky Road had walked a rocky road up to this social and only has a taste for the sweet compensation for a job well done.
Mint Chocolate, my mark, the item I’ve been ordered to deliver, is obliviously chilling on the marble edge of a fountain that may either be the secret to youth or the keeper of the three quarters she dropped in. A minty fresh compliment to cocoa seduction, a national favorite, and a favorite mark in my organization’s bingo book. Sending agents to sample frozen dairy might seem like a sweet paid vacation, but I know it’s all the work of that bastard Haddock and his grudge against me for scooping up the red sweater puppy he spent months thinking about bumping into by total accident at a merge; if he was at this social, I’d make his codename Frozen Crap. Now Mint Chocolate is at an angle blockaded by the awkward socializing of Peanutbutter and Lemon, a stone’s toss away from a table populated by Watermelon, Almond-Vanilla and Lime.
A convenient party foul to knock over the table would provide ample cover to deliver a silent dose of a lead justice to her minty chocolate breastplate, but the sun still lingers above the the tree-licked horizon like a bastard red-headed stepchild determined not to fall asleep; behold the reason I detest summertime missions. It will be a long, grating, creamy and fat-dense night in Paris before Rocky Road can ride the open road home with his minty-fresh fugitive sealed in a tight container for the interrogation squad to dig into; Mint Chocolate comes from a silver spoon, but what she’s done is so dirty it would eat through the cobblestones on the street if it melted. I’m not in the habit of making marks personal, but the dirtier the deed, the fatter my wallet, and I need a new Ferrari to rub in Haddock’s face.
Sit and chill for now, Mint Chocolate; pretty soon you’ll be on a rocky road to justice, and I’m driving. Hope you don’t stain my leather seats.
Cattitude
Talk to the whiskers.
Do I look happy?
Splittin'.
No photos!
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Haha this is great.
Let’s Get Social
Let’s fall in love by mistake, and then let’s start an idiotic fight. Let’s write letters to each other that we never send, and let’s write letters to the people that we hate that we regret sending. Let’s make friends that last, and let’s forget the people that mean the most. Let’s spend days in the sunlight that we hope never end, and let’s surf the long waves of nights that we don’t remember ending. Let’s forget each other’s names, meet under the Brooklyn Bridge, and see if we remember one another enough to laugh at each other’s stupid expressions. Let’s get chicken and waffles and joke about how we’ll get fat, and then let’s grow fat together while insisting that the other one is fatter. Let’s party on rooftops of buildings that we don’t remember, and let’s walk down unfinished streets full of people that will never forget our acapella cover of Journey. Let’s lose ourselves in fake people and reunite in the solace of a real relationship. Let’s take on lovers that are more attractive than one another, and spend long night staying up, unable to sleep, because of how much that pales in the beauty of each other’s company. Let’s make mistakes that turn into the best decisions of our lives, and let’s not regret one argument, because it draws us closer into the euphoria of our consummation. Let’s never grow too close to one another that we forget the absolute beauty that resides in every single other stranger that passes us by in the street with another story, and then let’s laugh at how their stories will never fit into the novel that won’t be written about the times when we found passion in the stupidest things. Let’s nervously glance at each other from across the bar for about two to five more minutes, and then when this liquid courage finally seizes the control of our anxiety, let’s just be social.
Flash Fiction: Don’t Take it Too Hard
In time, you will grow to be a very powerful. You will develop into a force of nature. You will become of being so unbelievably influential, overpowering, and omnipotent, that the people above me have given me no other option than to keep that from happening. I pray that by the time that you have found this letter, you have embraced every single facet of life that you can and taken nothing but the fullest out of all what you’ve had to glory and luck to experience. Among all else, I pray the time we spent together gave you the majority of these things. When we shared a moment at the top of the clock tower, I look down upon all the archaic and ancient structures that populate the museums of the time that I come from. I thought of how amusing it was that the way the ant people were amazed and mystified by these structures people was so well preserved in my own time. I was taken aback at how that mystification with the work from the finest architects on the planet paled so pitifully to how mystified I was by nothing but your company. If I can be any more cliché, falling in love with you was not a part of the plan. Despite that, the very last time that I find myself exploring your body will be when the flash of silver takes a voyage across your jugular. I’m afraid that I am not actually a foreign surgeon as you believed, though, that’s not entirely a lie. You see I am a surgeon, but my profession leans more towards the act of undoing then constructing. Every single man has his price, and I’ve lived by that mantra for longer than I can actually remember. You, my woman, are not so simple. You do not have a price, because quantifying your beauty and worth, is more than any of my superiors could provide to me as compensation. However, I am man bound by the pledge. The pledges that I made to you will be broken. I only hope that while I freeze in the ninth ring of hell that I can still feel some warmth from the memories of the time that I convinced myself that I could remain in this moment with you; upon the rooftops, in the café, and above all else, caught it in the unmoving vacuum that consumes us when we are one. In another life, in another continuum, when you realize your fullest destiny and make even someone of my caliber look like the most insignificant insect, you will remember our love and you will remember the petal of one of your many lives that I nipped with a blade. I pray that you don’t take it too hard.
TerraLove
They say that a crystallized metronome tick tock’s at the top of a glacier that stands upon the coldest climax of the entire planet.
At the apex of the planet, she dances to a billion ultraviolet airwaves.
Her scars make the Taj Mahal look like a sand castle.
She flashes her smile at a supernova and turns it into a blacklight.
Tonight, I am Mr. Apollo, and I need to orbit around her decadent Milky Way.
There is Mother Earth, Mother Teresa, girl what do I call you? My mother would tell me not call her at all.
If we went to California, they would arrest me for getting high off her aura.
I want to break her down like Nikolai Tesla and get rich off the secret infinity energy; and what I find might kill me, but the lack of contact is killing me.
Planetary whirling dervish, with hurricane pirouettes
and tectonic tango steps.
The right hemisphere of her body eclipses the left half of my cerebral cortex. Her touch outlives a redwood tree, from Mesozoic history to the 22nd century.
Her jewelry is fossilized amber that no archaeologist could analyze to understand her.
I do not fear the Caribbean volcano passion. I will skydive through the ash because the toxicity is bliss to me.
Flash fiction: The War of Glass
Tobias was a man at war. Tobias did not have artillery, nor a battalion to rally behind him, nor a flag to raise as he roared into battle. At the matter of fact, Tobias didn’t roar at all. Tobias simply sat and thought silently.
Tobias, as a matter of fact, only had a single enemy in what could be described as the most momentous and earthshaking battle of all time. The enemy was one that was just as liquid and ever changing as water in an urn that could constantly change the shape and size. The enemy, to make matters even worse, had access to every single strategy, retaliation, and secret weapon that Tobias could possibly muster with all the time in the world. However, to compensate for the enemy’s profound ability to decipher and analyze every single move he could make before he even mentally conceived it, Tobias possessed an ability that was completely parallel to everything that this enemy could throw it him.
Tobias had the same measure of telepathy that the enemy used to analyze him, and they were locked in an infinite struggle of who could possibly predict the other one’s move at any moment’s notice. Like two ferocious dragons, each one as long as the expanse of the nighttime sky, they stared each other down as their bodies coiled around the entire girth of the planet. At any moment’s notice, one dragon could lurch forward and completely decimate the other with furious and infernal anger.
However, because their bodies were so tightly entwined, Tobias and his enemy, there was no telling whether or not destroying the other one could possibly spell the end of the victor. It was a symbiotic relationship, baptized in the flames of an immeasurably chaotic conflict. Tobias, to state things simply, was in a savage battle with his own conscience.
In their internal conflict, Tobias and his mirror image enemy would race against each other in a battle that took place over immeasurable varieties of landscapes and formats. At one moment they would be engulfed in the white sands of a tropical bay, thrashing about against the pull of rip tides and ferociously struggling to give the other a tomb in the white sands. In another instance, they would stand atop the heads of titanic stone lions brought to life with paranatural curses, their demonic maned steeds equipt with ivory skyscrapers for fangs and ebony mountains for claws.
The war between Tobias and his conscience, could, at one moment, eclipse the rings of Saturn, and in another moment, be so microscopic that the sound of an atomic explosion caused by their clash would only register as a fraction of a decibel. The phantom melee between Tobias and his conscience stretched across all possible manifestations of matter, time, and space, until at the crux of their conflict, the savage competition was finally quelled by Tobias learning that the only way to subjugate his enemy, was to embrace it.
Within the desolate nucleus carved from the center of their brutal and bloody war, a single dove flew from the void and whisked away into the high cosmos, signifying that Tobias could finally let his mind be at ease.
Today, the dove flies above all landscapes that are bathed in blood, loss, and hatred. When the conflict finally subsides, the dove will roost at the heart of the battle, crooning a song that radiates with the blessing of Tobias.
Relay for Life: A Night of Hope
The air was charged with the kind of energy that can’t be generated by machines. For all of Tesla’s terrifying brilliance, he would have been a loss to re-create the same kind of output as this night with all the resources in the world; this was more than what can be explained with neutrons and plasma, this was a storm of unbridled electric emotion.
Relay For Life is a gathering that consummates the loss and strength of countless people. With over a thousand different stories from all corners of the country, each one a testament to despair and perseverance, it creates a sort of gravity both weightless and heavier than the world. The tension could almost mingle with the twilight air and create a feeling of humidity as the night stretched on.
It was 2:45 a.m. I had been running in the same .13 mile square since about 9p.m. My legs would go from being as rigid as broomsticks at one moment before unwinding into a mass of taxed, flesh-bound springs rolling down an infinite stairwell.
In spite of the pain, the physical challenge had never been a factor. This was not a battle of might, nor endurance, nor even wills. No competitor before or behind me spurred my legs to fight freezing and run, and no insecurity of my own ability to run in circles motivated me to take next lap faster than the previous one; more than a contest or personal test, this was a struggle born out of tribute.
My physical struggle was minuscule in comparison to the grand waves of loss that consummated in the establishment of an event such as this one, made to honor those in the fight against something so much more powerful than human beings. My role was not to feel pain, only to hold the vigil for those who could no longer feel pain; for that reason, I was able to keep running through a blisteringly cold night feeling as insulated as a thermos.
At six in the morning, the all-night vigil had finally reached its end, and so had the limit of my ability to run at more than a grocery store go-kart pace. The event had raised $111,00, and I had logged in roughly 26 miles on that half-quarter mile square of grassy field. The battle against cancer may never be won in a single night, but with the continued existence of wonderful battles like these, we can assure the battle is not lost today.
Rules, rules, rules
Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.*
Sometimes I feel there are more writers teaching others how to write, passing down rules, than there are writers who actually write.
It's easier to teach than to do, and it feels like a nice shortcut towards fame, success, money, whatever.
I do my best not to teach anyone how to write. I want to believe I'm just writing about my own process.
Very, very true stuff in here
Relay For Life! The All-Night Run for Honor and Life
On the 27th, this Saturday at 7pm, my university Hofstra will be hosting Relay for Life, an all-night vigil/marathon for the honor of all those who have fallen to or survived cancer.
Running or walking for any amount of time is customary, but in tribute to my grandfather who was taken down by cancer but inspired my active lifestyle, I will run for the entire time from 7pm to 7am.
My team page is here for all who wish to donate to the cause and help the fight for life perservere!
http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR?fr_id=48220&pg=personal&px=32684403
2009: 
Current:
