flash fiction (very short pieces)

#1. red pins blue pins (2025)

One by one we file out, chattering our warm goodbyes, wishing eachother all the best for the break. Some of us are going home to dingoes, others to a pet lovebird, some to kendo sticks or families and books and holidays in the sun. As the last nostalgic out the door, it's my job to turn off the lights and lock the door. However, this time, I pause for a moment to take it in.

The walls here are a gallery and a shrine to our home away from home. Potted plants, pictures of loved ones; they are terrariums of object chemistry, a microscopic expression of our hopes, dreams, foibles. Lithograph prints and Egyptian masks line the wall closest to the window, from which you can gaze out and see all the cars languidly journey out the gates. It used to be obscured by an old pinboard owned by last year's resident, but all things come to an end, so we carried it off downstairs in honour of its service, where someone else in our little city came to give it new life in their home.

Every day we leave our other lives at home to share in one together. Here we participate in this little city, this little diorama of intersecting lives, thousands of teachers and students day-by-day. We share the small triumphs and the big ones, whether it is a coffee by a misty window or our days where all we can do is slump in our chair and try not to cry. It is all part of a constantly shifting tapestry, the precise intersection of many lives.

I am relieved, as always, to take a break and take my mind away from work. But I can't quite bring myself to declare lights out for the summer on the four walls of this room. I look at my own wall: red pins, blue pins, scavenged from who knows where holding up the faces and reminders of a life within a life that I will miss for now, but find comfort in remembering its constancy. I can still feel the past term linger in my periphery. It's like going to sleep after a party and swearing you can still hear it going in the other room.

After a moment, I offer the plants a little bit of water and flick the lights. Before we know it we will all return refreshed in a few weeks' time, ready to begin anew. Even our spaces need rest from us sometimes too.

#2. coffee shop baby (2025)

Look at you. You're a baby in a coffee shop. Your mum is juggling two other babies and you're just lying there in your stroller. The server walks past and comments my, what a cute baby, but she's not talking about you; she's talking about some other one.

But you're not the only three babies in the coffee shop. Now I'm starting to notice more of you. More, and more, and more. Stretching to infinity. God forbid, it makes you realise on your coffee break how many different ways a baby can be. Some of you are screaming and clamoring for mum to pay a bit of attention to you. I have a lot in common with the baby in the coffee shop. Look at us drinking our frothed milk like we're the king of the world, we've done it, we've conquered life.

The coffee shop baby is not cognizant yet of how important it is in mum's Instagram agenda, but it does know enough to look at mummy when she points the iphone and makes a coochy-coochy-coo. Contort your face. Fight the system. One anarchistic soul screams and a pounding sound shatters the ambience. One enterprising, lawless baby has thwacked a pepper shaker to the cold floor.

There are too many babies in the coffee shop. There is a coffee shop baby in my lap and it wriggles and drools all over my laptop. No, wait, thank god. There's not. Not any more.

But I feel for you, coffee shop baby. It's charming how engrossed you are with watching me clumsily eat this slice of ham out of my croissant.

You could have been my own coffee shop baby. But I left you, didn't I, years ago? So there's no point reminiscing now. Instead I'll just slip you a blueberry behind mum's back. You giggle and mash its black roundness against your little sticky face and we move on. You were always so cute when you did that.

There are too many babies in the coffee shop. They mutilate the walls with their wails of abandonment and messes and it's my fault. I should never have noticed them. You're never coming back.

But it all comes back to normal when the server asks if I'm okay and I realise I've been staring at an unremarkable, fearful baby for the last five minutes. I've just had a moment, and there was a fly in my croissant, I tell her. We are so sorry, she says, can we have a look and get you a new one? But the fly is gone. I swear it was there a moment ago.

It's fine, I say, waving my hand. I don't need a new one. I just need to really get my shit together.