[500 words]
CIVIC INTEREST
Our pond monster is the best. He waits under unruffled water, eyes only visible if you grow too close: a flash of tentacle, prey invited into his water. We placed signs, minted a low fence that has random breaches. Some do not believe, or are goaded into exploring. It is a rite of passage, a way for school boys to impress school girls, a tale to merit rounding Third Base and getting clumsily to Home. Every year a handful of citizens go missing and the pond monster is credited. The paper puts out a special edition. It becomes compulsory reading.
COMING OF AGE
The new symbol of budding masculinity is the amount of clown shadow a boy can gather. Boys in the age of serious stiffness comb spots suspected of harboring clowns, trying to collect what shadows might linger from the last sunny day. Some spin tales of having stalked nests of clowns, raced in after a sunburst scatters them, gathering armfuls of shadow. Others laugh and say they carry sacks, and can fill them. Target girls smile and wax pink. Thole sells clown shadow anonymously in a nook behind his store. The boys cannot pay much, but offer all that they have.
BEING OF USE
The flowers left. It hurt to see them go, but we had no say in the leaving. From gardens and porches, third floor window boxes, pitch piles along poorly maintained streets. Wild and cultivated. The flower shop in town looked cavernous with its wares gone. We pondered for days where they might have gone, how to draw then back. Then, the next Friday night, a boy turning up at his date’s house carried bundled sticks festooned with green leaves from a variety of plants. If it works for him, and they end up parked on cemetery row, we will adapt.
THE REVEAL
Natalie tells us she came upon a troupe of clowns running together at lakeside. They were without make-up or their signature clothes or props. Stripped to the waist, in shorts and sensible shoes, they seemed to be lost in exercise, every clown anonymously keeping pace. She was less frightened than shocked. She muted herself in bushes as they were disciplining around the lake, like any clutch of citizens gathered to exercise en masse. Strangely, she holds that they were indistinguishable from our own townsfolk. Such an idea terrified her: clowns unprepared are like us? Clowns exercising? Certainly, she imagined it.
WHAT IS IN IT FOR EVERYONE
Evolina expected to be executed in the morning. All caution released, she danced naked on the pool table in the church’s basement recreation room, then accomplished sex with all six men who had gathered there to escape their families. She ordered ice cream at The Creamery, refused to pay, sat in the parking lot watching it melt. She was seen skating on the pond wearing nothing but a feather boa. Citizens began to track Evolina sightings, looking for a pattern. The next day, Evolina slept well past noon and was not executed. Townsfolk adjusted, argued the sequence of her visitations.
Ken Poyner’s nine collections of brief fictions and poetry, can be located at Amazon and most online booksellers. He spent 33 years in information systems management, is married to a world record holding female power lifter, and has a family of several cats and betta fish. Individual works have appeared in “Café Irreal”, “Analog”, “Danse Macabre”, “The Cincinnati Review”, and several hundred other places.
