Father’s Day Card
Flash Fiction
Another unsurprising eyesore, a wall littered with hundreds of decaying bodies, nailed to crosses. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but good god, these cards are ugly.
I can see some wrinkled biddy hovering in the corner of my eye, I know she wants to stand where I stand, to browse the tack in my little section. I’m not moving, she can wait.
I hate father’s day, how I’m forced to leave my pot of tea, to pause my film that took a good thirty minutes of browsing to find, to venture into town on this rainy Tuesday. To browse the corpses, hoping to find one that hasn’t had its eyes pecked out or skin peeled away. I hate that some pound sucking capitalist vulture is snapping its beak with delight at inventing such an inane event, just to suck all the peasants even drier.
Is that a man’s naked ass? Perhaps I should get him this one, really rub the salt into those sagging cheeks of his. Never to be plump or ripe again. I guess mine will sour one day.
‘Excuse me, excuse m- could I squeeze past to have a look at those cards? one or two have caught my eye.’
Well they would, wouldn’t they. Tasteless cow.
The biddy gives me a wink and a twitching grin as she shuffles past. Please send someone to shoot me if I end up looking like that.
Boats.
He loves boats or yachts, whatever the difference is. Never owned one, never will, just another deathbed regret to soothe him into the next life. Shame I won’t be there to see it.
What if there is a heaven. And when he dies, he’s up there waiting for me, peering down with his Roman nose. What if I somehow make it to heaven. Do we then spend eternity together? Fuck. I’ll have to bitch slap Jesus or something. That should do the trick and have my chestnuts roasting forever.
The door handle feels sticky as I wrap my hand around the brass looking knob. Some child and some slightly melted sweets are probably the cause. The clouds continue to spit their vile saliva, which seems to have increased in intensity the moment I step out the door.
I hurriedly scan the shop windows and see one with a smattering of bodies peering at me through the glass. Their eyes wide, pupils pleading. Desperate for me to remove the nails from the crusted flesh and lay one of them to rest inside a paper tomb.
Why do I bother?