Intersection, Transit and Rose
First Prize Winter 2019, Reflex Fiction
Marco watched from an unlit window, two storeys up. The old building ticked and sighed around him. Squat housing, an abandoned warehouse backed against indigo strings of railway track. In her flat next door, the nearly-famous actor was sleeping. On Transit Street below, a shadow oozed towards her car’s passenger window, ghost. Marco stepped across the room, pulled the Sunpac – his largest flash – out of the camera bag.
Obscurity or fame. Everyone here craved one or the other. Parolees, artists, whores. The pretty rentboy on the top floor, a different name each week. The strip-dive, charcoal-sketching drunk who thought he was Toulouse Lautrec. He himself, Marco, flown from a factory job.
His neighbour would soon move on. She’d played the lead in an art film, shot in the desert. Marco, sitting in the dark cinema, felt himself lifted on her luminescence.
Thump. Down in the street, her car roof slapped. Marco thumbed the Sunpac to full power.
He’d seen this done in an old film once, Hitchcock. He pushed the flash out the window, aimed. Covered his eyes with his free hand.
Pop! Red leaves on his shielded eyelids, silent lightning carved crevice and grate, freeze-framed rat and bottle cap. He uncovered his eyes. The shadow was upright now, uncertain. Electronic whine, the flash recycling to power. Pop! Hissed profanity from the street below.
Marco watched the shadow seep away. Beyond their common wall, his neighbour slumbered, her shell of dreams unbroken.
Intersection, Transit and Rose was first published in March 2020 by Reflex Fiction and appears in the anthology A Girl’s Guide to Fly Fishing, Reflex Press, 2020.