Flash fiction

Sometimes - not often enough - I have the insight to realise when a piece of my writing is throwaway. Here's one such example, a piece of so-called flash fiction, which format I'm indulging in because you can win big prizes with in national competitions, and three and six figure sums for less than 350 words seems like rather a good investment and not much effort wasted in the event of failure. Someone else will be winning these fabulous riches, of course. In this piece, I just don't care about the characters or the human situation (nothing new there), and that has to matter, even in 350 words. Squashing all the action in at the end when I start to run out of words is not really my shrewdest literary decision either.
Nonetheless, maybe it has a certain something in the idea...

                                       High Noon

Exactly the sort of thing billionaires should be seen in: private aircraft, skywriting Saturn-style rings around the equator as they soar at the precise speed the earth turns, so that wherever we are, it’s always mid-day. Yes, in this state-of-the art uber-contraption we’re magnetised to the high noon sun; we will never lag behind the planet and get caught up by its dark side. Not since I was held up in Indonesian airspace last year have I seen the night sky. All the right people have been paid off now, and I don’t expect to be bothered by the agents of darkness – sorry, that’s you – for as long as this baby holds together.

From the glass belvedere at the top of the craft, I watch a refuelling jet sidle up. Whatever was night like? I imagine it as an oil-slick. I imagine you waking up in the morning with gloopy black night all over your pyjamas. It sullies you, spoils your natural oils like ambition and ego. As for morning, it is either an intruder or a false prophet: I suffer no such tawdry characters up here. Likewise, the afternoon’s not to be trusted, stager of siestas, Sisyphean slope the sun rolls down. And evening is the brothel we all fall into. Up here there is only noon, the fulcrum, the balance. Dynamic equilibrium, as they say: the serenity of rushing around at beyond the speed of God-knows-what.

The plane is almost level. There’s that squeaking again.

I go get more champagne. Once, I caught a pilot in a bubble. But in the chill cabinet something else is reflected: a second plane, which can’t be right. Are we over Indonesia again?

Then I get the tweet. Ernest. Arbuthnot. Care for some company? He can’t have. Pop over, it’s twice as roomy here! He has. The sky darkens; the belvedere filling with shadow. His craft arrives.

Right. I have my own dark, thanks very much. And he’ll never have thought of it, the plodder. I press the button and, smooth as oil, down come the blinds.