Ella: Then

ella - then smElla likes things tiny. Tiny toy dishes, tiny dolls. She even wants her dad to be tiny. Like the Incredible Shrinking Man she saw on the Telly. He could live in her Lincoln Log Cabin.

Ella has a tiny pet. From her dad’s Ronson cigarette lighter, a flint. Red. Blowing the bead across the floor, she takes it for a walk. Till it falls in a canyon between floorboards. He won’t give her another.

Ella’s father does not shrink to a point of control. He smokes, stares, strokes, rolls her around. She goes tiny and red to disappear in cracks.

 

Tara L. Masih is editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and The Chalk Circle (both ForeWord Books of the Year), author of Where the Dog Star Never Glows: Stories, and Series Editor of the annual Best Small Fictions anthology. Her flash has been anthologized in Word of Mouth, Brevity & Echo, BITE, Flash Fiction Funny, and Stripped, was featured in Fiction Writer’s Review for National Short Story Month 2011, and was a finalist for the Reynolds Price Prize in Fiction. For more, see TaraMasih.com

Photo credit: Beret Olsen

One Response to “Ella: Then”

  1. gay degani says:

    Lovely,Tara! And sad!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *