One Flash Fiction Piece by Tim Goldstone

The Street Princess

by Tim Goldstone

They say when you hit rock bottom the only way is up. On concrete steps outside the railway station, shivering, coughing, her hoodie pulled closely around her, she drank straight from the bottle of ‘craft mead’ she’d pick-pocketed – it was all she could get from the little shop, days from bankruptcy, where paint flaking off the ceiling landed in abandoned spider webs. Last night in the park a torch had shone on her through the rain illuminating a hail of thin white arrows falling to earth. That morning to keep warm she’d danced to the sound of crows, her hood falling down revealing long tangled hair suited perfectly for flowing out behind her while walking dangerously high castle battlements; below her a winding river, a flock of birds, brave knights returning from battle, sick of violence – hands linked from their horses: enormous armoured black stallions, trampling the corn, while threading through poppies.

Tim Goldstone has travelled widely including roaming and working throughout the UK, Western and Eastern Europe, and North Africa. Currently living deep in rural Wales where he enjoys walking into marshland until he sinks, and seeking out old maps with ‘Here Be Dragons’ and ‘Unknown Land’ inscribed on them. His writing is in numerous journals and anthologies, including The New Welsh Review, The Bangor Literary Journal, Crannóg, Stand Magazine, The Offing, The Wild Word, The Daily Drunk, Madness Muse Press, Crow & Cross Keys, Flash Fiction Magazine, Lamplit Underground, Altered States, The Mechanics' Institute Review Anthology, and forthcoming in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, 11 Mag Berlin, Dodging The Rain, among others. Prose sequence read on stage at The Hay Festival. Material included in BBC, Waterstones, The Royal Court Theatre and Sherman Cymru Theatre websites. Loiters in Twitter @muddygold