Nothing Special
Flash Fiction Story
by Thad DeVassie
Girl meets boy on a moonlit beach. They talk the requisite small talk: what do you do and where are you from as they stroll alongside the metronome of a rolling and receding surf. The boy sings of life in the homogenized scales of super stores, food marts, and 24-hour delivery. The girl speaks a foreign tongue of emporiums, haberdasheries, and the local cobbler. The boy is enamoured. The girl, while feeling the moon’s hypnotic spell, tries to cut things short by proclaiming this will never work, not with a boy raised on everything. The boy is crestfallen, but also hellbent on convincing her otherwise. The girl pulls a small vial from her kerchief. She tells the boy it is from her father’s emporium where he doubles as the town druggist and soda jerk. He awaits an explanation that never comes. He grabs the vial and swallows its contents as if it were an act of heroism, or sacrifice. He plops to the sandy beach in the form of an oyster, a tiny mollusc no bigger than the size of her palm. She picks him up and tells him that after he labours to produce a pearl, something so small and precious and wholly unique, she will be here, right here for him, just before chucking the shell of himself into the ocean.
Thad DeVassie is a writer and artist/painter from Ohio. He is the author of three chapbooks and was awarded the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2020. His work has appeared in Gone Lawn, Salt Hill, Phoebe, Hayden's Ferry, Vast Chasm, HAD, Hex, BULL, The Citron Review and a slew of others you may or may not know. Find more of his written and painted work at www.thaddevassie.com
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