The Night Age Got a Jump Start on Flora
by Shira Musicant
It was at dinner with work colleagues, around seven o’clock, when Flora noticed she had not kept up with the banter, nor had she tracked the various tangents that invariably poked around the dinner table, nor had she seen Odysseus which seemed to be all the rage—though she was entertained by the notion of Cyclops with human remains in his teeth, bone fragments and such—nor was she drinking because alcohol contributed to her acid reflux, and besides she was exhausted from the crying baby in the next-door apartment—nerves frayed, actually— and this morning had woken up to ants invading, coming out of her walls where they’d apparently been building nests and procreating and now were looking for new places to colonize, rather like what various countries did in the name of God with whom she was steadfastly skeptical, though she did concede that there might be a malevolent omnipresent being pulling strings somewhere, one such string being the advice to go forth and multiply, advice which some took literally like her previous husband’s cancer cells, for example, when she heard Cora in HR whisper dead husbands to Laurel in Development, like Cora had been thought-reading, though that might have been Flora’s imagination, though she was the only one with two dead husbands under her belt, the only one who hadn’t seen the latest movies, and the only one with the next, perhaps last, decade of life sneaking up to cozy her when Helen from Accounting reached across the table and touched her arm interrupting her thoughts, asking Flora if she liked the baked potato which she hadn’t taken much notice of, though she’d been forking bites into her mouth, and now realized it needed salt and more butter and was almost gone, so she said something to Helen—did not remember what—and excused herself to the Ladies Room where looking in the mirror, she wondered why her face was more etched than usual and tried smiling to lift the wrinkles and saw a bit of potato skin stuck between her front tooth and incisor, hanging there like a miniature flag, and just then Age walked into the restroom looking like one of the three ancient sea spirits who shared between them one eye and one tooth and, trickster-like, sidled up to the mirror and stared back at Flora triumphantly, coming from behind and winning the race.
Shira Musicant lives in the foothills of California with her husband, children, granddaughter, eight chickens, the ghosts of two cats, and coyotes. She writes short fiction and creative nonfiction and has received four Pushcart nominations. Her words are scattered through various literary journals and anthologies, most recently Santa Barbara Literary Journal, BULL, Claudine, Flash the Court and Flash Frontier.
