New Flash Nonfiction

Here is one of my new flash nonfiction pieces. It is, I believe, still a draft. I am doing a good deal of this kind of writing, and am working through its relationship to autoethnography, and prose poetry. Over the years, I have done very similar writing; small twists and turns have shifted the genre in which the piece is situated. Hmm..I think I have an article idea here. Now, time for a magic paragraph and to look for a journal.

Ok, here it is.

Six Secrets of Disasters

Secret number 1

I am terrified of airplane take offs. It is when I become most religious.

Secret number 2

During that one minute of terror, when I imagine dropping out of the sky, and can almost feel the shrieks of my fellow passengers as we clutch each other’s arms, bracing for finality, as metal careens through faces, winds prying the skin off our jaws,  I think of my dogs. Usually, one on any given takeoff. For many years, it was Slick, miserable bastard soul mate that he was.

Secret number 3

I fear the implications of secret number 2 are why she divorced me. If I thought of my wife during such moments, well.

Secret number 4

Years ago, before she became disabled, I would listen to the audios of crashes. I listened, maybe fifty times, to a cockpit recording of the Japanese airplane that crashed into Mt. Fuli. The pilots lost control of vertical stabilizers, which means they no longer were able to control the plane, and had no chance of recovery.  They knew this, I am sure, which made their efforts all the more tragic. The recording in Japanese, so I could only understand what transcended language-the accelerating panic and dread in their voices. Moments before the garbled sound of impact, an English-language warning system implored the hopeless pilots- “pull up...pull up..pull up..”

Secret number 5

If I received a similar warning, it must have been in a language I do not understand.

*

Secret number 6

Now that I live alone, I fill four water bowls to their brim every morning,  and each time I leave the house. If I were to die on the street or am killed, the dogs would be able to survive for perhaps a week. Somebody is bound to come looking by that point.