SELECTION OF FLASH FICTION FROM:

Groyon, Vicente Garcia (ed). Very Short Stories for Harried Readers. Manila, Milflores Publishing, Inc.,
2007.

FLASH FICTION SET A:

1. COFFEE BREAK
2. PROSODY LESSON
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COFFEE BREAK by Ana Maria S. Villanueva

Only a thin glass wall separated them, but the cold space between represented a great distance.
She was a hundred miles away as she pressed her lips on the rim of her cup. He could see himself on her
fair face. His wide-eyed reflection bounced on the glass surface, distorted and made ethereal by her
ghostly complexion on the other side of the glass wall.

He had been watching her ever since he first came to this café. The first time he saw her, she
was sitting where she sat now. She always picked the table outside the coffee shop by the door where
she could watch the pedestrians hurrying home after work. Sometimes she would stretch her thin neck
to catch the last rays of the sun. Light would fall softly on her cheek as she read a hardbound book. Thick
dark lashes contrasted starkly against a white face. On the rare instances when she would look up she
would stare into space, and he wondered, who is she thinking of? What is her name?

Today, he found a vacant table inside the coffee shop set right across where she sat outside.
Only a glass wall separated them. Looking through the glass, he sat and bathed in her presence as he did
day after day. He almost felt like he knew her.

He knew the gentle slope of her back or how a strand of hair would escape from behind an ear
and fall on the soft line of her jaw. He had traced the ridges on her collar bone over a dozen times his
eyes carefully traveling the length of the clavicle until it rested on the hollow below the throat. He
memorized the lines that creased her forehead when a dark thought crossed her mind.

He understood the shapes which her dreams took on the edge of his sleep. He knew her breath
and the invisible clouds they formed over her steaming cup. He felt how her palm fit the curve of the
warm mug. Many times, he tried to read the soundless words that were on the tip of her tongue, but
they melted with the heat of the coffee before they could escape her lips.

Her lips, he knew them well. He knew how it felt to touch them with his. Briefly he closed his
eyes and felt the soft moist flesh gently pressing against his lips, forcing them to open slightly and
surrender. “The first kiss will be this kiss by which all others in your life will be judged and found
wanting.” He remembered the line from that Stephen King book he read the other day as he imagined
what it would be like when their lips would meet for the first time.
 Did she even read King? he wondered as he opened his eyes and watched her turn a page from
her book. He couldn’t make out the title. He wanted to tell her about the obscure bookstore he
discovered the other day, certain she would delight in the dimly lit store stacked with old hardbound
books abandoned by their owners, books that had been read under the soft sunlight, books with coffee
rings on the cover jacket. He would tell her about it and offer to buy her coffee. Should he go up to her
now? Tap on the glass and smile? Surely he was a familiar face. She would remember him as the guy
who always ordered a hot mocha java while he sat deep in a couch, his nose buried between the pages
of a paperback (when he wasn’t watching her).

His musings were interrupted as she suddenly looked up and stared right at him. It was a brief
moment that spoke of the many intimate nights he spent with her in his dreams. The look that pierced
the glass represented the thousands of seconds they had shared, holding hands in his head.

Their eyes locked as he drowned in dark pools. In that brief moment he saw nothing. Except for
his reflection in the mirror of her eyes, he did not see himself. He was just another stranger, one of the
pedestrians who decided to make a quick stop for a caffeine jolt.

Soon as the lock was broken, he took one last sip of his coffee. It had gotten cold. The taste was
flat in his mouth.

He swallowed and then walked out of the door.

PROSODY LESSON by Paul S. De Guzman

Now what one wants to tell the other is, “There is someone else,” except that neither of them
knows that they have the same plan. They sit down to dinner. In their minds they still rehearse the
ways to say it. Trochee plus dactyl. Iam plus anapest. Trochee plus anapest. Spondee plus dactyl. They
lift their forks, wondering if meaning changes with rhythm, and how.

“Great food,” he says. “Yes,” she says, “great food.” They smile, go on eating and continue
imagining the sound of that one sentence said in various ways. Hours pass.

Somewhere someone waits. A woman in a bedroom, surfing the Net, constantly clicking on a
mouse, waiting for a phone call. A man in a car, outside the restaurant, his blinkers going on and off,
waiting for someone to come down and tell him something.

“It’s done,” is in fact, what the woman and the man want to hear repeatedly. She imagines
hearing it in trochees, echoing the sound of mouse clicks. He wants it to take the rhythm of the blinker’s
iambic ticking.

They wait for a few more hours, until she decides to log off and he drives away.