Double-Click Flash Fic by Maya Sokolovski Page A

would even admire the orchids, all nonchalant as if she were a connoisseur and knew the first thing about plants. Like she always did when she visited. Then, she would casually walk over to the seed display and marvel at the selection. Cucumber seeds! Pumpkin seeds! Zucchini seeds! Wildflower seeds! Why, even artichoke seeds! And best of all, most curious of all, hemlock seeds.
What, do people really not know?
She had wondered, but not bought, the last time she visited.
    Now, sitting at her desk in the apartment, she visualized her next move, visualized like all the self-help books had taught her. She would pluck a packet of hemlock seeds and a packet of tomato seeds from the display, then set them at the counter in front of the cashier and look him in the eyes. This was to make it seem like she would live to raise tomatoes, and eat them in bruschetta form, laughing in the sun on her balcony as if she were in Florence or something, hemlock flowers waving in the breeze. But what she would really do was grow the hemlock, tomato seeds forgotten in a drawer, until she had bushels of it. Then she would pick the white flowers ever so delicately, until her lap overflowed with them, then recline in the sun on her balcony and eat them one by one. Spasms and convulsions would overtake her petite frame, she would sigh, then lie back on the chaise longue and die. Like a lady.
    But she knew she had no patience and no green thumb to speak of. This is where reality set in. She grumbled to herself as she made a new mental picture. It was of her, crushing the hemlock seeds in a bowl with the handle of a knife. Then she would mix the ground seeds in a glass of soy milk, chug it, and die with a milk moustache on her face, on the kitchen floor. Best. Death. Ever. She would even take a selfie in lieu of a suicide note. It was a foolproof plan.
    The pictures in her mind blew up movie screen-sized through her consciousness. She needed to clear her head a bit or she would lose her nerve. It wouldn’t do to cling so tightly to her dreams. So she got up from her desk and stepped onto the balcony. Her arms resting on the cold rail, she looked out and over the city. No sunset here, just the dying shades of sky behind the urban sprawl. And then she saw it: the whole of the city rose up in front of her, lights shimmering, cars speeding, weeds growing, humanity exhaling on street corners. Sounds of movement, thunder in the distance, the rumbling of a plane flying overhead. The beauty of it took her breath away.
    The city he loved her – and she loved him back.

The Kidnap of Persephone
    T he pallor of the countryside under a rosy dawn: fields of wildflowers hurry past, the glass of the carriage window a stage for pastoral scenes.
Maman
, sitting opposite me, sleeps, her head lolled back, her eyelashes flecked with moisture, nose whistling. I look out the window and wonder if Luc and his family have reached the cottages before us.
    All the night I have shifted in my seat and clutched my skirts close about me, feeling every little stone the wheels roll over and every prick of the chill country air. Just as my eyes close to welcome the descent to sleep, a dagger of light illuminates the carriage interior and announces the sunrise. The carriage comes to an abrupt stop and my mother is jerked awake. Recovering her hat from where it has fallen at her feet, she opens the carriage door a crack and speaks to our coachman.
    “Bertrand, why have we stopped?”
    “We have arrived at your summer lodge, Madame.”
    Here we are at last, again, our refuge from the fumes of Paris: a country lodge big enough for a family and a minor retinue of servants, but which of recent years was occupied by my mother and me alone, with the occasional tenant during the colder months.
Maman
reaches beneath my seat and pulls out our trunk; some years past, a footman would have carried it out for us, but my late father’s secret debts and sudden death robbed us of much of our wealth.