A perfectly joyous and askew collection of flash fictions for the autumn weather today. The writer Hilary Smith was once known as THE INTERN, and while her blog was marked by sharp insights and warm humour (+many other lovely adjectives, of course, but these two for now), I think it’s her fiction that charms me most of all. This is not the weird in the abstract, the alien, but tactile, lived. The intensity loaded in physical sensation, the sights, the smells of memory and woodland, coupled with the dislocation at the heart of the girl’s journey.

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A Walk In the Woods

1.

The forest of her childhood was a whirring, humming thing dense with asters and goldenrod and a thousand unnamed plants that twisted and curled and bled sticky juices on one another. As she walked she kept stumbling across the tiny bodies of her friends, shrunk to the size of apples and rolling on the ground. Now and then she would kick one by accident and it would cough up a scent: birdseed and rain, slush and rust, blood and baby powder. Each wave of scent transported her, invoking each friend like a genie in a bottle. Now Ainsley overwhelmed her, who killed a canary by sitting on it, now Frieda, who ate snow.

“I’m back,” she called down at them, “I’m back.”

But they turned their apple faces away and she walked on in a flush of shame.

2.

Her best friend, the exuberant and troubled Pamela, had married a wasp and moved with him into a paper nest. When she tried to visit, Pamela hovered in the door: “You can’t come in, bzz bzz bzzz, you can’t come it.”

The nest was gray and brittle and hung from a twig on a dead branch of an old pear tree under which a plow lay rusting. When Pamela had gone back in, she sat in the grass and listened for a while.

For a long time there was nothing, and then the wind began to blow and from inside the nest she heard the wasp-husband commence the evening prayer.

3.

She came to a sand dune where before the woods were dense and mossy.

“Where have all the trees gone?” she said.
“Removed for cleaning,” tittered the birds.

She waited by the sand dune until presently a team of repairmen came and screwed the trees back in. They were cleaner than before, it was true, and less full of ants.

“What happens to the sand?” she asked.
“Oh, that stays.”

4.

Her feet were growing hot and swollen in the boots she’d borrowed from her mother. Presently they began to pulse like hearts. She started in the direction of home, and it seemed the forest was trying to come with her, coating her socks in spiky burrs and insinuating itself into her pockets. The apples were bursting open like puffballs, releasing their spores into the air. Ainsley Frieda Melanie Imo. She began to kick them intentionally, coughing on the vapours they produced, stumbling through the dense green clouds that came spouting through their crumpling skin. In the distance, she could hear the high, vengeful droning of wasps.

5.

Finally she came to the road that led to her old neighborhood. At the house, her parents, two beetles, scuttled out of the cracks in the kitchen floor to circle around and around her.

“How was it?” they said. “How was it?”

She sat down. She was very tired. She watched the beetles circling, and listened to the rustling of leaves outside the kitchen window. In her fist was a sumac horn, a sprig of goldenrod, a spray of asters.

The canary had croaked like a frog, she remembered, and then she began to laugh.

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a href=“http://www.hilarytsmith.com”>Hilary Smith is the author of the novel Wild Awake, out now from HarperCollins.