This week I’ve given romance a shot. I wanted to capture the feeling of a relationship more than any particular action or event, and it ended up being the shortest flash fiction yet: barely over 150 words.
THE DEEPEST SLEEP
When she smiled at him, the entire world disappeared, cast away to some distant, silent place. And when she kissed him it all came rushing back again, starting at her lips and the base of his spine and meeting somewhere between his shoulder blades with a warm pulse. She smiled and kissed him often, giving reality a sort of heartbeat—alternately ethereal and so overly real that it was he who felt ethereal.
Her smell defied description. It was like oranges and pine and the first breath of air after a long underwater swim. He never grew accustomed to it.
They would picnic, and afterward they would lie in the grass under a sprawling tree, dappled in sunlight. Eyes closed, he would drift in and out of wakefulness with her breath against his neck. Warm like the sun, gentle like the breeze.
He never slept as deeply as when he was with her. He was dreaming awake now, and it left his slumber undisturbed.
