by Robert Scotellaro
She told me, she wondered if roses smelled like old gym socks to gardenias, once. And that relativity was a flexible concept after all and dependent on who was perceiving what. She was a thinker when I wasn’t, during my caveman days when I’d just gotten back from Australia after boxing a kangaroo for bragging rights, and lost. It was my Dark Ages and she taught me how you can’t have shadows without light and how there was a famous artist who wore a candle hat so he could paint at night, said, “Can you imagine?” But I couldn’t, was too busy dancing barefooted on a hot tin roof, out of step. By the time my Age of Enlightenment arrived, she was gone, and I didn’t need the candle hat anymore to paint her portraits in the fragile hours, for there were light bulbs then, sun-bright, and that simple on and off switch, and I knew, finally, just how to work it.
Robert Scotellaro is the author of eight books of flash and microfiction. He is the co-editor of New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton). Visit him at Robertscotellaro.com.
