Two Micro Fictions
2025-Nov-04 • Luanne Castle
Archibald Adjusts His Dreams Again
As Archibald rubbed his sore and scrawny calves, wishing they had more definition, the locker room mirror caught his attention. A scraggly piebald pig stared back at him. He looked behind and then to both sides, but nobody else was in the room. He glanced down at his bristly chest. No wonder he wasn’t sweaty. In the examination room, his doctor pulled a measuring tape out of his pocket, then scratched notes of his patient's dimensions, saying “shhhh"" and "just one more moment." He counseled Archibald to look the other way and whacked off his left shoulder with a gigli saw he kept as a joke, then sent him home with the bill. Archibald’s wife pushed him against the oven door and examined his nakedness with a magnifying glass, looking for the inflation valve. “You’re so prickery.” She shrugged, sniffing. “Too bad you’re now lopsided.” Archibald knew what was coming when she plucked the cleaver from the knife block. He did feel more balanced afterward, but sore and confused. He had woken up as a man, albeit a small balding man approaching middle-age. While Archibald stewed on his problems—with the occasional whimper---the sewing machine whirred and growled and clattered all night. The feathery breastplate with silken tablecloth (“robe!” his wife corrected) fit him like shrink wrap. Looking down at the wonder of himself, he considered that he might have a future in Vegas, so he twirled on his little hooves over to the closet mirror. The robe well diagramed Archibald’s loin, bacon, and ham.
The Surgeon’s Creation Tells What Happened
The surgeon palmed the money before he sliced the tissue and scooped out the rot. Then he packed the hole with an amalgam of ground hipbones from living and dead. When I awoke from my dreams to a conversation between the disembodied about the weight of a mass, the nurse handed me a mirror to see the rosy glow for myself. I saw a fiend, the creature. What a bargain you got, she said, now off you go and have a complacent life filled with gratitude.
I woke while he was still at work before my splayed flesh. My eyes flipped open, and the nurse adjusted her scrub top, the surgeon harumphed, a lipstick kiss cried out from his neck. The surgical instrument tray no longer gleamed but was heaped with bloody rot. I’ll call the anesthetist, the nurse cried out. The amalgam rested in the paint pot, brush still pristine. I tried to ask when the stitching would begin, but my tongue had disappeared.
Sewing my tongue led to finding the mass which caused the jagged stitches. The nurse tried to spin it the other way, but I knew the truth. If I had been able to speak from the beginning none of this would have happened. I would be scarless, a map never opened, a cocoon of indeterminate but great beauty.
Luanne Castle
Luanne Castle’s poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Grist, Fourteen Hills, Verse Daily, Disappointed Housewife, Lunch Ticket, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Cleaver, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Phoebe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gone Lawn, Burningword, Superstition Review, One Art, Roi Fainéant, Dribble Drabble, Flash Boulevard, O:JA&L, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble, Antigonish Review, Longridge, Paragraph Planet, Six Sentences, Gooseberry Pie, Switch, and Ginosko. She has published four award-winning poetry collections.