SFWC Community Microfiction: Candle Hat
This is the second entry in our microfiction series written by San Francisco Writers Conference community members.
Candle Hat
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
Robert Scotellaro is the author of 10 flash and micro fiction collections as well as 5 collections of poetry and several books for children. A book of his prose poems is forthcoming by Červená Barva Press. He has, along with James Thomas, co-edited New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, published by W.W. Norton & Co. His work has appeared widely, nationally and internationally, and is included in the Norton anthologies, Flash Fiction International and Flash Fiction America, and in 7 Best Small Fictions and 3 Best Microfiction award anthologies. He is the winner of Zone 3’s Rainmaker Prize in Poetry and the Blue Light Book Award for his fiction. Robert is one of the founding donors to The Ransom Flash Fiction Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife, artist and art historian, Diana Scott. Visit him at: www.robertscotellaro.com.
