Flash Fiction (poetry): Metamorphosis by Val Muller

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is to write a story where water plays a role. It can be a lake, a river, the sea, rain, or just some water to drink. It comes to us from Val Muller, author of the Corgi Capers mystery series.

Metamorphosis

By Val Muller

I still see her in my truck bed,
As she looked that dawn,
How she turned over in her sleep,
tucked her leg out of the blanket
and kicked through the fabric
almost like she was swimming.

I shake my head at myself
Picking up a hitchhiker
Like I don’t know any better,

Driving her to the diner in the middle of the night,
Paying for her fish n chips
Because when they brought the check,
She acted like she never heard of a dollar.
She gave me her seashell bracelet
and asked if I would drive her to the coast.
Her lips pouted like a siren’s.
I lied and said
I was headed that way myself,
Hundreds of miles to the west,
That there was plenty of room in the truck
Whose cab barely held me.

Her hair blew out the open window like it was tossed and turned in the tides,
And I drove through fields of corn that swayed as if under an ocean current.
Hours passed, eternities passed, and her scent filled my truck with the fragrance
Of all that was missing in my lonely, landlocked life.

Hundreds of miles washed over us, and I had to sIeep.
All my money gone to gas and food,
She didn’t blink when I said we would rough it.
I offered her the cab, but she insisted on the truck bed,
Said the stars speckled with clouds seemed like seafoam to her.
She hummed a song that flowed in through my open windows
And lulled me to sleep like the soft crash of waves.

When we reached the coast, she seemed brighter somehow,
stronger, shimmery, secret in the sunrise,
and although this farm town boy had seen the ocean only on screens,
I could not break my eyes from her as we walked the sand.
She grabbed my hand only once, the smoothest touch I had ever felt.
It was like, I later learned, a smoothed sea-glass,
made sleek with hundreds of years in the surf.
Her lips, the one time she kissed me,
Tasted of salty air.

She stepped in the water and turned to me once,
smiled, and let the waves lap her up.
She disappeared in a rush of foam.

I ran out to her, not even thinking,
this is the first time I’ve felt the ocean.
Instead, I searched with eyes and arms and hands,
Trying to find that smooth skin,
That sleek hair.

My eyes glimpsed only a glitter
that spoke of seashells’ iridescence
And of the mystery of saltwater—
A green glow of a fin.

Years later, I sit on the beach each sunrise,
Rain or shine, summer or chill,
Hoping for just a glimpse
Of she who transformed me,
Who picked me up on the shoulder of my life
And brought me here to the coast,
Where anything seems possible,
Where I wait for a glimpse of magic iridescence
In the place where
The sea air tastes
Like her.

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: https://valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.ca/