Chickenwire

Flash Fiction

You can cut yourself on a chickenwire fence.

You can walk three miles into town, a town you don’t care for, and the feeling seems, at a young age, to be mutual.

You can walk back home three miles, back to the old farm with the chickenwire fence, trying not to cry because you’re lonely, but not wanting to be friends with anyone you meet.

You can watch hungry rabbits bend chickenwire with their nose to get nibbles of wild strawberries.

You can meet one girl in school, whose own loneliness almost drowns you, and you can be kind to her, as kind as one can possibly be.

You can find out you are not enough when she finds her father’s straight razor and ends her loneliness for good.

You can search for a sharp object to do the same, when you remember you can cut yourself on a chickenwire fence.

But you don’t want to bleed on the strawberries that the rabbits eat.

You can take your grandfather’s needlenose pliers. 

You can walk out to the fence to pry off some of the sharp parts.

You get there and you realize you would never harm the rabbits, so it makes no sense to harm yourself, but you are out here with pliers and loneliness and you begin to bend the fence, and the fence becomes faces, and you talk to the faces and you give names to the faces, then the faces ask for bodies and you warp the fence into bodies until the fence isn’t a fence anymore, they’re your friends.

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