Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

5

Christopher was not a scholar. He didn't have the attentiveness for that kind of work. In a library he would sit quietly at a table for 20-30

minutes, then get up, walk around, look through the stacks and return to his table with another 10 or so books completely unrelated to what he'd been reading. This could go on for an entire afternoon or evening, and afterwards his table would be covered with tower-ing, unsteady piles of books having no discernible theme uniting them.

Christopher wrote better than average. He wasn't a great writer, just like he was not a profound thinker or serious scholar. But he was still captivated by the larger than life. As he grew older and as the limits of life became more and more real to him, he began to reach out again for the world of the infinite that had mesmerized him as a youngster.

He began to write—big. He knew he couldn't capture it on the epic canvas of a great novel. He could only see glimpses of it, and sometimes he couldn't even describe it in words. Often what he wrote would seem to represent his insight, but then on hearing another's opinion, he would realize how miserably he failed.

Over the final years of his life, he wrote hundreds of pieces of flash fiction—finite sketches of the infinite. He never published them, and they were never published posthumously.

First published in Writers Haven Magazine, Issue 13, The Writer.