The Dark Truth

A boy walks down the middle of a Chicago street at night, until he doesn’t, his bullet riddled body lying on the line between law enforcement and civility. A Chicago woman is caged for contrived circumstances during a traffic stop in Texas, bars the last thing she sees before her life ends. A man jogging down the road, alone in a time when gatherings are discouraged, is confronted by two men in a pickup truck, three shotgun blasts their deliverance of Georgia justice for the crime of being black.

There is fiction in the belief that this will end anytime soon. For each, the one thing darker than their skin is the darkness of times that never seem to end. To see the truth, imagine any past leader of color and know that, with each of these, his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream.

Although far from fiction, this is my response to Prosery: Maya Angelou, presented by Björn at dVerse ~ Poets Pub. With Prosery, the challenge is to write a piece of flash fiction with a 144-word limit. Included in the bit of prose is to be a complete line from a poem. For this prompt, the line to be included is “his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream” from Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird.” I didn’t feel I could write fiction worthy of the weight of Maya Angelou’s full poem, but this does meet the additional challenge of hitting the 144-word mark, exactly.