Margarida Brei is the Readers’ Choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge. The winning entry is decided by the popular vote and rewarded with a special feature here today. (In case of a tie, the writer who submitted an entry first is the winner per our rules.) Without further ado, here’s the winning story:
Doorway
by Margarida Brei
The setting was surreal, as if nightmared out of a Salvador Dali painting. It was aberrant, abnormal and absurd! Whereas Dali captured the “above realism”, the fantasy element and the hallucinatory oddness, the setting was beyond eerie. Cautiously walking on eggshells J’dad took measured steps to investigate. Half expecting to fall down a rabbit burrow and emerge in a Western surrounded by stampeding horses or a rock ‘n roll video with surround sound of energy drum bursts, insightful words and earworm melodies, J’dad gripped the wooden door frame.
Anticipating stepping through the doorway to another dimension, he threw a prop through. Perhaps it would flash into a scene from the “Twilight Zone”? Or appear in a “Star Trek episode”? The prop fell to the ground disappointed on the other side of the doorway. Easing his way behind the doorway, J’dad looked at a young version of himself. Mouth open, J’dad froze. The huge mistakes he had made in his life rolled by in painful killing slow motion. His biggest mistake was to allow his high school sweetheart to roll through his fingers. He should have pursued university and the girl of his dreams at the same time? Fool!
Like the shallow fool, he had become he remembered that the now tremendously happy blonde with five children and a gift of a husband, was heavily overweight.
Much better to have a trophy wife with plastic thighs and botox lips to make an impression in this age and profession!
