New Flash Fiction: "Werewolf"; also off to France

Hi, folks. I'm going to France next week, where a friend and I are going to babysit two Alaskan huskies, a terrier, and an unknown number of cats at this farmhouse outside this little town called Laval in the French Alps. (Rough, huh? Hey, it's not how my life usually works.) So I'm getting together the stuff I'm going to work on. Besides another chapter of my nonfiction on Aethelflaed (the daughter of King Alfred the Great, who kicked the Vikings out of England) and my revision of the novel Mercutio (Romeo and Juliet told from Mercutio's point of view), I'm really inspired by these Halloween items my sister sent me. They were in my aunt's house -- vintage Halloween paper stuff, cards and decorations and so on. Some of them are things you'll all remember from your childhoods, but the coolest are these Depression era vegetable men, images that came from Europe. Their Halloween/harvest imagery has these turnip-headed dudes made of vegetables walking around at night grinning. Something very creepy about them . . .

So I'm all Halloween inspired and using the vegetable men et al as fodder for a series of Halloween flash fiction (or prose poems, or short shorts, or however anyone wants to define them). I'm hoping this blog will be a good forum for this not-so-commercially-viable kind of stuff. Here's a fresh sample:

Werewolf

The Moon is the tricky path. If you don’t tell the truth it will take you down past the cliffs and crags and you will lose your footing and go over the point of no return and the jagged rocks below will take you.
Everything shapeshifts in the moonlight.
There’s a dark figure crouching by the river. “Heal me!” he cries at the moon, at the filmy women floating over the nighttime earth. But no one can save him.
His silver-gray eyes are open and round and wet, wet and cold as his graying muzzle. Sad and old and unable to die. His joints are piercing sore with wolf arthritis, woof!
But he cannot leave.
He pads through the forest, finds the hand of a man. A coroner, out for a midnight walk, Tries to nuzzle the hand, but the man will have none.
The werewolf always has to tell the truth or the demons of the jagged rocks will catch him.
Hell, you see, is not fiery but cold. It will be hard on his poor stiff joints.
He looks up at the man, the coroner, whose hands touch the dead. Wolf’s eyes implore.
He can’t speak but he sends his thoughts into the man’s head.
I am a werewolf! You know death! You aren’t afraid of me!
And the man takes pity, fondles his ears, says, “Good dog.”
Then, because he knows they can only stay like that for so long before the werewolf bites him under the moon, as werewolves will, before the wolf-thing kills him or, worse, changes him into what he is, because that is the wolf’s nature, the wolf’s truth, the coroner says gruffly, “Go along, now.”

Okay -- first promised tips for new writers tomorrow, and also my classes always ask me "What is flash fiction?" so at some point soon I'll be addressing that.

But the very first and best tip for new writers, corny as it sounds, is keep writing. So keep writing.