'Coriolis Effect' by Mikki Aronoff

After 'East Wind', Charles Burchfield, 1918

You signal for the bill, push your plate aside, clear space for the reading. I reach for your baklava and you fake-fork stab my hand. Leaning back, I sip the last of the Turkish coffee, worry my mouth to dislodge the sludge plastering my teeth. I upend the cup onto its saucer, leak a gossip you’ve been itching to hear. 

You shake your head —a slow metronome, fall into the privacy of silence. You crick your neck, your brows tilt a probe. Was the telling too skeletal? Mother, who favored discipline over detail and the crisp lines of shadows, long ago weaned us away from excess. A drain of color.

These days, facts shift with dizzying speed, spin out of control. How to steady the course when moving objects always veer right? We wobble, hitch and detach, wobble, hitch, detach. 

My fingers wriggle an abracadabra. Nothing’s left to us these days but moon and mugwort. I nestle cup and saucer in my left palm, rotate them counter-clockwise — faraway/close, faraway/close, faraway/close. 

Your eyelids flicker and drop, ready for your reading.

I right the cup again. A swirl of dregs. A story, a door. I ask what I always ask when questions clog: Clarification, please.

the sky a stain of coffee
home a hungry ghost 
a howl of black wind
a slant of needles

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Mikki Aronoff lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025 and Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025. She is a co-author of the book, Neverafters. More at https://www.facebook.com/mikki.aronoff/.

'Coriolis Effect' was first published by Flash Boulevard in December 2021.