Two Fictions
Angela Rydell

One Surrealist Painting Can Change a Lightbulb

Under a dangling lightless lightbulb, a single hand sprouts from the gold tooth of the artist's dead mother, which teeters atop the inflatable vulva of his father's lover, which in turn balances upon the mouse-sized cockroach that cowered in the urinal of his college dorm's bathroom the night he lost his virginity, perched on a red kitchen timer set to twelve minutes until done, under which a phallic baby rattle droops like Dali's clocks, pooling onto the linoleum of the old green kitchen floor he once fell on as a kid, gauging a chunk out of his noggin depicted in the painting as the back of a head with a large window-like hole in the center, its shutters open, revealing the bright, soft innards of his lit up brain.


Inside It Was Beginning to Snow

The couch soon glistened like a giant crystal jutting from pale carpeting. Birds huddled under the end tables, vied for shelter under the coffee table and heartier houseplants. Squirrels nested in frosted lampshades, thin icicles hanging from each shade's rim. The television blazed, and eventually footprints encircled it, people come to huddle around as if for warmth. While outside the sky was a ceiling. The walls were closing in, offering a few narrowed views of windows opening to windows. Now and then a face appeared, pensive, searching. Eventually just the occasional silhouette, blank and shadowed. And a darkness settling behind closed doors.

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