Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome back Houston-based writer Neil Ellis Orts with “Twelve Hundred Miles,” a poignant flash fiction piece about a relationship which has been sundered. A sudden rainstorm brings the beloved to mind, along with the knowledge that the narrator’s behavior is what necessitated their separation. Full of regret, he pens a letter that will most likely never be read, let alone answered, perhaps only to allow himself space to sound out his grief. Neil manages to distill and communicate this regret in less than four hundred words, drawing us in not so much by what he tells us about these two people, but by what he does not tell us, the negative space around which the narrator’s words tiptoe. Our imagination tries to fill in the gaps, but we are left with questions. “What’s the right angle to see you, if I could see twelve hundred miles? As if I were Superman with super vision. I can almost hear you telling me that’s not how light works. That our vision wouldn’t bend with the curvature of the earth, that we see much farther than twelve hundred miles but into space, not across the continent.” Similarly, our vision is not focused on what happened, but on the present moment, a now full of regret, grief, and the pounding of the rain.
Experience “Twelve Hundred Miles” in Synkroniciti’s November 30th issue, “Space,” Vol. 5, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Neil Ellis Orts is making his third appearance in Synkroniciti and other recent work has appeared in the journals Soul by Southwest and Ruminate and the anthologies The Bad Day Book, Unknotting the Line, and Black Ink on a Black Void. His novella, Cary and John, is available from Wipf & Stock Publishers. “Twelve Hundred Miles” started when the first line came to him on a rainy day.