Short fiction: Recipe for a Winter Evening
A prose poem or hybrid flash or whatever it is I wrote
Recipe for a Winter Evening by JY Saville
Pre-warm one plump armchair with a snoozing cat. Remove, fill with tired limbs, optionally replace cat as topping. Infuse with woodsmoke and mulled wine, add hazy dreams of new beginnings and leave to marinate in reminiscence. Beware of steeping too long as mixture can become bitter. Decant tired limbs into cold bed, cat can be used as garnish. Serves one.
I wrote this in an online winter solstice writing workshop in December 2020. This morning I was looking for unfinished short fiction to work on over the next few weeks, stumbled across this, tweaked a few words, gave it a title and decided to share. It seems more suited to the start of the year anyway.
I think it was intended as some form of hermit crab flash fiction, which is to say a short piece that borrows the housing of something else like a shopping list, job advert, or in this case, a recipe. It might be a prose poem, I’ve never been sure where the boundary is.
Normal schedule will resume on Sunday.