Diana reached the corpse. "You can't hurt anyone else.” Specks of saliva shot from her red lips and landed on her husband’s powdered face.
Her gaze ran down to his wrists. She couldn’t help herself and let out a giggle recalling when the police officer tied his wrists together like cloves of garlic. A rare state of featheriness in weighty waters. Hues of black and blue, wagging tongues—tonguefish—drowning victims, belief, non-belief, grief in grieving-what-could-have-been, relief, memory.
*
On the day a jury announced: Guilty, a cluster of women chanted Liar in acappella. Diana studied the cirrostratus sky. I wish I were You. Invisibility doesn’t lessen their faith in You. Just because the women weren’t in that bedroom, car, kitchen, shed, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
*
Diana strode away from the congregation perched like ruffled birds on wooden benches. He can’t hurt anyone else. “Divine,” resonated among the worshippers. She turned back only to wink at a Mary nestled in a niche.
Isabelle B.L is a writer and teacher based in France. Her work can be found in the Best Microfiction 2022 anthology, Free Flash Fiction, Compass Rose Literary Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine and elsewhere.
About Jeanne the Woman in Red by Isabelle B.L
Sent unwillingly to a New Caledonian nursing home in 1967, Jeanne remembers and faces her Communist and feminist past (did her actions make a difference?)—along with solitude and old age.Jeanne falls in love with a Spanish man, but also falls deeply in support of the Red Flag. She refuses to be a spectator to the devastating events in the world of the 1930s and 40s, arrives in New Caledonia, where she cofounds the Communist Party and fights for all men, women and children exploited by Colonial powers. She aims to empower the oppressed and have them rise against their oppressors—but not without consequences for her: a bomb attack, constant scrutiny from government agencies and solitude at the end of her life. Inspired by the life of Jeanne Tunica Y Casas (1894 – 1972) The novel incorporates family accounts, documents and translations of her key tracts and articles. The Jeannes of this world, past and present, should never be forgotten.
