Tiny silent movie about a cleaning fetish. And sherry. I have two further flash fiction films on SlideShare: Pirates - about bitchy kids and revenge. http://www.slideshare.net/leanneradojkovich/pirates-30443480 The Onion - about creepy Uncles and soup. http://www.slideshare.net/leanneradojkovich/the-onion-27555475 Plus a tapas-sized presentation of my Master of Creative Writing exegesis: The Literary Benefits of Linguistic and Cultural Hybridity. http://www.slideshare.net/leanneradojkovich/literary-benefits-of-linguistic-and-cultural-hybridity Clean first appeared in Blackmail Press #34 http://nzpoetsonline.homestead.com/LR34.html See www.leanneradojkovich.com for more info.

1. Clean

2. Doreen keeps her
house extremely
neat.

3. A place for everything
and everything in its
place, she says to
herself.

4. Every morning she
works her way from
room to room dusting
window sills and
picture frames,

5. even picking up
ornaments and
dusting the dust-free
spaces beneath
them.

6. She vacuums the
rugs, room by room,
rolling them up to
vacuum underneath.

7. On rainy days she
takes all the clean
pots out of the clean-
pot drawers and
washes them. If it's
not raining, she
sweeps the driveway.

8. She irons every
afternoon. She irons
her underwear,
blouse, skirt. She
irons tea-towels,
pillowslips, sheets.

9. She's a
production
line that
can't stop
clicking and
whirring
despite
diminishing
returns.

10. Once a week she
changes the sheets on
the children's beds,
just as she always has
though her five
children have long
since left home.

11. In the evenings she
sits in her chair,
drinking sherry, all
alone.