A Rusty Surrealist Flash by Deke
“That’s one giant posse!” exclaimed little Rufus. “They bullied up about half Tuesday and ain’t left yet!”
As the sun set beyond Lonetree, flying mortars hummed in the distance, whining like mosquitoes exploring an ear. A parrot cawed from the central garden. It wouldn’t survive the night.
There were other recent visitors of note to discuss: Salesman and the priestesses. The priestesses used to bring flowers. This time they only unpacked pain and dissonance. This was an unwelcome shift. Salesman? Well, he always comes with a quota and would leave with his beans.
The market closed early; all of the wares were stored, and by dusk, twice the regular crowd was already crammed into Gumball Jimmie’s dinner house.
“I don’t remember when you could drink it, but there used to be a time,” Rufus continued to no one, “when a citizen could bathe in tap water. Now it’s got a grit to it.” He took a swig of his jooce. With the back of a hand, (the good one), he wiped the pulp and ash residue from his stained soul patch. In a dark, back-corner booth, Vanda was hypothesizing to her regular crowd. Rufus, strained, but his faulty aural hole couldn’t quite gut out the details. Anyways, he gleaned enough to know it had to do with the latest arrivals. It was what every sect was talking about.
Who were they looking for? No one knew, but everyone speculated. Even Mutt had his ideas, but his ideas weren’t worth tack and nobody common took notes. Only the secretaries took notes. They always took notes. There were volumes on Mutt, even more on Rufus, and at least thrice that on Vanda. The collection was encyclopedic: volumes stacked higher than the birdshit on the one-legged statue of the last president and CEO.
Voices chattered and the gearbox rattled. It made a cacophony that settled over the crowd like a weighted blanket of crushed glass. Nothing really mattered, but the concern was gravy, thick and hot.
It was 1729 according to the time box, and it was fixing to get dark sooner than six-ten. That’s when the medicine man would come out and the real party would begin. It was set to be a long night, and either someone was gonna hero or nobody would. Only the flip side of the rotation would tell.
Posse Commit Us, a rusty surrealist flash by Deke, is published in The ITZ Gazette literary category. This vignette drops readers into a distorted townscape where Rufus, Vanda, Mutt, and the ever-present secretaries move through an atmosphere thick with speculation and dread. Mortars hum, parrots caw, and the promise of a medicine man’s arrival hangs over the crowd like prophecy. Within this compact space lie secrets and truths — if you know where to look.
Compact and deliberately elusive, “Posse Commit Us” exemplifies flash fiction’s ability to suggest more than it explains. The author is carving out his own niche with a subgenre we have tagged Rusty Surrealist Flash Fiction, marked by corroded imagery, absurd juxtapositions, and a sense of foreboding that never quite resolves. As a work of veteran literature, it resonates with the fractured textures of memory and the dissonance of lived experience, while leaning into the absurd to destabilize certainty.
Psychologically, the story operates like a fevered dream, reflecting how collective unease can magnify into myth. Its power lies in the way it resists coherence yet remains vivid — an unsettling mirror of the human tendency to impose meaning on chaos.
