inspired by the art of Yayoi Kusama and Joseph Cornell

At the gray farmhouse, the crackle-finish door teetered open, so Wilhelmina stepped in, her polka dot headdress rustling. She bellowed, “Anybody there?!” She found the aisles between well-laden bookshelves a bit too narrow for her satin hips, but hunted the hard cover of Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination. Someone within this home library, called @SoloPointillest, was offering a copy for only $10. A snowy arm reached around the fiction books and presented the art tome.

“Where are you? Solo dot specialist! Come on out!” Willie, as she liked to be called, rounded the corner on James. “There you are. Oh, what a labyrinthine tattoo.”

James prized his stippled and rambling tattoo, so intricate that a casual observer would never make out that it was a fly on a pretzel-shaped path to nothingness. However, at the moment, he saw something which made him rethink the design. Willie’s shiny outfit was a patchwork of various neon-colored dots. While her circles were brazen, his own were barely perceptible.

As Willie reached out to trace a section of the pattern on James’ arm, he flinched. Willie thought he cowered, and her body was suffused with maternalism, a surge of instinct that made her want to protect this thin, milky-white man. She had never felt this way about anyone. A tear clung to her eyelash at the thought of going home and never seeing him again.

Usually when James sold a book in person, he would request the cash be left in a bowl near the door. That way, he didn’t meet anyone. This was fine with him. The touch of another person seared him. Even a look could put him off his dinner.  But Willie’s touch didn’t harm him. Instead, in her hot pink and lime, Willie’s festooned beauty touched his heart as if with a relentless feather. He thought he heard birdsong somewhere in the house. And balloons popping.

“Will you pose for me?” James spoke without thinking. He felt the blush rising from his nethers.

 For the rest of the day and into the night, Willie and James created points and dots on the floor and their clothes and even on ordinary paper. After a while, James dared to create larger marks, his points blooming into small dots, even lines. Willie painted her favorite obsessions, phallic structures intersecting with reshaping dots and circles.

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Luanne Castle’s stories have appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Gooseberry Pie, Bending Genres, Bull, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Cleaver, Disappointed Housewife, South 85, Roi Fainéant, River Teeth, The Dribble Drabble Review, Flash Boulevard, and many other journals and anthologies. Her stories have been nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her hybrid memoir-in-flash will be published by ELJ Editions in December 2026.