Literary Lion. King.

 

Last week’s challenge saw many tales of merrymaking, while this week’s Literary Lion prompt is as regal as it can be. The word is “king”.

You have seven days to create a flash fiction story in 400 words or less. Include the tag ‘Literary Lion’, pingback to this post, give me a mention on twitter and Instagram so I can share the words and have a browse of each other’s tales in the WordPress reader.

For my tale I looked to the animal’s kingdom’s royal lineage, and to the planet’s original crown-wearer…

King.

I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe…

Mists hovering above flooded grounds, ripples rolling away from every footstep, trees soaring taller than I and into the sky to touch clouds. I’ve seen olive eyes peering up from within muddy pools, the wings of reptiles flicking between branches of feathery leaves. I’ve seen lizards clutching with claws to the trunks of trees, but over them I reigned, their Tyrant Lizard King.

I’ve seen an entire realm of kings; hundreds of pairs of eyes on the crown, steely in our stare from the second we felt the sultry air for the very first time.

And now I see you, human. You with your inquisitive eyes, you with your unenthusiastic frown, and even you with your expression of awe, just like the one who first saw me, the one who gave me his name. 65 million years underground and now again I stand tall, your Tyrant Lizard King.

 

 

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Sharpen.

Happy new year to my lovely readers, I hope your last few weeks have been filled with a little indulgence of all kinds. In racking my brains this morning for a New Year’s post I ventured down this nostalgic path…

Sharpen.

Mechanical pencils are very often my weapon of choice, owing to many childhood years spent amidst shattered splinters of sharpenings and lead smears across my fingers and exercise book pages, but this morning, jutting from the hefty white ceramic fist that sits on my desk grasping my writing tools, a sliver of gold caught my eye.

Digging out a plastic sharpener in faded fuchsia from the bottom of my desk drawers, I gave this metallic sheathed scribbler its very first gasp of life. It shed its lustrous skin whilst the smell of wood shavings and lead scuffled up my New Year’s flu blocked nose and struck a chord in my brain that resonated with my eleven year old self, sharpening pencils in a blue diplodocus desk tidy that my Dad had purchased because I had a penchant for dinosaurs and it was obviously with much hilarity that one could sharpen their pencils in an extinct reptile’s bottom.

Once I’d grounded myself from my nostalgic wondering, I noticed the sharpenings had spiralled into a golden fringed crown… a regal start to the year.

Day 93.

Old friends are the very best of friends, and Mr T Rex and I go way back. #100happydays #day93