The Hemingway Day. Chills.

This week’s WordPress Photography challenge is to capture the extra(ordinary). This little guy’s sole purpose in life is to tell us sun-basking humans how tepid the water is within which he bobs. He does an ordinary job. He floats in an ordinary way. He even retains his air of ordinary when the waves of a belly flop come quivering in his direction. It’s his permanent vacant gaze in the wake of such revulsion that I find quite extraordinary.

Here’s a six-word Hemingway Day inspired by our elephant friend.

 

Chills.

Feeling blue even in searing sunshine.

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Literary Lion. Baked.

Huge apologies for the lateness of the Literary Lion this fortnight, but I am mid house move, and, of course, our little lion friend got lost in the forest of cardboard. Suffice to say he is now found, and this week’s word is ‘Sun’, something that the usually cloudy-skied England has actually been blessed with today…

You have a fortnight to tell your tales of ‘Sun’ in 400 words or less. Remember to use the tag ‘Literary Lion’ in your post, pingback to this prompt and don’t forget to give me a mention on Instagram and twit-twoo on Twitter.

Here is my sunshine inspired piece…

Baked.

The sun crackled, singeing her skin. She drank in the heat, letting it hit the depths of her lungs as it enveloped her, invading her body with its stifling smother. She opened one eye and saw her feathery lashes in the reflection of her sunglasses. They were curved, covered in a thick black mascara stain. She was batting them in vanity when she first noticed the lines. Little wrinkled trenches spanning away from those plumed hairs, gorging through the skin and reaching towards her eyebrows in a takeover of old age. Her designer lenses magnified them to horrific heights. Her years of sunshine allegiance, her practised pose of worship, her secret concoction of lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil, and all she was left with was something that resembled a desiccated baked potato.

Literary Lion. Tumble.

Greetings from a Literary Lion on holiday! Whilst packing for my little Spanish vacaciones I remembered to tuck one of our lion’s words into my suitcase. I found an appropriate setting for its capture today, whilst I was trudging the Andalusian hike of the Rio Chiller, which saw me wading through water and tumbling onto what are now a pair of very bruised knees until I reached our word of the week… ‘Fall‘.

As always, you have two weeks to tell your tales in 400 words or less. Remember to tag ‘Literary Lion’ in your post, pingback to this post and all you Instagrammers and twitterers, don’t forget to give me a mention.

Here is my falling tale…

 

Tumble.

Every week he would arm me with the same headphones and a new track of calming. The voice would resonate within my ear, encasing all air beneath the padded earpiece as it commanded, twisting feathery wisps along my ear canal, shuddering the eardrum, dispatching its schemes right into my inner ear.

His legs would tuck neatly below the mahogany desk, smile soothing, nodding. My eyelids would weigh and droop as they were pulled under.

He would sit, I would fall.

This is what his Ph.D had taught.

Memento.

Day 7 of Photography101 and the theme is ‘Landmark’.

Memento.

I bent down and picked up a handful of sand. His stone eyes watched me as I let the grains fall through my fingers and into the black cylinder that had contained a fresh 35mm film cassette just seconds ago. I snapped the grey lid shut, and placed my very own piece of the Sahara in my pocket.

The Great.

 

Day Five of photography101 and the theme is solitude.

The Great.

From here, the world was silent.

 

Echo.

Today’s Photography101 task… to capture ‘Bliss’.

Echo.

The silent canyon captured every grinding footstep and threw them back with avidity.

Hunger.

The first writing challenge of this week has asked me to describe someone that has entered my life in the last year. I didn’t even have to ever interact with this little gem for him to set up camp in the back of my head, he was waiting to be released…

 

I was dunking chunks of airy white bread into the syrupy sauce of the Gambas Pil Pil when I first noticed him in my peripheral. The glossy orange oil stuck to the bread and was sucked up by each doughy hole, creating delectable bite after bite, but even my ravenous stomach could not concentrate on the starter once he had appeared on the terrace.

The sun had left the sky some hours ago, but the Spanish heat still lingered in the inky night time air. He had slumped at the head of his table, the elder of a jabbering local tribe; the villagers that dined late and chatted loudly for many moonlit hours.

Chubby grey eyebrows loomed above a pair of thick rimmed glasses. His appetite was magnified by the lenses, his perverted eyes undressing every woman in sight and devouring the menu as though the dishes were oozing their aromas in front of him. An off-white shirt grasped his arms as its only means of support, flapping otherwise across his torso and his neck, unbuttoned and casually thrown open in desire of a drop in body temperature. The cool down looked unlikely for the protruding stomach, as its organs were hidden beneath aeons of over indulgence. Wiry hairs coiled across his chest and clung to the body amid pools of moisture, whilst his thick tanned skin strained across his ballooning gut and gleamed under the starlight.

As my back strained from the white plastic patio chair, and the oily orange sauce dripped from my bread onto my pristine white beach dress, I pictured the reserved, clothed crowd that frequented the restaurants around my London abode. I decided it was perhaps time to go home. My local Spanish bistro did a decent paella…

Day 106.

Bank holiday Monday. The time for plump raindrops, feather filled duvets and ridiculous trousers.

Monday Muse. I Seem to Have Misplaced My Clothes.

To the left of me a man peeled the last of his clothing from his tough tanned skin and stretched as though he’d been hankering for this freedom his entire life. To my right sat a group of women in their 60’s, ordering drinks and leaning over tables of tapas, skimming the food with unclad body parts that gravity had got the better of.

Gill told us the nudist beach existed just past the painted cliff face. The one that was brandished with a no swimwear sign. The one that we weren’t planning on passing. Apparently the nudists had spread their wings and decided their sandy quarters needed to stretch further afield.

Whilst sipping on my tinto de verano I noticed I wasn’t the only one in need of some refreshment, and that’s when I first noticed a perplexing point about nudists…

Being perhaps an ignoramus in thought, I had assumed that with the removal of one’s clothes in public came a certain adaptation in relation to one’s bodily movements. I was proved wrong when I noticed a beachgoer rummaging through his cooler box for quite some time, facing away from where I sat, bent from the waist up…

Nudism, you have not won me over.

Day 103.

No matter what my vocation in life, I will never be one to champion the mornings of Mondays… But I won’t whinge when the week is launched from a hammock, amidst some sunshine rays and views across the Sierra Nevada. #100happydays #day103