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.

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The Hemingway Day. Hide.

 

Having spent the past hour dithering between Wimbledon watching, work and this blog post, I am struggling to find more words than the six below. Welcome to The Hemingway Day…

Hide.

The wind disguised his skulking inside.

 

Thanks to The Daily Post for the photo prompt this week, here are some other photos of doors.

Who’s the fairest?

Day 17 of photography101… “glass”.

Who’s the fairest?

Despite the 24 carat hue in the distance, the darkness was coming.

 

Echo.

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

Echo.

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

Ruin.

Day fourteen saw a second instalment in a tale of lost and found, today is the final piece…

Ruin.

The heat was radiating from every angle of the landscape, smearing the view in the distance, adding to the blurred state of Laura’s mind.

The past hour was the longest yet, her wristwatch ticks were amplified as each second slaved by. Her skin was powdered with the dry dusts of the dirt track, it clung to her throat, grasped each eye lash and dried the lips until flakes formed between the cracks.

The track meandered through the mountain hiding sheer drops and rugged crevices around every corner. As Laura traipsed she had passed ancient Spanish fincas and derelict farm houses, but the latest crumbling ruin hid something inside that caught her eye as she trudged by.

The whitewashed ruin’s front wall had ruptured and tumbled towards the track, revealing a tiled floor that had been interrupted by thick tree roots that had claimed the space for their own. A pile of rubble sat at the centre of the ruin, a drab sight on first glance, but upon closer inspection it was peppered with pockets of colour. From pastel tones of yellow and green, to once vibrant shades of red and blue, each splash of spirit belonged to the footsteps of someone that had once treaded this very ground.

Laura pulled turquoise from the rubble and revealed a tiny court shoe made from fine silk. Across the threadbare fabric a tail of embroidered flowers climbed from the heel to the pointed tip. The shoe was warped and contorted, and beneath its toes were little indents of life, traces of ownership.

The dirt pile swam with these forgotten shoes, and Laura wondered why their owner had left such fine attire so carelessly strewn. Most of the shades had a partner hidden amid the dirt, but the turquoise shoe was an isolated soul.

Laura gripped the heel between her thumb and forefinger, holding the shoe up at the sunlight where it glistened for the first time. She climbed across the ruin and stumbled back onto the track, twiddling the tiny piece of footwear between her fingers all the way back to where she started.

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…

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

Day 46.

That little ray of sunshine shimmering across my iPad is entirely indicative of the slice of summertime we have just booked. Isn’t it oh such a bore and a chore when your relatives live on foreign soil and you simply must go and visit them? Hooray for holidays. #100happydays #day46