Literary Lion. Catch me if you can.

 

Thank you to everyone who has responded to Literary Lion so far. The kitty has meowed for another week, and the word is ‘Escape‘.

 

You have seven days to craft a story of 400 words or less, inspired by the prompt ‘Escape’. Remember to include the tag ‘Literary Lion’ in your piece and to pingback to this post so we can find your work in the WordPress reader. I encourage you all to try and read each other’s work and leave some feedback, there are some wonderful stories being told each week.

Please do tweet me your stories too, or tag me on instagram and remember the hashtag #literarylion

And so to my ‘escape’ inspired tale…

 

No Way Out.

I thought her breathing techniques were flawed. That calm, velvet hued voice was trying to control my abdomen. I resisted for as long as I could.

The sleek synthetic strands twisted across my wrists, almost beautiful. The threads frayed, cracking into untidy tendrils as they snaked past skin cells, drawing rusty droplets that tainted their clean coils. My blue veins pulsed beneath the grip of the rope, staining the fibres further with every heart-powered throb.

When there’s no way out you either pray or resign yourself. Tonight, defeat. I was futile in the battle, witless in the war, completely hopeless against the takeover.

She edges towards me with her mirrored tray, empty but for one glass cylinder of clear fluid. Her closed fist nears my chest and she unfurls her fingers to reveal the mint and black capsule in the centre of her palm. She pleads with me for cooperation.

I imagine the muscles of her neck convulsing beneath my thumbs, but my hands are hopeless, bound to the white metal bars of the bed. I thrash my legs, but my body is shrouded by drearily patterned polyester.

She leans towards my ear. Whispering. Breathe in for seven, out for eleven, give the parasympathetic nervous system a chance.

The sleek synthetic strands twist across my wrists, almost beautiful.

 

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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…