Sunday 6 September 2009

Crazy Gulf (500 words story)

You make me feel this small...

My heart compacted knottily tight. Pounding, pounding. Pestle and mortar. Turning me inside out. Evacuating through the dimples and pores. Compressing my being, the flakes of my soul whittled away. Until only the multi-layered carcinoma of my heart remains. Shrivelled and tumescent simultaneously. Wound and wounded. My body has been shelled so I can present myself in the palm of your hand.

Here you come in my direction. Advancing upon me with your metal cane. Desultorily drop me to the ground. Cruelly beat me with just a single crisp metal thwack. Send me spinning, head over heels in repudiation. Now I have to shield my eyes, even as I tumble and fall. Inclining down the camber, being palpated all the way by plastic green blades. Not dissimilar to the presentation verdancy used by greengrocers to display their fruity wares. Only here I veer past a display globule of cement, no wait, from its faint linger of mint, I glean it's actually hardened chewing gum.

Having picked up angular speed, I encounter crashing off wooden banking with a convulsive dull, wooden thump. Propelling me further along through some gravelly grit, back on to the lumpen plastic green, replete with miniature protuberances not unlike mole hills. Scooting past, my nostrils tugged at by a sour acridity. With disgust I find myself hurtling through bird droppings. And suddenly the lights go out as a whirling windmill scoops me up in one of its sails. Arching up towards the sky, no quicker than the London Eye, but I dare not stare at the sun.

At the bottom of the downswing, the windmill expectorates me with an almost apologetic wheeze. I'm dribbling on, past insect husks and abandoned pollen pods, when all of a sudden I feel my abdomen drop from under me. Down a trapdoor in a wooden platform, I plummet through the porcelain walls of a narrow tube. Bruising and concussing as I am bounced from pillar to post.

Again I am ejected and hurled back into the light. But before I can catch breath, I sink down once again into a hole with a feeble splish. This time all motion is arrested. The walls of my confinement entirely enclosed. I can barely raise my breathing apparatus above the surface of the rank water. I appear to be ensconced in a tiny pothole. Before I can bemoan my fate, I am snatched up in long, slender fingers. Tips painted vermillion. It's her! With tender touch cupping me so gently. She holds me between the extreme margins of finger and thumb and wafts me through the air. The clinging droplets fly off me one by one and I can breathe again. She loves me, she loves me not. Triumph! The omens are ripe. She finishes drying me on a 'she loves me'. She has me in her heart after all.

She sets me down on some more of the bristly faux grass. She examines the foot of her cane. Averting my gaze from the imminent impact, I squint ahead of me to espy in the distance the form of a clown. Giant feet straddling the miniature sunken font in which I am to be baptised. Sinister smile on his paint-chipped wooden face. "I challenge you to land a hole in one between my legs" he seems to mouth. I feel the rush of air as the cane accelerates towards me...

Par for the course

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