Category: Competition

I’d shake it all out – watch it fall out like runny, shiny, smooth, glassy beads. The sand in my shoes warm from the sun that played all afternoon on the golden beaches –
I would run my fingers through my hair wet at the nape of my neck.

She is trapped in a gilded cage. Trapped shut in a cage of her own making – one that she refuses to own.

I used to be one of them – a show off, fast, showing off my moves, floating belly side up like a poached egg but now my new body is soft with body fat, it is still a comfort fit although it feels so different when I see myself in passing mirrors.
It feels as if I am staring at my face in water; in a million different pieces that somehow does not quite have the right fit.

My mother has stretched out her legs and put them
on my fathers lap -‘He is mine. Stay away or go away this is our private time.’
So I disappear to my room – she doesn’t have to say much to make me the Outsider.

Her footsteps loosened the aged mahogany floor when she stumbled into her room one night; and for the sake of not interrupting her roommate she did not turn on the lights. With not a care for the couple’s rustling and kissing adjacent to her, she let the large volume of rum from a prior dinner party coax her to sleep–without knowing that she was the accomplice for her roommate’s murder.

I asked, why is it that this calendar and the one behind it have both been modified so that each month has ten days? “I was raised to go into the fallout shelter after the tenth day…”

Consequently, the 2000 inhabitants stationed in Antarctica assigned with research tasks failed to send an urgent transmission because of the storm’s damage to the main satellite:”(34147) a cold-adapted plant that decays 6hrs after growing in a theoretical millennium has been discovered. Conclusively we found the species in the family negating every virus in existence.”

I get up, lean out of my bedroom window with elbows firm on the sill and fire the gun. I hear the magical, instantaneous ping and rattle of the pellet hitting the can as it falls of the fence; I return to bed and drink my tea satisfied.

“What’s that seductive cologne you have on?”

“Male sweat.”