Wednesday 14 November 2012

Pirates, mafia thugs, butlers, delinquent gangs!

The list goes on to include gladiators and bad-ass priests and clever hackers and fast-food employees and gun-slinging cowboys...
But that's beside the point.

I ADORE THEM ALL.

The excitement! The grandeur! The mundane! (Oh, I swoon!)
It's the details that really get my heart going and set my fingers on a mad dash. I make it a mission to pick apart their respective expectations. At the moment, I'm in a phase where pirates and sailors are my obsession, so much so, I've taken to saying nautical (y'know, naughty and radical!) Yeah, I coined that up myself when I couldn't remember what it meant, although, in my defense I recognized that it was a sailor/ship term. I'm cute so it is forgivable (insert cheeky smile). 

And alas, I am off topic. Anyways, pirates, right. This is a blurb of writing I just wrote that stemmed from the idea of pirates and sailors: Hooks

*****

Pulled from a platform and tossed into the water, she flaps her arms to upright herself, splashing water and creating a cascade of rising bubbles. In her panic, she attracts the attention of the fishermen overhead and forces herself to still her movements and to slow her breathing to minimize the bubbles slipping from the genetically altered gills under her jaw. 

She can't see beyond her floating dark hair and the veil of bubbles around her, but she frantically searches for somewhere to hide in the clear green water, knowing she won't escape otherwise. Dark faces and thudding disturbs the water around her in the empty pool. She hears a deep muddled sound, vibrating the surface from overhead. She propels herself to her right, unseeing, swimming through the water like a current, slamming into an invisible wall clouded by gaping faces and excited thumping. She floats away from the horde, ignoring her bruised shoulder, and starts to swim in another direction aimlessly but with force. She slams into another wall and swivels to swim again but the lines have already started to cast. 

Heavy hooks, the size of her head, plop and begin their descent into the pool. She presses herself to the wall, noticing that the hooks are clustered around the center where she was initially deposited, slowly pirouetting and showcasing their jagged points. She bypasses the dangling hooks by swimming around them with her fingertips skimming the wall, in search of a way out. 

A riot of thumping from the wall startles her, and she propels herself quickly away from the disruption, unknowingly heading towards the center. More hooks descend around her, filling up the space around her and she freezes as they sink down beneath her. One grazes her arm in its descent, almost scratching her skin. For a moment she stays completely still, watching the glint off the silver hooks as they float on gossamer strings around her. She marvels at their beauty with a racing heart. 

A hook sharply tugs upward on her left and she jerks away from the movement, shouldering the transparent lines around her. A scream becomes engulfed by the water when a hook she shouldered jerks upward, splits the skin on her right hip. A thin trail of blood starts to cloud around her waist as she desperately palms her wound, wearily regarding the surface where the hook had ascended. The cloud thickens against the jade water, alerting the hooks of her location. 

A tremor of fear almost makes it through her body before the frenzy begins. Hooks are suddenly pulled towards her, ripping through the water in sharp thrusts with an excitement that ripples the surface. She attempts to dodge the hooks zipping around her, following her red beacon. A hook stabs through her shoulder and she produces a shriek that carries through the emerald waves. The hook in her shoulder is sharply tugged upwards just as another clasps around her left arm, the jagged point digging into the crook of her arm. The hooks swarm around her like piranhas, grappling into her arms. A couple miss and hook onto her thighs, sticking and tugging her legs over her head to flip her. The lines are tangling in her flip, causing the lines to furiously pull in hopes to untangle themselves. 

A hook flies from across the pool and fastens around her waist, burying into her flesh to gain purchase before pulling its line tight, flipping her horizontally in the water and tangling her in the net of the lines attached to her arms. More hooks find empty spaces on her hips, and with this new-found boldness, a hook grips into her chest, plunging for a breast. 

All the lines are tight, tugging from all directions in an attempt to untangle themselves, but the flimsy lines hold firm against the forces. A hook darts through the water and she watches, tearfully as it rushes towards her face, catching her throat and snapping her head back before reeling her up.

*****

Yeah... I can be quite morbid (cheeky smile!!). 
There was a tad bit of science fiction in there and I would love to write a companion to this piece with the perspective of one of the fishermen (now, wouldn't that be interesting!).
~Mera 

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Your reaction to the story is highly anticipated. I'd love to know what you think so feel free to comment and criticize. (And suggestions are always welcome and considered!)

 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.