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Brazen bull

debut short story

By Becka MPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Brazen bull
Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

They were lying in bed with his back turned towards her. He was fast asleep whilst her eyes bored holes into him. She looked at his skin and wide shoulders, her eyes tracing along the blue black lines of his massive tattoo. The intricate strokes of art felt like a portal, a point of reckoning about the very idea of being. It felt as though she had been catapulted into a new reality. His tattoo, was of fluffy clouds dominating a stormy sky that framed a magnificent beast charging through the wilderness.

She could see this, all through the lines of ink that were etched onto the curves of the skin on his back. He felt like someone she’d known before and struggled to brush off echoes of the past whilst she was getting to unravel him. She lay back down and let her prying eyes rest for a minute. Her head ached as the pulse of reality flooded her body once more. She let out a sigh and thought of poetry instead.

This moment wasn’t meant to last. There were no drab or forbidding feelings and somehow, the shock of that, got her up. She gathered her things and snuck off into the night. On her way home in the car, she played the evening out in her mind. At first, it felt like a fairytale. She had found herself giggling and flirting modestly. A shyness she hadn’t felt in a long time, returned and for once, she didn’t have to ‘put it on’.

But now that she was free from the shackles of lust, her mind could get back to work. “What did it all mean?” she enquired. “Who was he?” she demanded. Why did he come into her life like this? Like a bolt of lightning he had rearranged her whole life and schedule. The debt to pay to the world, for hosting her, had suddenly seemed so insignificant.

Was he a catalyst for her freedom or the matador trying to stop her dead in her tracks? Her delusions cartwheeled across her nervous brain and by the time she made it home, the driver had to ask if they were at the right address to coax her out of the vehicle. She apologized profusely and stumbled out the back door so quickly her head spun. She shut it with enough conviction to elicit a very gentle but firm slam.

It was probably the only thing she felt proud of that night. She had apologized to the kind man for keeping him waiting whilst she was dissociating, left the situation like someone in control of her life and sauntered towards the front door with ease. There was nothing to worry about. When she opened it and saw the familiar yellow glow from the living room light spilling onto the bottom of the stairs, she had to charge up towards her solace and gather herself.

In front of the mirror upstairs, she thought a bit more about her predicament. The dark path toward being preoccupied with the life of someone else. “I’ll think myself silly and tumble off the cliffs of insanity if I keep this up.” she affirmed. “I must return my attention to more pressing matters.” she continued.

Her eyes darted toward her tarot deck and she let out a groan. The spiritual charlatans had left her in shambles. She redirected her focus to him once more. After all, what was more accurate than her own intuition? She likened his tattoo to the storm brewing in her own conscience. The light at the foot of the stairs was like the fire underneath the belly of the brazen bull.

She’d been forced into its metal interior and had been carving her way toward an escape. A glorious leap into the freedom from having to transform her screams into acoustics reminiscent of wild planes filled with sunshine, flowers and the smell of fresh rain. The puerile likening of the evening to something like a fairytale, came upon her again. Just like she was in the car, she was still wishing for a prince to save her. She played the part of the princess, in some overly embellished and foggy rendition of what love is supposed to be.

Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that only leads her to anguish and bears the sole responsibility for her storms. Every day when she revisits this idea, a kind of mental torture comes over her. The great conundrum of why she, has to be the one in charge, of the raging bull.

Short Story
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About the Creator

Becka M

terminally unique

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