Using Props

Week 9 of my flash fiction course and nearly there...

The object of this exercise is to take a prop and  let it chart the life of a character in 300 words...

The Sacred Space

 She first became aware, somewhere in her teens, that a crack in the wall is not a bad thing. The Sacred Heart on her parents’ wall, the burning heart surmounted with cross and thorns, that surveyed her every misdemeanour and purported to represent long suffering love for humanity and boundless- passionate love, appalled her. She was done with self loathing, guilt and catholic recrimination.

She found a wall of her own and replaced the bloodied heart with a giant poster of Bogart, trench coat fitted and feodora hatted, flicking ash from the corner of his curled lip snarl. Like a totem pole the man-poster attracted bad boys until she ran out of patience with them. A clenched fist inside the Venusian mirror with handle became her aspiration. She feasted on de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, the Second Sex and Sexual Politics and baulked at her status as “the other”.  

 But biological clock ticking, cow heavy like Sylvia, she watched the wall morph into Winnie the Pooh and Tigger too as she moved backwards and forwards simultaneously. She lost sight of the wall while it cracked and shattered until, suddenly free, cheap prints of Venetian canals, Greek ruins, heavily carbon footprinted vacations reflected her domain.

 These copies of copies attracted creative friends and their very own originals: water colours, oils and acrylics of fruit bowls, sunflowers and streetscapes. An army of creative women demanding wall space. She wrote a poem and won a mirror. And at last found a wall that reflected her own image.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2019