(Short Story)
She knew she needed to run faster. She could hear the howls
of the beast, even though the sound of her own heart beating in her ears was
loud enough to drown out a concert. She was running as fast as she could, but
she needed to go faster. Even at her top speed, she knew it was catching up
with her. Her legs were beginning to shake. Her lungs were already aching. But
she couldn’t stop. It would catch up with her.
She could feel blood dripping from her cheek from where a
sharp edged-branch had struck and cut her. She knew in her gut that the beast
was able to smell the blood.
It would be night soon, not that it made a difference. The dense
forest was already blocking any attempt the sunlight made at trying to help
her. She was trying to find some direction but her mind was running rampant,
much like her.
She had finally arrived at a clearing. She took a moment to
stop at the edge of the clearing, to take a breath. She needed it, badly. And she
needed to figure out which way to go if she ever wanted to get out of Nature’s
backyard.
She was leaning against a huge tree when she heard it again,
the deep, guttural growl. It was closer this time, somewhere right over her
shoulder. She had to do something. She had to find a way out, a way back to
civilization. But which way should she go? Everywhere she looked, all she could
see was a thick forest and dense undergrowth.
Before she had a chance to panic about direction, she felt
it, the warm stingy breath on the back of her neck. There was no use running
now, no misinformed notion of survival. It had caught up with her. Her
momentary stop had lasted a moment too long. She couldn’t move now. She stood
still with her breath hitched and her mind numb. She knew it was sizing her up.
And then it walked around to face her up front. For the first time she got a
look at the menace she was running from. It was hard to look away from the big
green eyes, but once she did, she saw only black, like an absolute darkness. It
was crouching on all fours, her beast, and it looked much like a huge rabid
teddy bear, except for those penetrating green eyes, which were anything if not
human.
In those moments, which were possibly her last moments, when
her whole should have been flashing before her eyes, all she could think of was
that her feet were killing her. The beast, as if reading her mind, suddenly started
eyeing her feet. Without thinking, she bowed her head and saw that she was
wearing her sparkly, 4-inch high Louboutin heels!
Before she could even figure out why she would wear 4-inch
heels for a run through a dense forest, she raised her head only to see the
beast lunge at her with his teeth bared.
The searing pain in her neck was what jolted her back to
reality. She was sitting in her bridal room, dressed in her elegant red wedding
dress and even though all the make-up and the finality of what was about to
happen to her was making her quite uncomfortable, she had dozed off in a very uncomfortable
armchair.
She couldn’t bend forward for risk of her dupatta messing up
her hair, so she raised on foot and saw that she was indeed wearing her 4-inch
high Louboutins. The angle at which her foot was would probably give her a
sprained ankle by the time she got to her new ‘home’.
When her father finally came to walk her ‘down the aisle’,
and the first face she saw when she walked into the hall was her mother-in-law’s,
with her deep green eyes, she realized the beast that was her fate had finally
caught up with her.
There was no place to run now.
And all she could do was smile and pity the beast because if
she couldn’t run from it, she would definitely give it indigestion.
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