,so I cradled my broken arm and ran as fast as I could using my shoulders. I could hear those dreadful footsteps slobbering behind me, tripping in hunger and desperation. The sound brought cold tears to my eyes. The insides of my cheeks famished and swelled from the constant, burning hyper-breathing.
I could not decipher which way to go, how to get away. So I just carried on, jarring myself against the thick parallel concrete walls that surrounded me. I prayed for relief.
I suddenly snagged on a creeping root and my entire body weight landed on my arm. With a terrible snack, and a pain that felt like someone had placed my arm on kerb and then jumped on it, came a horrifying, wet moan from just behind me. I scrambled to my feet and continued my agonising run. Every step I took stabbed me, and I could feel a juggle inside as my completely shattered bones shook from movement. I could hear those awful steps plummeting…
Closing in… Hot breath on my neck… I took the next left sprinting so hard that I sprung into the adjacent wall. This time my arm let out a falling-tree creak, but I didn’t have time to notice the blood that then started spitting. The impact surprised the thing and it hurtled forwards, being slapped by that long enclosure that kept us both trapped here. It gave me seconds.
But then it got faster.
I heaved everywhere, my life was just ache, my arm bleeding heavily through my white fleece. My legs fidgeted on each step I took. I was giving in. The thing had me. I was hopeless, my pace slowing, each turn and each shoulder against the wall knocking more from me than the last..
With pride, I snapped around, ready for a defeated dog fight. I was already dead.
But then it all glistened away in grey fog. The stone walls burning softly, their new state of matter drifting up slowly, in circles and bending lines. I watched, gently holding my broken arm as the sky formed into grey, and the walls came loose, and I could nearly see the shape of the maze I had bashed through now broke in suspension. Light as air it left me. With my broken arm I stretched, painfully, stained with blood on my clothes and my beaten hand that poked from the darkened sleeve, and felt the mist that rose from the wall beside me. It felt…slender on my damaged body. Healing almost, like deer tears roaming along the pain.
I turned to meet my chaser and found it lying in a massy mass. It was limp and fallen, just letting itself cloud. Its thick blackness eroded into grey too, it lightened as it flew.
The effervescence felt like home.
And then I realised, my devastated hand was dissipating too
Leo Grey 