Transgression Smackdown

Fiction
Copyright © 2011, By C.L. Smith
Word count: 200

Your blue-jeaned legs were too long for your boy’s torso. You were hot to prove to everyone how high you could roundhouse to kick the top of Mrs. Johnston’s doorway.

“I take karate,” you puffed.

Your eyes were as pale as your skin, as still as your soul as you budged desk after desk aside with your hips. Occasionally a scrape skittered across the floor, a small stab of mouth pouching open, then a sudden shush.

The nearer you prowled, the more your mitts parted the folds of forgiveless air around a girl-shaped space.

Six, seven, eight times you tried. Target moving, gone; low center of gravity, your reptilian brain labored, and you susurrated as you tried connection from behind, in a gambited vise.

Then, as a balloon ooooking out oxygen, your breath is denied you. An arrow-end upends you below the sternum as the power hourglass flips in front of your ineffectual face.

While you’re bent over, your quarry glides tête-à-tête with you. After another vicious knee-kick--with compliments to your self-described sweet spot--her victory is iron-willed.

The breach that you intended to spread wide has held. And your lips forevermore trap the tale of your toothless puissance.

This is an entry for the Mookychick blogging competition, FEMINIST FLASH FICTION 2011. Enter now.

Girls Run Wild

Fiction
Copyright © 2011, By C.L. Smith
Word count: 200

As we stretched, I overheard Jason chiding another guy: “You run like a girl.”

That’s when the girl who was once so helpful as to be verbally savaged by a blind man surged into vigilante mode.

“Oh, yeah? That’s a compliment.”

In some cross-country events, both genders blast off simultaneously. This was one of those races. It was also one of those races that makes people outside running wonder “what the frack makes them do it?” That is to say, it was a hellaciously hilly course and a wet slurp of a day.

I sprung my trap as mile two bloomed nearly into mile three. Jason and his friends--hell, let’s just call them the Argonuts--were bunched together like sheep until the last hill. As I powered up, I knew he could feel somebody close. It was a quick, narrow-pathed hill, then we descended and the way flared. It got guttural as I sprinted him down—and gazelled past.

“You run just like a boy,” I taunted after he’d heaved himself across the line 21 seconds later.

Truth is, I never ran as fast as when I carried, proudly, on my shoulders what it means to be a woman.

This is an entry for the Mookychick blogging competition, FEMINIST FLASH FICTION 2011. Enter now.