Going for Gold

Globe Soup 24-Hour Flash Fiction Winner

(prompt: ruthless ambition)

Going for Gold 

The force of ten thousand hands unites behind Hannah’s pin-sharp posture. Poised, she claps; ghost-dust rises. The arena drops into weighted silence as ten thousand eyes narrow to a single point. Curved calves quiver, heels flushed, toes grip. A super-charged cloud of now-or-never suspends above her shiny forehead and immaculate lady-made face: each unbearable atom of her being loaded.

Maxine’s throat constricts as her daughter somersaults from springboard to high bar; done umpteen times, at umpteen events but never here, never on such a prestigious stage. 

swing

Maxine’s jaw clenches. Brick-teeth grind behind a blank smile. Her stomach lurches as Hannah attempts the big Salto. Keep your protein bullet-shake down, she prays. 

swing

Maxine has held her breath Hannah’s whole fourteen-year-old life, from baby-feet patter to trials, try-outs, amateur try-harder late-nights, training, gaining medals, injuries, recoveries, every professional drama to right here, right now.

swing

She’s spoilt Hannah, she knows. Stolen her own child’s childhood, hidden ambition inside lullabies, joyless Christmases passed over for moving up the seeding, super-food feeding her über-specimen, ligaments taut, tendons strengthened through repeated tension.

swing

Who needs hazy, lazy summer days, anyway? Climbing trees (injury risk), making mud pies (fruitless energy waste), dolly-playtime (useless role-play). Her daughter needs skills, not friendships.

Nailed! 

A flawless routine, gold a hair’s breadth from Maxine’s fingertips.

Hannah skips, down the steps…

…slips, rolls her ankle.

Just like they’d agreed.

Cameras zoom in: Maxine clutches her injured daughter, distraught. Hannah’s face, fear and disgrace. Maxine had insisted, ‘People don’t just want a winner anymore, they want more, they want a story.’ Maxine would deliver a social-media frenzy, weeks of tweets, nurtured hype, Hannah’s heroic recovery.

Fame’s a fickle thing, brings strange feeling to the surface. 

She won silver, in the end

with grateful thanks to Globe Soup for first publishing my story https://www.globesoup.net/24-hour-flash-fiction-winner