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The Apricot Boy: A Novella
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 2 2021
Pages: 34
Weight: 0.14
Height: 0.08 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
It was because:
The boy was alive and asleep when the sand-bank began to nudge its way into his dreams. The premonition of himself as himself was there, in between the dreamt images and his wakeful breathing, inside his little child-head, under the thick shock of yellow hair, inside his dreams of mountains and open skies and sea-birds. Then he realized his mother was there. She had begun to appear midst a radiant orchard unlike any he had ever seen or hoped to imagine. He said it was in the morning that he first noticed there were arbors on either side of the bed and that fruit-trees bowed to canopy over the little gravel walkway his duvet resembled as it stretched to become the ground upon which his mother stood. And she would begin repeating eleven words while walking towards the boy. After uttering the eleventh word she would be instantaneously placed back in the spot from which she began. It seemed to the boy, under the shadow cast by enormous wings of imagined frigate birds and the sinking and rising of mountains and waves, that each time the last word gave way to the first there was some sort of rupture of worlds, an earthquake inside the air as if a sheet of glass were broken and at the same time replaced before one's eyes, or maybe even inside one's eyes. However, the boy began to realize the world was subservient to her words, that it was obliged to re-begin when they did, those which were softly delivered under her breath but nonetheless bursting to ooze with the same sanguine maternal energy that drips from such women like his mother, those whom a even stiff breeze can make pregnant. She said, Llanotenga, you are half-Indian and an emperor lost in time. Though it would not be long before the boy would come to realize something, one particular something, and in such a harsh way that from his own future would be eliminated any ability for error. He could only grow to realize that there was no escape from such strange luck as his own.
_________________________ For fans of literary fiction, imaginative realism, desert fiction, novellas and short stories, wanderer extinction fiction, imaginative artistic books, and the StorytellerUK2021 contest winners.Also in
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