Very short story, prompt was “kraken” #vss365 #kraken
A voice like velvet and beer announces her. “Ladies and gentlemen… The KRAKEN!”
The crowd’s been expecting tits. Also ass. It’s burlesque; fun weekend night. She has the tits. Smaller, but quality over quantity, right? And an ass she could kill with.
But she isn’t using them to kill yet. She just… stands there. Pretty, yes. Slender. Nothing at all menacing about her. So they wonder: why the name?
The music starts (slow guitar, sounds like Beck unplugged) and she puts her hands out at her sides. Then there are a few hoots and whistles, but these die down as she just takes a step on the line of tinsel on the floor before her. Then, eventually, painfully, another.
They don’t know how to react. Her face… it’s not doing sexy, it’s… in tears. Mascara is beginning to streak before the song (about desperate, damaged people) is a minute in. But they can’t look away as she takes step after painful step, backtracking and trying again, trying desperately to balance on the line on the floor.
(One of the people in the song is on a ledge, in her wedding dress, the other ten stories below.) Even as the pasties come off, the illicit pink on pink that should bring down the house draws not a sound because they’re too wrapped in tension to breathe.
She cries out (as the bride leaps), and falls, and the crowd cries out with her. There is no rope; she falls only to the floor, but she pulls them all with her, 10 stories down, where, as one, they and she (and the bride) hit the concrete.
The act ends as she rises, and they are back in their seats, whole, and once more free to breathe. They take one great breath, then roar with voices and hands.
And that’s why they call her The Kraken.
© Sean Miner 2022
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