EMERALD BOLTS / Kristen Holbrook

Emerald Bolts

Kristen Holbrook

Emerald Bolts is an independent platform for flash fiction from Ireland and the rest of the world.

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Denial

I used to be terrifying. Powerful. Everything fled when I stalked the land, made the ground tremble with the crash of my weight every time I took a step. Everything. Except her.
She longed for power. Lusted for it. Told me so. So I told her no.
That wasn't something you could say to Medusa.
Now I'm stared at in museums. A decapitated, stone head. She'd done that. Turned me to stone with the evil eye, wrapped her golden snake-scaled body around my neck, squeezed, cracked my head from my body and left it. An Olmec colossal head is what the onlookers called me. Thoughts, wishes, wants, regrets, and fury hold me down with a weight of forty tons.
If only they knew the danger they looked at. The danger of denying a woman.

– Kristen Holbrook (USA)

Kristen Holbrook is a fiction writer from Ohio. One of her short stories, "Blair", was published in The Opening Line in 2013.