Today’s writing prompt and my response.
Day five of six of this week’s challenge! The story starts here.
Hurt Amaze Prick: use these 3 words
He trusted her. There was something she said right at the beginning which intrigued him.
‘You mentioned,’ he said, ‘you’d found a group of us.’
‘Yes, but didn’t I also mention they came and took most of us away?’
The hurt in her tone fed his guilt at his earlier suspicion. ‘You did. But if there was one group, there might be others.’
She looked at him, briefly closed her eyes. ‘There were rumours of a place where our kind are welcome. It’d amaze me if it was true, unless it’s only inhabited by us, no humans.’
Excitement stirred his belly for the first time since it had all happened. ‘We need to find it. Was there anything else to these rumours?’
‘You believe it could exist?’ She stared at him with those dark eyes.
He shrugged. ‘We can spend our days running in circles here, trying not to get murdered. Or we can spend our days running away, searching for this paradise.’
She blinked. ‘No one said it was paradise.’
‘Got to be better than this.’ He reached out and gently clasped her shoulders. ‘Anything we can go on? Anything at all?’
She grimaced. ‘Maybe. One of those I was with, he had a piece of paper – he called it a map, but it was rough, sketchy lines, some signs on it. He maintained this safe place was in the spot where a red pen prick had been made.’
She breathed out loudly. ‘We wanted to believe him, but no one did. He would never say where he found it and when you tried to make sense of it, the pen prick seemed to be in the middle of the ocean.’
He laughed, couldn’t help himself. ‘A treasure island? Like an ancient pirate map?’
She smiled. ‘I guess so.’ And then she said. ‘If we had something to draw with, I could draw that map. We all could’ve, we studied it so hard, trying to tell if it was real or a prank.’
‘I’ll find you something. It’ll be totally dark soon, and I know just where to go.’
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