They call the maze a trap, those people on the outside, that has chains and blades and padlocks. They call it a trap because it is dark and wide and the silence yearns for occupation. They call it a trap because those who are sent in never come back out.
But the Minotaur knows better, he knows the maze is not designed to lure others in, but to keep him from going out. He calls the maze a trap. He calls it a cage because it is dark and the rock floors and walls are slick with water and rebuff his touch. He calls it a cage because of the doorways in the rock, yawning caverns that whisper promises of freedom into his ears but just drag him further in. He calls it a cage because of the silence that is the catalyst for the feeling that bubbles in the pit of his stomach, for that feeling that oozes through his arteries and veins to burst free in a sound that is so loud and pained that it echoes off the rocks long after he has retreated into the worn floors of his mind. He calls it a cage because he is an animal.
His mind is threadbare; with rugs that have hardened and faded, with dresser that only hold the same razor sharp word that splinters the wood, with floors polished from the dragging of his feet as he paces back and forth. There is nowhere to hide from his mind in the cage, in which words metastasize and wear out his skin until droplets of blood stain his hair black.
They call him a monster, those outside, those who are free, those who are simply human, those who live under Apollo’s unassuming fingers. They send young men and women into the cage each year, women with dresses as gossamer thin as bat wings and men with youth still scrawled across their cheeks and hips, women and men who cower in the curved hollows of the cage until the sharp cut of urine wipes the underside of his nose.
When he sees them he hears the word monster in their shallow breaths , hears it in shuffled footsteps, hears it in their fucking entities and somehow this, this is worse than the silence, worse than the loneliness.
Now the Minotaur sits among tibias and skulls, femurs and ribs and feels a piece of something stuck in his teeth and paces the floor of his mind.
A/N
Hey! So I'm going to try to post at least twice a week but we'll see how that goes. I'll continue doing short narratives like this as well as a collection of poems :). I know there are a bunch of run-on sentences but I'm using them in a stylistic sense to show the difference of his thinking from a normal narrative.
Thanks for reading!
-Lila
ns18.223.213.54da2
