‘Imagination’
.I would be stammering, if I could say something. My mind feels blank, and nothing emerges from my lips.
I feel a red flush, my face is hot, fevered. I try desperately to come up with something, anything.
Worthless snippets soar past: “A man walks into a bar”, “Long, long ago”, “After the war”, “Before you were born”, “Famous last words”. Around each of them, tales orbit. Sometimes many, sometimes a handful, but always something. Each is a glittering paragon of what I cannot grasp.
I try to remember some interesting facet of my life, but its landscape is bland, flat, commonplace. A normal life lived by an unremarkable person, devoid of any features worth commenting on.
I can think only of things I have said before, and of fragments nonsensical or pointless. I feel like a mortified child, waiting, hoping, begging, for the ground to swallow me up, for some distraction to save me.
My muse is absent, so absent no trace is present now. The muses of others flirt, almost within reach, but dance away laughing. Without a muse, only the mundane remains. I flinch.
All because you are so beautiful and you said, “Tell me a story”.
(200 words)