Racing Hearts Go!

Fear

His feet pounded beneath him. Heart racing, feeling as if it would jump out of his chest with every beat. He could not breathe, his throat choked with a burning lump of fear. Nausea lapped in waves at the top of his stomach. Tears stung the backs of his eyes.

"Do not cry", he thought to himself, "Do not let them see you cry, it will only make it worse".

He continued to run across the oval, through the crowd of leering faces that watched in amusement, snickering sadistically at his plight. Their lips curling in snarling laughter, their eyes slitting in cruel pleasure. Each person stepping out of his way as he ran, no matter how big, how tough they were. Even those that had that small speck of sympathy reflected in their actions. Those that looked down, looked away, not able to watch the horror unfolding before them, but still unwilling to intervene to save him.

Not a single person wanted to be touched by his shaking hands as he ran. Scared to be dragged in to his fight, too afraid to stand with him, on the chance that the evil pursuing him might turn its sights to them, encompass them within it's gaze, consume them with it's intensity.

Clarity and a sense of timelessness coming as his mind flashed on all the things he wanted to be, who he wanted his first love to be, how his first kiss should have felt, tasted, smelt. He could hear it's heavy breathing closing in on him, feel each thunderous step it made pounding on the ground.

"Please may god have mercy on me? I am sorry for playing my PSP in church on Sunday. If you save me, I promise I won't do it again" A litany of promises, wishes, ran through his mind as his legs began to fail, to shake and tremble under him, his chest began to constrict on his lungs, preventing air from entering.

He could not go on any longer. His only hope was to reason with it. To beg and plead if he had to. He was ready to cry now, he didn't care if they all saw it. He would trade that shame for being scarred by this being any day of the year.

He stopped, turned, hands dropping to his knees as he bent over in both supplication and pure exhaustion. Ragged, gasping breaths burnt their way down his throat, fighting with the bile and vomit that wished to travel in reverse.

"Please, ... (sob)..., please, just (gasping breath)... let me go. I'll do anything, I promise, just let me go" the words mixed with spit that had pooled in his previously parched mouth like a biblical flood, drooling out of his mouth as he dropped to his knees. Tears streamed from his stinging eyes, blurring his vision of the atrocity, careening down his cheeks to join the snot that ran from his nose, running along his upper lip and finally mingling with his drool before flowing from his chin to run in a constant line to the ground.

"I can't, (gasp), just can't, (sob) please" he wailed, but it kept coming closer, leering at him, enjoying his pain, eyes alight with the fires of hell as it leaned in, lips peeling back from it's teeth, too wide a smile for the face, too wide to be natural.

"Caught ya!" a sing song, teasing whisper. "I got him" she called, louder, to her friends. Her hand snaking around the scruff of his neck, gripping the back of his hair and head, talon like nails digging in to his flesh, putting pressure on him, pushing his face closer to hers.

He gave up, he could not stop sobbing long enough to breathe, let alone try talking to her, reasoning with her. He just tried to find a calm happy place in his mind to retreat to when she closed in and kissed him.

As she flounced happily away with her friends, and his peers, fellow males, fellow victims, finally came to his side, patting his back in the universal symbol for comradeship, he wondered why the year 5 girls at his school had to play kiss chasey every lunch time.