Prey. Pray. Play
Response for the Triple Centina Writing Challenge
The man watched the baby crawling on hands and knees with affectionate joy. “Look at the little feller,” he said, looking back and blowing a kiss at the baby’s mother sitting in the chair behind him. “Only some months before, he was still inside of you!” he said, as he followed the little busily moving shape. The child moved along at a surprisingly rapid speed and the man followed, with a smile of wonder on his face, as he watched the pretty dimpled thighs and feet. When the fire alarm rang, the man was so startled he dropped his knife.
The woman sitting in the chair, bound with rope, her mouth sealed with duct tape, watched, taut with fear. The man who had broken into her house and tied her up, while she had been cooking, was slowly following her baby as he crawled, a lethal knife in his hand. A scream rose in her throat, a prayer in her heart. “Please,” she was trying to say, “please, not him.” She willed her small infant, all of ten months to move faster, get away, realising even then, what a futile hope it was. The falling knife narrowly avoided the infant.
Baby Silas was pleased that someone had come to play with him. His mother, sitting curiously still in her chair, wasn’t making the noises she usually did when he crawled too far from her. He sat up, looked at his mother, and then at the smiling stranger, and started moving again. Should he go into the bedroom, or the kitchen, or the washroom? The man followed him, saying things. When the fire alarm shrieked its warning, he was so terrified, he crawled in, through the nearest door, then through the open wardrobe door, and hid among the clothes, absolutely still.
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
Thank you for this superb, challenging and meaty prompt, Ravyne Hawke :
