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Ljubreah – Written by David Hartley

October 7, 2010 by 330words

Penniless, shamed, she wraps herself in bubbles, held tightly in place with cheap tape, to replace the lycra that they had stripped from her when her grip on Dalos failed. Shamed, she scales buildings with deep envy, like they, the men, had rights to make such tall heights from glass and steel, while she is punished for a mistake that killed her heart quicker than it killed her partner, but with no less crushing force.

A celeb with failure on their shoulders is worse than life in the United Scabs of America, so the bubble wraps around her head as well and while many people glance, few recognise. In the early daze she strolled the Mancunian coast, dancing through the flotsam scum and her weight bounced up to a level that her belly betrayed.

So she trained, hard, harder still, until she was better than she had ever been and now she scales buildings in minutes, leaps impossible lengths, riding the city smogs, to land with grace upon a pinhead or better.

But superheroes had their day and the chancers, the cheap imitations, the rejuvenists don’t get a look in, don’t get a say. She can’t even invent a name for herself and Ljubreah doesn’t slip off the tongue anymore.

So down it will come, with a bolt of stolen electric, sucked from the underground generators, which she now holds aloft like the morning sun to grab the Headlines and the Broadsheets and the Roundheads and Cavaliers, before she thrusts it south to strike at the centre. She leaps, flips, an impossible length, and lands with grace, upon a shorn lamppost, standing proud in her wraps afore the cameras, striking a pose that Dalos fell in love with.

She hates tall buildings, hates their masculinity and their pride. She hates the city, hates its swords and its hoardes of zombies. Hates the coastline of Manchester, never clean, never pleasant.