new work

The Challenge that set by Mslexia is to write 500 words as wife mother daughter a real or fictional person. This was a far more interesting proposition than the one set for my small Suffolk writers group. I was halfway through it anyway so I decided to run with what I was already writing. It seemed to me like cutting class – which I had never done in school. So maybe it was about time to break the mould of a lifetime of trying to conform. It was this class that had got me to source a magazine to write to get work out there after all. So it was in someways legitimate not to follow the set piece but to go it alone. Deep Breath stride into the new!

Meta title 

The World’s Wife 

Cleopatras Mistress

Julius did not excite my hatred. He was, of course, a wonderfully strategic choice but fairly soon despite Cleopatra’s charms he became easily distracted from her bed. He had had a lifetime of soldiers and here in Egypt we have an endless supply of beautiful Kole eyed boys.

When he left her he was a burnt out wreck of a man. We had sucked him dry.

When Antony arrived he was my rival for her bed although he never knew it.

When he entered the palace gates with trumpets and the beating of swords his armour shone with desert sunlight.

He stank of desert sweat and horses. On the evening of the first day we bathed his vigorous charms with cedar wood oil.

Over the years I covered Antony with smiling hatred like swarming of flies on rotting carcass.  I sought to overwhelm him with tainted food and incantations. 

She knew of my intent but did not interfere. Our women’s love ran as deep in Nile mud. It amused her to see him treat me like a maid. His presence gave a new dimension to our secret congress. We enjoyed the frisson of the intimate of touching of maid to mistress as I bathed and dressed her in front of him. Her supple body writhing like python flesh with the pleasure of my touch or his. She was a fascinating magnetic creature that drew the eye. Extraordinarily physically reactive and a lover of snakes.