This is my attempt at Julia Skinner‘s 100 word challenge. Be gentle with me.
100 Word Challenge inspiration
Bronzed
Tanned. Weather-beaten. Sun-kissed. Interesting that a bunch of pallid, over-coated islanders should so worship the sun. Or maybe not so interesting. We don’t get enough of it perhaps to feel complacent.
Bronzed has always seemed such a heroic ideal. Not only because statues of soldiers are routinely cast in the stuff, but because of the Bronze Age heroes I lapped up as a kid: Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon.
For me, a particularly pale specimen, the reality of spending time in the sun is very far from the mahogany skinned ideal flaunted in travel brochures and David Hasselhoff TV vehicles.
I burn.
I really enjoyed the way you used the image to motivate a parallel discovery about the hilarity of tanning. Nicely done.
I love your use of language! And how your use of detail makes this feel so much fuller than it can be with only 100 words. It’s not hard to be gentle with you when your work is this vivid!
Very kind comments Lisa & Re. Much appreciated. Maybe I’ll enter again…
That’s a novel way of interpreting the image! I love the way you’ve put so much info in it only to tell us you burn in the sun 🙂
clever
As a pale skinned Kiwi I burn too, particularly in my homeland where the ozone is thin. I know exactly how this chap feels. Love the irony in the comparison between the idealised bronzing and the real. Great original entry! Vx
What a great take on the theme. I love how you have used the sun to have changed his colour. x