Daily Prompt: Choose Your Adventure

Daily Prompt: Choose Your Adventure.

Write a story or post with an open ending, and let your readers invent the conclusion.

Michka sat in the locker room lacing up her tennis shoes and trying to clear her mind. Her stomach danced inside her like a hive of angry bees but she knew better than to give in to its demands. Acknowledge and dismiss. Visualize those bees getting drunk on pollen, slowing down their frenetic wings and finally settling in to a humming stupor. Michka knew a certain level of nerves was good; that was the adrenlaline kicking it. But too much and her muscles would react by tightening up – no longer able to hear the messages her brain might send. Too much anxiety could make her feet feel as if they were running in wet sand and her arm made of oak, heavy and stiff. She needed to be relaxed and present today. After all, she’d trained for this moment since she was seven years old.

How many hours had she spent on the court? How many little yellow balls had she hit in her lifetime? She couldn’t even dare to guess as the number would be in the millions. She popped in her ear-buds and let the ragged voice of Mick Jagger fill her. Nothing like some old-school rock n’ roll to get her fired up. She had her dad to thank for all of this: her love of this game and her affinity for the Stones. She smiled as she thought of those early days, her father feeding her balls, teaching her how to hit with topspin, sitting court-side at most of her matches. She knew he’d be in her box today, cheering next to her coach and trainer, willing her to play with abandon and to go for her shots.

A security guard entered the locker room and motioned to Michka. It’s time. She jumped up from the bench and shouldered her tennis bag to begin the long walk down the corridor to the open court. Heart pounding in time with the music still flooding her mind, Michka followed the broad back of the guard. This is it, she thought, and felt a familiar tingle run through her, that magical moment when nerves turned to excitement. She stepped out of the player’s tunnel and onto center court. The roar of the crowd was so powerful it dwarfed the music from her Ipod. Michka looked up, saw the packed stadium of people screaming her name and ….