Day 126 Writing Short Stories

Satin

The rich, petrol satin with a golden pattern was draped around the sofa. The queen’s seamstress had left it there to get accustomed to the fabric. It would be the queen’s new dress. Something the queen had picked abroad. She hated it, but she was the help, and she wasn’t going to say no. Now she just had to find the right kind of dress pattern, which could hide the monstrous fabric and its hideous golden ornaments.

She sighed.

The fabric had been there for days now, and the queen was meant to wear it tonight. It would need a miracle to get it ready. Making a corset bust took weeks. Not to mention the days that went into sewing the skirt part.

It was more like that she would hang rather than the queen march to her ball in a new garment.

But the thing was that there was only one dress she could make in a day. And she had some extra turquoise chiffon lying around. She began drawing an over-the-shoulder dress that flowed down. With golden bands, she could embellish the horrible pattern in the satin and make it look almost beautiful. It would be something different, and the queen would either refuse and consider the dress as lunacy or see it as divine.

She took that chance, working on the dress all day without stopping. When it finally draped over the queen, she had started to like the fabric. The turquoise chiffon added a layer to the dress, making the queen look less bare.

She studied the queen’s face, but the woman gave no indication of what she was thinking as she measured herself in the mirror.

“It’s different,” the queen finally said, letting her breath. “But is it too different?” she added.

She had learned to keep her mouth shut and not to comment. You never defended yourself with the queen. What was there to say? The dress was a spur-of-the-moment thing. But she was proud of it. It had felt like something new rather than the tired old patterns she made for the queen and her court.

“It will have to do, but the theme of the ball will have to change,” the queen said. Still, there was no sign whether the queen hated or loved the dress.

Door-To-Door Salesman

Cosmos was never about the cosmos. It was about matter and how it combined. Here at the outskirts of the universe, matter had made it possible to pass through universes if you knew how to harness the gravity to work for you. She had done that, but not to study all the possibilities. She was the greatest salesman in the known and unknown universe. She sold it all. Time, death, immortality, possible worlds, new lands, adventures, knowledge, and love. The latter didn’t seem to go out of style, no matter what universe she visited.

But her last job had made her run, and now she had been running through all the universes. The known and the unknown. Trying to hide from what she had witnessed. There had been a murder. Not just any murder. The murder of a prominent businessman. The one who owned almost everything he could touch and even think. Horrible lands that she hated to visit, but a sale was a sale, and she needed what the man had promised in exchange for love.

But there was no delivery of either of those things. She had seen who, or more like what, had done it. That what would lead anyone looking into the murder to whoever had harnessed it. And she was the only one who had seen the thing, and now the horrible creature was after her, knowing how to slip through gravity, time, and space and keep up with her maneuvers. No one had ever been able to track her, and people and things had tried. This was not the first time she had stumbled onto things that were not meant for her.

She would have to find its master, but how could she flee and investigate at the same time? Meaning it was a loop, and she had to find the starting point if she wanted to get out of this alive.

Chasing Frog

The boy slipped and fell, losing his shoe in the mud. He was covered from head to toe in grayish, sticky mud that had somehow wormed its way into his ear. He wailed aloud, cursing the frog that he had chased down.

The Prompts are from the book A Year of Creative Writing Prompts.

Today’s prompts were challenging. None of them really spoke to me. I want those monsters and androids. Yet, I know that trying to write outside my comfort zone will make me a better writer. I just wish becoming one included black holes, time thieves, and super intelligence. I’m glad I could at least put a different spin on the salesman story. I just wish I could polish it more and see where it might lead. But now I have to stop. My hand doesn’t like all this writing.

Thank you for reading ❤ I wish you a day full of space pirates, losing time in the woods, and all the other wonders there are under the ever-shining stars!