Day 154 Writing Short Stories

Bud

It’s the beauty of the moment. The possibilities bud into majestic adventures. She had learned to smile past all the noise going on inside her head, knowing that it was just noise. She now saw past it, seizing the tiny smiles, tilting her head to look beyond the worries and all the dark clouds, noticing the soft paws and all the good things that were there.

Blue Collar

The light shone from the front door window down onto the carpet full of bills, casting the mail like this holy thing, full of possibilities. All she saw in there was terror and fear. The bills kept piling up in the foyer, and she circled them, stepped over them, not daring to touch them. It was the funeral bills, creditors after her. It was the utility bills, all the purchases she couldn’t return, all done before he had died on her, leaving her alone with a debt the amount of a mountain.

She had never worked a single day in her life. They had met at the university, and he had swept her off her feet and arranged their lives so that she didn’t have to worry about a thing. And here she was, and he was dead. She had never felt this much terror, pain, and sorrow as she knew now. By the grace of the universe, she had found work as a cleaner, but the money she got from that wasn’t enough for anything. Enough to get her back to their home on the Upper East Side. The mailbox, the off-white door, and the dull carpet in this desolate place were a judgment for all the bad deeds she had ever done and thought.

She never knew she was such a terrible person to deserve such a fate. To deserve the sorrow of losing the love of her life, and to know this much despair. Death wasn’t beautiful.

Train Station

The clock face turned past midnight. The little black dots made it known that the hour and mood of the day had changed. The waiting area of the train station turned tat more sinister, tat more darker and scarier. Tat more place where he belonged.

No one dared to look at him too closely. No one noticed his crooked nose, the scars, or the porcelain-white skin. People hurried past him and on their merry ways.

He sat there waiting. This was where he should be, where he would show up. He didn’t have to look at the watch to know the time. He felt it in every fiber of his being. Time had become irrelevant. Time had become all that existed. Time was there for others. He sometimes envied them — how carelessly they wasted it, how ignorant they were of it, how they didn’t feel it pass through them. He wanted to be as clueless as they were.

The man he was there for rushed in. He had bewildered eyes of terror that only the living could think of. He was a nobody, but he would become somebody.

He stood up, and he walked past the man, brushing his hand on the man’s back. When he stepped farther away, the man got knocked down by the clock that had come loose.

“Sometimes, time is on the nose,” he said to the dead man, whose expression hadn’t changed. “But don’t worry; things only get better from here on. You won’t be sent to oblivion or back; you get to work and work and work. And see how the universe passes by.”

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

My mind feels empty and full of thoughts at the same time. It lives a life of its own, still entwined with all the stories I write and the sci-fi book I edit, but never staying still on anything. I will let it be and do my own thing in the meantime.

Thank you for reading! Minds are funny things. I hope your mind is behaving today ❤