Day 215 Writing Short Stories

Cradle

The snow had fallen over the land. It cradled the quiet town into a soothing slumber. The mid-winter mornings were dark and cold. He had woken up before anyone else in the house had. Like he always did, he was pressed against his window, watching down into the street and to the factory rising over all of his friends’ houses.

He had never known anything other than the city and its quiet streets. He knew nothing about what people did beyond the city. Here, everything was centered around the factory and its endless testing. One minute everything was fine, and the next minute, they had to take shelter in the fallout shelters to wait until the experiment passed.

He tapped against the glass and felt the coldness of the outside on the tip of his finger. He drew the outlines of the machine that came to pick up their trash. It was a colossal mech that wandered from house to house. He sometimes wondered if they would one day develop minds of their own. If one day they would break free of the duty.

One day, he would be the one designing the robots, as his parents did. His friend Jani would be the one in the science department, inventing alternative energy sources. And Maria would do everything in her power to discern what the universe was made of.

Sentences

This is about writing random sentences and making a story about them. I don’t know why I skipped this one. I only noticed the fact when posting the stories here on my blog.

Barking

The high-pitched barking gradually grew stronger. He listened to the sound in his bed, wishing he didn’t have to get up and dance in the cold room to find out what had aroused his neighbor’s dog. The barking went on, and he was losing his patience.

He pushed the duvet off him and lowered his bare legs on the cold wooden floor. He wrapped the duvet around him and dragged it against the floor as he made his way to the window. The outside world was dark blue, glowing in the coldness of the midnight. The neighborhood’s stillness was evident. There was only the neighborhood dog out in the yard, yapping away. It had its head turned towards his house, and its bark seemed to accuse him of something.

He pushed closer to the window and saw a huge shadow looming over his yard. It was round and big. It took over every inch of his back porch. With the realization came the loud humming once masked by the barking. He swallowed and took a step away from the window.

A small, talonous hand wrapped around the window railing. A creature no smaller than the dog peered in the window with its huge one-glass eye, which reflected his own image at him. He swallowed, and as soon as the thing had appeared, it was gone, and the dog stopped barking.

He stepped closer to the window, feeling shivers taking over his body. The shadow was gone. So were the creature and the dog.

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

I feel so bad that I didn’t write yesterday. I applied for a new job, so I spent all morning writing the job application. When I finished with it, my brain was so wired that it was spinning and spinning, and I couldn’t concentrate on writing. Yet, even though I know it was the right decision not to write, I still feel bad about it. Writing centers me. It’s what I want to do. I love inventing stories.

My mind is still in the strange world Simon Stålenhag has created. I love how strangely familiar it feels. It is like he has made this magical, sci-fi aura around the normal, the things I did as a child, and I feel like a kid again, like everything is possible and the world is more complex than it is. I want that feeling to come back. Maybe that is why I write; living in all the possible stories gives hope to our universe. I want there to be aliens. I want there to be ghosts and magic. I want there to be other universes. The world of Simon Stålenhag gives me that. His reimagined Swedish landscape feels like home to me. I’m in awe of the world he has created.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a wonderful winter day!