Day 220 Writing Short Stories

Statue

The valley of death spread around her. Tombstones and statues rose from the mossy ground, draped by the weeping trees, whose bare branches reached for the ground. The wind brought the laments of the dead with it.

Her boots ground against the gravel between the paths, taking her deeper into the valley. She kept the lantern in front of her to guide her steps. The soft yellow glow felt comforting against the red-colored dark sky. It kept her safe. It kept the dead away.

The tombs faded away, and the statues grew more prominent. They lost their human form, becoming the shape of the old gods. Their snaking arms and eyeless faces. She stopped in front of the obsidian statue. The golden veins enchanted the god’s shape, making it look alive.

She lowered the lantern at the foot of the god. She let her hands trace the lines on the statue against the cold obsidian, searching for the slight indent left there by the previous necromancers. Like them, she was to guard the line between the dead and the living. One false step, one wrong word, and she could let them loose.

When she found the indent, she pressed her seal ring into the hole. The statue rattled, splitting in half, revealing the steps deep under the earth.

She took her lantern and stepped in, listening as the statue rattled intact once again.

Basketball

The prompt is about two clumsy kids at basketball tryouts. I work with kids who have developmental issues, and this comes too close to home for me to want to write about it. It can too easily slip into my work, and I want to stay away from it. Clumsiness is not an inherited feature, and there are things that can be done about it. It can sometimes be due to inner ear issues, sometimes to spatial awareness, sometimes to primitive reflexes that have not integrated, and so on. All of those can be modulated with the right practitioner. So if you or someone close to you feels they are clumsy and can’t reasonably control their limbs or perform coordinated movements, it is not you; there is an underlying issue that can be mitigated.

Handsome stranger

A broken arm leads to meeting a handsome stranger. Another prompt I skipped. I don’t feel like writing about love today.

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

I almost couldn’t write today, as my thoughts felt scattered, but I’m happy I did. But I feel like my thoughts are empty now, and there is nothing to add here in the afterword. I wish you a wonderful day! Thank you for reading ❤