Day 229 Writing Short Stories

Possess

There are no ghosts in space. There is just science and the madness of the vastness, but no ghosts. So it was. Yet, she couldn’t quite believe that. The silence of the abandoned spaceship and its empty halls made her relive all the horror stories she had read through on her long voyage here. The rest of the rescue team was searching the other parts of the ship. They were constantly chattering together.

She had muted their feed, turning their speech into text and asking the computer to monitor the text for anything relevant. They were mainly joking around about the missing crew and space aliens. None of them spoke of ghosts and horrors from the cosmos. They didn’t believe in those things. They thought science explained everything.

It didn’t explain how a crew of this size could go missing. It had to be ghosts. The monitor showed nothing. She had gone over the feed before the disappearance, and one minute the crew was there doing their duties, and the next thing they had vanished as if someone or something had erased them.

She replayed the scene repeatedly in slow motion on her helmet’s screen as she searched the crew quarters.

It was like time had stopped there, like some strange force had possessed the ship and removed all life from there.

Dumpster

He nodded his head along with the music as he steered the huge garbage truck down the street. The city was still asleep, and he had the roads to himself. The sky was already coloring from pale pink to light blue.

He had always liked the solitude of the job, and the days free after driving through the route. There were rumors that the new company didn’t like the relaxed schedule the drivers had, but until extra work became reality, he would ignore the future. For now, there was the music and the quietness of the streets.

He turned the car around at the little circle at the end of the neighborhood road. He hopped out of the truck, parking it next to the bins already dragged onto the curb. He took them one by one to the car and emptied them into the hull. The fifth bin rocked when he got to it.

He sighed. The raccoons had taken over his route lately. They were everywhere. The little bastards were evil, but cute. And he knew what he was talking about. He had a baby one at home. He didn’t have the heart to leave the little thing alone to fend off the big bad world on its own. So now he had a baby raccoon as his companion. It was better to be an adult one, or he would soon have an animal sanctuary at home.

He took the stick he had made a habit of carrying around and slowly lifted the cover off. The bin rattled, but then the motion stopped. He waited for the raccoon to come out. It didn’t.

Just my luck, he thought.

He carefully leaned over to see what was in the bin.

He took a step back and stared at the bin. Then he took a step closer again and stared at a little humanoid-like creature with green skin and big black eyes. It was covered with rubbish and blinking rapidly.

“Fuck,” he said.

The word echoed back from the bin with a metallic undertone.

Pizza Boy

The car made a tiring noise as it drove through the quiet streets. The order had come just before he got off from work, but his boss had been a dick about it, sending him to deliver the last pizzas to some godforsaken mansion in the middle of nowhere.

The navigation was telling him to turn onto a small forest road.

“Hell no,” he said, and contemplated ditching the pizzas.

He steered the car onto the small road and prayed that the tip would be worth it. Worth the shitty job he couldn’t quit.

The forest got thicker around him as he kept driving. He was pretty sure he was going to be murdered out here in the middle of nowhere by some mad serial killer. It would be just his luck.

Seeing the mansion made him even more sure he would be dead. But he was being stupid. It was just a house.

He parked the car next to the front steps and took out his pizza bag. With every step he took, and just before pressing the doorbell, he made a little prayer to ward off anything evil happening tonight.

The door slowly crept open, and he readied himself to throw the pizza bag against whatever was coming out. Then he stopped himself. A man in his pajamas and morning robe rubbed his unkempt beard and, with tired eyes, stood at the door. The only odd things about him were the extra hair and somewhat pointy ears, but he looked like any stoner gamer on a streak.

“Here’s your pizza.” He opened the bag and handed over the pizza boxes.

The man didn’t react.

“Hey, man, I really need to go. Just take the pizzas.” He again offered the boxes.

The man looked dazed, like he wasn’t seeing him, like he was looking past him at the yard.

“Hey man,” he let out. He was getting pissed off.

Then, the man seemed to snap into attention.

“Oh, yeah,” the man said slowly. This time, he looked straight at him. He took the boxes from him and gave him a hefty tip. As he rode out of the forest road back onto the main road, the sun was already up and high, and he was sure the cars passing him by looked strange, like they were from the past.

He shook it off and kept driving to the pizzeria, but when he got there, the city had changed, and there was just an empty slot there.

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

When I saw the prompts, I was sure I would write the Possess one and skip the other two, but it almost went the other way around. I first wrote the Dumpster one and then the pizza thing, then I had a hard time finding a story for the Possess prompt. The mood it required seemed so far from the others. I was still processing them in my mind. When I write, the stories linger even when I have stopped writing. They are like “bad” possessions that won’t go away. It is like they have become an entity of their own. That happens with stories that have potential and with stories that have characters who have become real inside my head.

I know the Possess prompt’s story halted abruptly. I couldn’t figure out where it might lead, knowing that discovering the story would have taken hours, so I left it as it was.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a day full of stories!