Day 255 Writing Short Stories

Fang

The fangs thrust out. Then they went back in. She tested it twice more. Every time she made them appear, there was a light tingle in her gums and a great hunger that came with them.

Last night, she had been on her way home after a long night partying. It had been dark, and she hadn’t been paying attention. She had been quite out of it. Then it had happened, she had been attacked. She had screamed and kicked the woman, who had gone feral and bit her. She had gotten some of the woman’s drool in her mouth before she had been able to escape with bite wounds and a bruised back.

She had gotten home, reported the incident, and went to bed. She had slept and slept, only to wake up the next night, feeling odd. Hence, the experiment with her teeth, the mirrors, and the garlic. Her conclusion was batshit crazy. She had tried even that, to turn into a bat. It hadn’t worked. It was a myth or a TV trope. But the others had held. She was a vampire, and the woman who had bitten her yesterday was one too.

She knew she should be afraid, or admit her into a mental institution, or call the cops and tell them she was a predator now, but she felt unfazed. Her mind and body hadn’t felt this good in a long time, as if every joint, every action were hers. When she tuned in, she could see—not exactly see, but more like detect—her neighbors going on in their homes. It was like a red mist that pulled her towards them. Some looked tastier than the others, but she could control the hunger. She knew that if she ate, she wouldn’t eat close to her home.

She drew her jacket on. She was wearing her miniskirt, platform boots, and a tight top. She paused before she headed out. She could do this. She knew she could. It felt natural, and no morals were holding her back. It was as if being a vampire made more sense than being human. She smoothed her tongue behind her teeth and around her fangs. She opened the door and slipped into the night.

Analyzed

This is about a patient psychoanalyzing their psychologist. There were so many misconceptions in the prompt that I don’t want to touch it.

Virus

The shit had hit the fan just after the lockdowns. First, it was a common flu. People got sick. Then people started dying. There was a report that it was bad, and people were quarantined in their homes. That hadn’t helped either. The death rate kept accelerating. So much so that people around you started dying and fast, so fast that the societies collapsed. There was no government left. If there was, it had gone into the underground bunkers, which no one had seen in years.

He would have loved to say that was it. But that wasn’t it. The worst was yet to come. Only around 5 percent of the human population survived the virus. It was said to be made in a laboratory. So was the rumor. However, there was no one to gossip with. Just the neighborhood raccoons and the feral dogs and cats. There were a lot of them. Rats too. But he had seen a few humans around. In a moderately sized city, the survival rate was around two thousand individuals. But then the killing started, especially as it was hard to come to terms with the fact that those who had survived had mutated. Some had mutated in decapitating ways. His wasn’t bad. Not in the sense that others had it. He couldn’t be up and about in the daylight now. The light hurt his eyes. But he could see in the dark now. See, really good. That was a moderately easy thing to live with. But then there were the scales and the constant itching. He had been lucky to find a zoo pharmacy where there were ointments that made the itching less bad. He had seen people with extra legs and arms that did nothing, skin going all gooey-like so that every stick and stone got lodged into their skin, and other sorts of nasty things he wanted to forget.

But then there was the super-race. They were agile, strong, and close to human-like. They dominated the city where he lived. He was sure they dominated all over the world. They had their own unofficial city in the middle of the town. He kept away from them. The super-race was mad as fuck. They killed based on your usability. They had tried to recruit him. He had said no. Luckily, he had come across them in the night; he would be dead or forced to join otherwise.

He didn’t like people before the virus. He liked them less now. Being on his own was better. He was trying to build himself a transport that would take him across the country, to see if there were better places to live out there. He doubted that, but moving was better than staying put.

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

I liked the prompts today. I didn’t have the necessary concentration. My thoughts kept drifting into irrelevant things, meaning it took a long time to write them. Still, I’m happy that I got the concepts as I wished, and I think both the first and the third prompt have potential for a full novel. I can always return to them if needed.

Thank you for reading ❤ I hope you have a prolific day!