Day 279 Writing Short Stories

Blemish

Good stories define you. They tell you what the world is like. What is true and what isn’t. They tell you what the emotional stakes are. I try to be true to good stories, but I might lie. When I tell you my sister, my darling, loving sister, who I adore, is a blemish in our family line, a liar and a thief, you must understand that I’m telling you the truth. That’s not a lie. But there are other lies. Lies about my family, my past, my future. It might all have happened, or none of it did. But I would never lie to you about my sister and how she became a pirate. I would never lie to you about such things. Still, I let you decide what to believe.

Maybe I should start the story somewhere. Let’s start with her and me. She is not my twin, not in the traditional sense. She was born two years before I was. So, practically, we were twins. We did everything together. We hunted trout in the stream just beside our home. We caught butterflies for our homeschool projects, for governess Whitmore. A stern woman with no joy in the world. We called her a witch, a spinster, a spider-legged demon behind her back and laughed. We never dared to say that to her face. She would have eaten us.

Sometimes my sister opposed our governess, and she would end up locked in her room. I would always climb to her second-floor window to keep her company. We would play silent games. Games of great battles, where we took over the lands and ruled them as sisters. She was always the commander of armies, and I ruled the courts.

So our childhood went. We roamed the woods, the moors, the streams, the oceansides. We were wild and ruled by our governess. Occasionally, we saw our mother, father, and three brothers, who were going to inherit the estate and be dukes and lords and all that was bestowed upon men. Then she grew her hair long, her black hair that enchanted men alike, and she wore dresses and heels. I never did. I still wore my leather boots, which made it easy to climb onto the roof and survey the lands. Now, you wonder, how was it so that she became a pirate, a thief, and a liar, and I didn’t. Stories are like that. They make no sense. I would have been happy to be a pirate and a thief, and even occasionally a liar, but that was not for me. That was my sister’s path to take, as I never went to the parties she went to. I stayed home to read or gaze at the stars.

Like most women at the time, like most women in history, who are fair and rich like my sister was, men are attracted to her. And there her story starts. Her story didn’t start with being a commander like mine did. Her story started with her magical hair and her poise. There we stop being twins, sisters. There she grows out of my juvenile behavior. She says as much.

She sees those men as her way out of the streams, the moors, the family home. She falls in love with the wrong kind of man, who promises to take her to distant lands and make her his queen. At first, she sent postcards, and I got to read about her wonderful expeditions, strange flowers, and animals. She is happy. I can tell. But the lines become fewer, and then they stop.

I’m too busy to notice. I have too many duties. One of them is to attract a husband, or so my mother says. So I get a cat.

I live my life as evasively as I can. But sometimes I bend to my mother’s will and wear a dress. It never attracts the same attention as her wearing a dress did. Yet, I’m not destined to become a spider-legged spinster as governess Whitmore did. I have my own path that began in one of those parties. It lies behind masks and evasive movements. I become part of the government, but not as a femme fatal, but as a spy, whose pursuit for justice knows no bounds. I surrender my life to the cause and my cat.

I could leave the story there. Or I could tell you about my brothers who became who they were meant to be. They make babies, who will one day follow their father’s steps and so on. But you have read about such lives, so I won’t bore you. You want to hear about my sister; everyone does. So do the newspapers. She becomes a blemish on my family, forcing my mother and father to publicly disown her.

But I don’t come across to her as a reader. No, I come across her as a spy and a sister. Her hair doesn’t look as smooth and silky as it used to. Her skin doesn’t glow the way it did. There’s a baby, but no husband. He was no good. There’s a boat and a crew that obeys her will, and like with trout, she catches the empire’s boats with the same cunning she used in our childhood. She is ruthless, and she has sent captains to their watery graves.

When I see her, it is not the cruelty I notice. It is not the worn skin that catches my eye. It is the loneliness that shines in her. She has lost my courts and become a commander on her own. I want to hug her tightly and tell her that I have come. I don’t. I have my cause, and it is with a poison and slit wrist that she goes.

So the newspaper writes. They write about her tragic life, the little son left behind, taken by my family. They don’t write about her sister, who adored her more than life. They don’t write about how she would do anything to save her sister. They don’t talk about second chances and forgiveness. They don’t tell the truth.

Poet

A poet is hired to write lyrics for a pop artist. He tries his best to make them meaningful, but the producers don’t like them. He writes the corniest lyrics there are, and it becomes an instant hit. I skipped this one.

Witch In The Woods

There’s a lore in the town that a strange woman lives in the woods and she is a witch. A man sets out to find out if this is true. I skipped this one because the first prompt ran long.

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

I had fun writing the first prompt. I wanted to write about sisters and their paths, so I had to make the word ‘blemish’ work for the story, and it did. I wasn’t sure what would happen to the sisters and what the story would be, but I knew it was about love.

I have been thinking about family lately and the roles we women play in society. I used to want to shake free and have no ties, no demands, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. I’m blessed with a sister whom I love and respect. We are night and day on so many things; in the end, it doesn’t matter. It is a bond like no other, and I have to work harder to cultivate it. There’s no taking it for granted.

I will never become a mother. It was a choice I made a long time ago. But I’m an aunt, a wife, sister, daughter, and a friend. I want to cherish those aspects of myself. They don’t make me weak; they make me strong. All we have are the connections we create. They make life so much more meaningful. I see the cost of not having connections every day in my line of work. I see the pain and mental disorders that come with not having anyone. I don’t want that in my life. We cannot be lonely islands in the sea, or pirates who take what they want with disregard for others. The silly thing is that we need each other. I need you.

I would love to think that if my sister needed a second chance, I would give it to her. I adore her and her strength as a mother, a nurse, and a leader. She runs a children’s ER and cancer unit in a hospital.

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