Day 280 Writing Short Stories

Dust

A thick layer of dust lay around the house. It had settled there as a reminder that even when things stood really still, time kept happening. It made dust. It made autumn leaves. It made wrinkles, and it robbed away memories.

She stood there, in the abandoned house, watching as the world made no sense. Here, everything had stopped, yet it kept going. The soft sun sieved through the broken, milky-white windows, painting the wooden floor lighter. Between the fallen glasses that still lodged upright on the windowsill, spiders had made their egg sacs. Soon, when the sun was warm enough and winter stepped away, there would be hundreds of little spiders crawling all over the house, leaving their prints on the dust.

Here, everything made sense, and none did. Here, even though someone had cherished the place, time always found its way to things, both in good and bad. Here, she remembered that loss would heal with enough days passing. Here, she remembered pressing her cheek against her father’s chest, and feeling it rise and fall, rise and fall, unlike it had done when his time had come.

Here, she stood really still, and she could see tiny universes forming in the falling dust that played in the soft sunlight. Here, there was nothing else but this moment.

Fall

A boy falls from a bridge and is saved by a strange creature as he plunges into the cold water. I skipped this one because I need to leave for work.

Grandmother’s House

The long corridors twisted and turned. They snaked through the house, always changing shape, always taking them where they hadn’t meant to go. They kept their hands together as they moved through their grandmother’s house, searching all the hidden rooms. The house seemed to grow every night.

It was their first week of summer here. Their parents had dumped them on Sunday at their grandmother’s front steps, telling them it was good to stay in the countryside away from the city hustle. They had insisted that they could do time without phones and consoles. All they had with them were the dusty old books their parents had graciously gotten them. They hadn’t touched the ghastly stuff. Instead, they had been exploring the house and the surrounding forest.

Their grandmother left them alone for most of the day. She insisted they sit together to eat. All they did was eat and eat and eat.

“It’s here,” she said.

“No, it’s past there,” she said, pointing at the steps leading to the upper floors.

The smaller of the sisters frowned. The steps hadn’t been there a moment ago. The bigger of the sisters insisted they had always been there. Both as confused as the other.

They took the steps up. They had seen a light in the attic, yet their grandmother was in the garden. There had been a movement. They needed to know. The light and the movement had been there every day now.

The steps stretched long. So long that it was at least a hike to the mountains. But it abruptly stopped at a blue door. They swallowed and looked at each other, begging one of them to say, “It wouldn’t do; they needed to turn back.” Neither of them spoke. So it was with sisters.

They pulled the door open, and light blasted out of the room, blinding them. They lifted their hands over their eyes, shrieking.

“Come, come, come,” a voice said. It was an old, weary voice. A voice that spoke of time.

They opened their eyes, and there was an old woman there. Her wrinkles were as deep as their grandmother’s. She was dressed in a similar vein, and she could be their grandmother, but she was still in the garden.

They stepped into the room, and the door closed behind them.

In the middle of the room, there was a lighthouse lantern. The light circled the room, swooping past them, but now it didn’t burn their eyes. It seemed to have become softer.

They frowned. They looked at each other and then at the old woman.

“Come, come, come,” the woman repeated, motioning them to step where she stood.

They did as told, and there they could see the garden, where their grandmother read her book, yet she wasn’t there. She was here as the old woman next to them, but when they blinked, she sat back where she had sat in the garden.

“Time, time, time, a flickery thing, hence the light.”

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

I’m not sure what to write here. I feel like all I can think of is to crawl back to bed and sleep. I don’t know why I’m this tired all the time, even when I have had enough sleep. Maybe I need to get my thyroid checked again and see if there have been changes in my levels. A year ago, my thyroid gland became inflamed, and I got really sick. They took two biopsies and luckily ruled out cancer. Even so, whenever I get too tired or my heart races, as it has been doing lately, I fear the inflammation has come back.

I enjoyed writing the dust piece. It reminded me of the time I took pictures in an abandoned house. Even now, it feels like time stands still there, and I’m still there in the soft winter light. Abandoned houses are weird liminal spaces that play with our perception.

Anyway, I have to leave for work now.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a mysterious day!