Day 303 Writing Short Stories

Translucent

Souls come in all shapes and sizes. They are not translucent as people imagine they are. They are as solid as any motherfucker can be, and she hated them.

She shouldn’t. It was her job to coax them, ease their torment, and build an army from them, yet she hated them. They were all whiny little things that complained about this and that. Boohoo, so you died!

Get over it. So do all of us. She wanted to say. She never did. They little fuckers could be annoying and uncompliant if you offended their sentimentality. So she played nice and agreed with them that a terrible wrong had been done to them for them to die, but could they now hurry and push inside the bottle so she could grind their souls into dust to power her necromantic spells.

Her master was yelling somewhere up in his lair of doom. She was to build him an invincible army from the dead. Now she was powering the skeletons she had hauled out of the local cemeteries. Some got their original souls back, though reshaped. It was highly dangerous to give them their original souls back in an original state. It would only bring trouble. People were overly attached to their bodies and memories, insisting on having some autonomy over their actions. They didn’t seem to get that there was no autonomy in the army. You did as you were told.

She installed yet another ground soul to a skeleton and made it sit in the corner to wait for the master’s command to march.

The whining of the souls she held in her command was reaching its crescendo. So was her headache.

“Shut up!” she shouted.

The basement fell silent.

That’s it, she thought. She had had enough of all this. She would quit her job as a necromancer and move somewhere nice and warm, far away from her master and his army and any people for that matter, and go mad in a swamp or some other remote location.

She released the souls from her command, and they surged out of the basement. The screams upstairs indicated that they had been felt and seen.

She hurried to her closet to pack her bag before the master could fight his way into the basement and force her to obey. She had long ago gotten out of his commanding spells, thinking working for him was a good career move anyway. But it hadn’t been. So it was time to run.

White Lie

A white lie snowballs into a great one. I skipped this one.

Regret

Write a different way for your past regret. I skipped this one too.

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

I have been sleeping lousy for two nights in a row, and while it doesn’t affect the creative part of writing, it affects endurance. I feel tired sooner than I usually would. Hence only one short story. I hope today’s evening is more uneventful after my sports massage, so I can just rest at home and go to bed early with a good book. Now I will cuddle with the cat on the sofa before heading to work. He is napping next to the keyboard now. He was on my lap as I wrote my book and part of the Translucent story, but then I fidgeted too much, and he moved onto the desk.

There is a thick fog outside my window. The city looks hauntingly beautiful, and I like the mood altogether. I wish a few jackdaws or magpies would be playing outside, but for some reason they are nowhere to be seen—just a few pigeons.

But now I’m off.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a cheerful day!