Day 337 Writing Short Stories

Songbird

Nature was to be kept. To be controlled. It was her power. Her way to stay alive. She had risen to take the seat from the king, and now no one could challenge her life, her children’s lives. She used the earth and the sea to crush her enemies. She kept the kingdom happy with plentiful harvests. And she taught her daughters to do the same. When she was gone, they would have to defend themselves. There was always someone willing to kill them. There was no trust, just the execution and the play. That was the price of power.

She glanced at herself in the mirror and saw the deep lines around her eyes. There would be a few more years before the powers consumed her. It was the price to pay—a better price than the one she was born with. If she had followed what destiny had foretold her, she would have become a wife, a farm worker, a laborer, worked her hands raw and her back bent. But that was not the life she wanted for herself and the daughters she had seen in her dreams. That was a life for those who didn’t know how to dream big; those who didn’t dare to do what it demanded to get ahead in life. Life of the little people.

She snarled. It had been such a long time since she had thought about her past. It was the forgotten part of her.

She heard her daughters’ laughter and screams from the next room. They were tormenting each other. Good, she thought. There was no room for softness and care. They had to rule with iron and will, thinking only of what ensured their survival. Sometimes it was kindness. Sometimes it was punishment. But it was always rationality. There was no room for emotion. There were no room for the songbirds. Just ravens and buzzards.

Picture Album

She flipped through the album. There were so many faces and names she knew nothing of. All of her relatives. All hidden in her grandmother’s album. She wished she could ask her who they were and what they meant, but she was too far gone to answer her. She had a late onset of Alzheimer’s. It was only a matter of days or weeks before she was gone. She wished she had been more interested in her family history when she was young, but she had been too concentrated on the future not to notice the past. When her grandmother was gone, there would be no one to tell her about the past. All of these faces in the album were dead now. Their stories forgotten in the fleet of time.

She drew her hand over her belly, wondering what kind of future and past she could give.

Flower

The intoxicating smell floated around the neighborhood. It came at the back of the old foreclosure house with its unkempt garden. The house had been in dispute with the courts and the family that owned it for years. It was the black spot of the neighborhood, which was otherwise up and coming. People just wished that the house would go away, but now, now, as the garden was in bloom and the nights were turning sweaty and feverish, no one had time to think about the house and its market value.

There were only the strange dreams, the impulses to do reckless things. There were affairs, murders, and robberies, all heated in the area. It was like madness. No one understood why they did things they would never have done otherwise.

Then it was all gone. The pitch-black flower with blue-green bloom withered away, and sanity came back with the consequences.

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

See you on the 27th of April. I will leave today for my climbing trip and take the well-deserved rest I need. The idea of not writing and following my routine feels so odd. Writing the prompts has become an integral part of my life and morning routines that I wish I didn’t have to stop. Though I know it’s good to have a break and air my head, especially after those tired days lately, when I’ve been skipping a few days.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a great weekend!