Day 340 Writing Short Stories

Straw

The straw swirled in the water, making a loop around the riverbed and down the stream. She followed its flight, unsure why she had dropped it in the water. Just a basic instinct and nothing more. Yet, she kept doing that, tugging every straw, touching every tree, brushing her fingers against the petals of the flowers. It was as if she had to witness the world through her hands, otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

Friend

She was nervous. They had never met, but they had been talking to each other for a better part of the year. Now they were in the same city, and there was no reason to meet up. It was silly that she was feeling this way. They knew everything about each other. He liked painting and reading books. The same books she did. And he knew she enjoyed skating and being outdoors. Yet, they clicked.

He had suggested a skating park as a meeting place. She was already there, alone. The places looked like it had been forgotten. The graffiti was old, and the ramps looked like they hadn’t been used for a long time. The ivy from the nearby trees was making its way through the cracks into the ramps, splitting them apart.

She sat on the ledge, watching the decay with a morbid curiosity.

“Sorry about the place. It is hard for me to get around people,” he said.

She recognized his voice. They had talked so many times when neither of them could sleep. He had helped her to calm down, to see the beauty of existence so that she could eventually fall asleep. And she had assured him that she accepted him, that they were friends, that she would always listen to him and answer all the questions he could ever think of.

She turned to face him, and she swallowed. He was blue. Not the Smurf sort of blue. But an alien sort of blue. His face was alien, too. He nervously shuffled his feet, and she took him in.

“I,” she began.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have—”

She got up and rushed towards him, hugging him tightly.

“It must not have been easy,” she said, still embracing him.

He tied his long arms around her and said, “I just needed someone to know.”

“Now I do.”

Cloud

My mind draws a blank here. This was a story about a cloud, and I can’t seem to come up with anything.

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

Sometimes I wonder if there was ever a better world or a day we were all happy and content. Could such a thing even exist, or is restlessness forever bound to us, forced on the world by the nature of existence as a law of everything? Is it so that we can only steal those moments for a while, and then they are gone, and we are left to dream of that perfect bliss for years to come?

I naively wish that there was a world where quiet, kind, beautiful moments were all that mattered. Where it was okay to sit and watch as the river flows by, to witness as the wind bends the sunflowers, and listen to the songbirds sing their songs just before the sun sets. But there is money. There is duty. I’m required to fix things I cannot fix. To care for and take on the burdens of my clients and their parents, and as beautiful as it can be to help others, I’m bound to it by money and corporations. And my clients are ever so restless, and part of that seeps in.

Couldn’t there be an alien friend who tells us there is more to existence than the one that we have invented here on Earth?

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a wonderful day full of aliens!