Day 345 Writing Short Stories

Morale

The little cheer, the quiet rumble, the hurray for others suggest, the morale of the party, the company, yet the silence of an individual and the success possessed. No hurrays, no cheers, just jealousy.

Pitted Against

The blade was thrown between them. Whoever got it would get to kill the other one. Such were the rules. Their fight would be aired, and the winner would earn their freedom.

He looked at the bigger man, not too far from him. He was half-naked, and his muscles glistened in the sun. Their episode was all about power versus whatever he was, the mind, he guessed. It couldn’t be more of a cliché, but he knew the modern audience loved simple things. And he didn’t mind; this was the only way to get out of the prison island. He just had to kill the other man.

At the back of the mind, it felt like it shouldn’t be so. Prisons were meant to keep killers away. They weren’t supposed to let them back into society. And his death or victory would be aired, and everyone would know what either of them had done to earn their spot.

They waited for the starting sound.

He might be faster than the big man, but he doubted it. The man looked as if he had done nothing but exercise since getting here. He had done shit. He had played others against each other to stay alive and get extra rations. There was no one to bid against the gigantic man now. There was only the blade and the struggle after that.

It was just his luck to get this kind of combat. The show altered the format every episode to keep people hooked and gambling. Back in the real world, when he had been a viewer, he had found the whole concept tasteless, but he had made some big money with it. He had always known who would win. Now, everything was stacked against him.

The starting sound blasted, and as expected, the huge man rushed to the blade. He didn’t even try. The other man was coming at him, grinning widely, expecting an easy fight.

He dashed to the ground, took a handful of dirt, and flung it at the man. He jumped at him and twisted his blade hand as the other man fought to see again. He got the blade off the man and stabbed him in his neck ten times. He stood there over the corpse, watching the arena.

They let no one out this easily. He swirled around and saw as the small gates at the sides opened up. There came a growing roar, and he knew that the smart man against a dumb oaf was not the story; this was Ancient Rome. And they would not let either of them leave.

Fantasy World

She had been in her own little world for so long that she felt awkward in the real world. The real world was also too depressing for her liking. There were no fantasy creatures, no kind fairies, no wise wizards; there were wars and destruction, but those were done in a highly warped way that made her feel uncomfortable.

She hadn’t been prepared to leave the college and her literary bubble.

She hesitated and took a glance at herself in the mirror. She looked like any corporate coder should. But she didn’t feel like one. Her father had gotten her a good job at his friend’s insurance firm. She was to be the junior statistic programmer. It was better than most of her classmates had gotten. Some of them had nothing to line up for, yet she would rather trade with them if it were up to her.

The real-world things, the bills, the corporate stuff, the housing, the future, marriage, all that was just not what they wrote in her fantasy books. Not in the way she was to face them now.

She sighed and left the mirror. Her father would be pissed off if she didn’t show up.

She left her house and took the tube to work, and felt as the world got a little grayer and monsters a little real.

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

Today’s prompts were hard. The details felt so restrictive, and I wasn’t happy about them. But once I started writing, the stories came. Okay, stories have been seen and done before, but not by me, and they felt like a fun exercise. It’s funny how presumptions can hinder oneself. It’s so easy to be swept away by assumptions and let them guide you, but we don’t really know without giving it an honest go. So here I am, proved wrong about my initial weariness and thoughts about restrictions, and happy that I wrote them.

Though we need assumptions and patterns to function, the thing is that we come into this world with knowledge (there was a science article about how brains are equipped with information from the get-go), but we have to cut some ties and form patterns to function, so we don’t have to second-guess everything and learn everything again and again. Yet, we are trapped by learned patterns, as sometimes they can be so narrow and even false. But without those patterns, life would be chaos. Scientists have proposed that autistic persons have even the useless neural networks active, the useless connections don’t sever as they are supposed to when we learn and experience things. That’s why they have a hard time functioning in a world full of social rules and sensory information.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a day without assumptions, have a good one!