Day 349 Writing Short Stories

Hymn

The desert rolled out from the circle of fire, turning dark at the corners. The smoke from the fire rose into the vast starlit sky. The water was coming to a boil, and the leaves would be soaked in.

This was his hymn for existence. This was his song without words. Here, he could see as the sky whale made across the universe. Here, he could witness what it meant to be a human on a planet so vast and complicated that it left a mere mortal baffled.

Here, there was only this moment, and no other moments had to be remembered.

The leaves soaked into perfection. The tea on his lips warmed his whole body.

Time Travel

Now there was a fix. A fix none of them had been looking for. A fix they had accidentally stumbled onto. The world was going to end in three weeks, and they could save it. Save it through time travel. Time was cyclical after all. They could alter parts of it to prevent the upcoming nuclear annihilation. But none of them could agree on where to start and how. What was the pivotal factor driving the world’s powers to this situation? All of them had their own opinions on who was to blame and what the fix would be. The physics department was divided.

She found it all silly buggers. The guards at the lab had been quadrupled, and the security was insanely tight. But they didn’t seem to care that she existed. They didn’t see her as someone who could influence the upcoming events. Of course, they didn’t. They thought nothing about the lab mice, or about what they heard, saw, and experienced daily.

She had become test subject 910 for a cause. This cause. Her species had always known that the time was cyclical; they just didn’t know how to build a machine that could free them of their own timeline. Now humans had one, and they silly buggers were riddled with emotions, ideologies, and fallacies. She sneaked behind the towering guard’s shoe. Of course, he didn’t see her.

She slipped into the machine and entered the coordinates. She knew exactly where she needed to go. It was simple. It was obvious. It was the time when all this began. It was the time when humans started telling stories around the campfires. She would make those stories better. She would be their source. Their muse. She would see to it that the stories were better than the ones they had come up with on their own.

Monster

Her song echoed through the halls of the old abandoned manor. It was a song about friendship and kindness.

The hairs on her back rose, and she knew that the thing was close. The thing that had been killing and taking children. She continued her song, luring it closer.

Her toes curled, gripping the floor as if to keep her from fleeing. The terror was there. It would soon come. She could hear its broken breath, smell its fleshy fur.

The song reached its climax, and the yellow eyes emerged from the darkness. The monster swayed from side to side, unable to attack her. Its teeth were stained dark. Its breath pulsed towards her. And she heard its heartbeat. She only had to stop singing, and it would tear her throat.

She sang about nature, about altruism.

The monster dropped to its knees, tears rushing down its cheeks. It remembered what it was like to be a human, what it was like to be the victims it had taken.

When the song came to an end, there was no more of the monster it had been. There was just a woman curled naked on the floor, her curse driven out.

All anyone wanted was to be remembered as the child they were.

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

I feel awful that I didn’t write yesterday. I had all the plans to do so, but the morning just slipped away from me as it almost did today. It is because of those two nights without enough sleep. I have been feeling sluggish in the mornings. I need to change something, and that is the time I hit the bed to read. If I get enough reading time, I always have a good night’s sleep.

It is so easy to do unnecessary things and stretch the day longer, even when I know my alarm will wake me up just shy of 5 a.m. I love waking up early, before the world has started to spin. The quiet time is perfect. But I have put too many things into my mornings. Too many exercises to do, so by the time I hit my computer to write, the world is starting to wake, and I’m already tired.

I need to change things, but I’m bad at it. I’m bad at changing my routines once I have made them, even when they are tiring me out. It feels like giving up. It feels like I will lose something. And it’s so much easier to do them when I wake up rather than in the evenings. And the silly thing is that I already cut so much out of them just a few months ago.

More often than not, the climbing and training for it hinder my writing and publishing, especially the marketing and getting things other than writing done. I just don’t know how to give up that part of my life and free time to write. It’s especially hard now as I can climb outdoors. It’s a special kind of drug to climb outdoors. Too addictive.

Nevertheless, changes have to be made.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a lovely day!