Day 363 Writing Short Stories

Gargoyle

The fast-flowing city poured down the cobblestones to the small harbor next to the canals. There, people and things swirled onward. Only at night did the constant swirl come to a halt, and it could follow a single path through the cobblestones.

Now, there was a woman. She had stifled her light just up the street, just before walking down the path to the harbor. Harbor, it realized, held so many secrets. It had seen the cops move amongst the tugboats. It had witnessed men with daggers and spells take hold of the harbor from other men with daggers and spells. And the woman was going just there.

It moved its stony nose, trying to catch her scent, her essence. It was not pure. But it was not nasty either. She smelled of flour and lilacs. She smelled of the past and future; it saw flowing past it every so often.

It observed her flight to the harbor. And soon enough, she was surrounded by the men who owned the daggers and the spells. They smelled of piss and ale, dirt and leather. They smelled all the wrong things. It was certain that she would die.

But she was stronger than her scent. There were tricks up her sleeve. She drew death from there, and some men with daggers and spells fell. But there was more. The one with the death on his side, too, and she didn’t see him from the shadows. It saw the man draw its wards.

It never intervened. Not for the fast things. But there was a memory here. A memory of flour and lilacs, and the gargoyle came down. It crashed on the big man, who was drawing his skeletons from the ground. The woman took the skeletons down, and their eyes met. Hers were green as the leaves, and its was as lifeless as the skeletons should be.

She nodded in appreciation.

It expected her to speak.

She stuck her tongue out. It was cut in half.

And it nodded slowly in response. Words were not made for the gargoyles either in the first place.

News

In breaking news, the Kingdom of Kletter has offered to host the next round of peace talks between the neighboring warring countries. The King states his divine right will set the countries right, and if the countries won’t accept his resolution, he will send his knights to bring order in both places.

There are talks about the Kingdom of Kletter’s rebuilding plans for the warring areas. The King has been reported to say that a mine here and there would do some good for both countries. The King sees the whole thing as a way to fuel the economy and as a good thing for the merchant class.

Silence

The absence of words. The constant listening. There she found her newfound peace. She had never realized how much the need to respond had consumed her, how much finding a socially acceptable response or words at all had taken out of her. She had turned her into a puppet of the image in her head of what one should be like, and now, in the forced silence, there was no need. She could just nod, and if she needed to write a response, she would write it down with simple words, without a hassle.

She loved the absence of speech—the quietness of her soul.

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

I can highly relate to the silence prompt. As a kid, I loved listening to other people to learn what they thought and saw, but I soon learned that I was expected to speak, that you had to grunt at least. I’m a good listener, but I’ve learned to speak, too. I’m pretty good at speaking to other people nowadays. Really good. I learned it first as a bookstore clerk, seeing strangers day in and day out. Then I honed my skills as a therapist. But actually, I rarely enjoy talking to people. I hate the little conversations one has to have to carry out the interactions. I rarely know how to respond, or that’s not true. I know what to say, but I don’t see a reason for it. I would love to talk about empires, social behavior, the rules and laws of psychology, consciousness, philosophy, wars, fantasy, and writing, but people want to talk about people things. I still wish I didn’t have to speak, that I could just exist as a listener.

Anyway, I actually found what follows when the prompts stop. I still want to write stories, but I want to learn. So I only write one prompt, not to overwhelm me, but I do it as I wrote yesterday. I will make a chart listing genres, styles, and perspectives, and I will raffle off the angle from which I will approach the story. Let’s see if that will amount to something. It will be interesting to see what follows, if anything really does. I love these little stories I get to write.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a day of little stories!