Day 21 Writing Short Stories

Kill

My mother said I was only good at one thing: being fearless. She used to carry me on her back as she went to hunt the monsters, and instead of screaming as my brothers did, I would cheer her on. I laughed when the blood sprayed on my face. I can still remember her and those days. It was before I was taken to the mines to work. She was gone, and my brothers were not kind men. They sold me on after she died.

The world is not kind. That much I learned early on. But once you have a knife, you can have a destiny. And when the foreman wasn’t looking, I made myself one, slit his throat, and escaped that hellhole. From then on, I knew killing came easily to me. I have no qualms about that. Someone might argue that it was to kill or to be killed. I think such lines are for fools. There’s no moral high ground in killing. I am not, nor was I, a liar.

I didn’t return to my brothers. What good would that do? They were two oafs who deserved all the misery they got. But I returned to my roots—the roots of my mother. I began killing the bounties pinned on the tavern walls. They tried to rob me with the payments for me being a girl and all, not believing that I could have done what I did. They accused me of stealing the kills.

No more. Having someone’s balls hanging from your blade stops any speculation. Mad eyes can do that too. So my lovers tell me. I have as mad as they come.

But I live a good life now despite my brothers or my mother’s madness in me. One with a house to call my own and servants to pamper all my needs. Not that I let them. They are more there to be rescued from worse fates. They are my one good deed in life before I go, like my mother did, killed by a monster. I have left all that I have to them, trusting my life in their hands every time I drag myself back from monster lairs. I will kill my way to exist until then. There’s always some monster willing to terrorize the not-so-good folks of the town.

—

More monsters! I got them in despite this being a rags-to-riches story. I find the rags-to-riches tale difficult to write. Somehow, I think there should be a great moral story in it to state that happiness before money is somehow a superior thing. But money in the world we live in is necessary. You don’t need trillions of it, like one person in the world might think — you know who — but you still need a moderate amount to live a good life, where you can take care of all your ills and ailments, without having to worry about unplanned events. Of course, if writing about utopias, dreaming of a world as new, there could be that moral. Or someone realizing that there was a way to escape the constraints our modern society puts on us by gathering or growing our own food. But I think there would still be some way to trade our time and products with others.

This one was a comic (didn’t quite get the tone right) and a fantasy rags-to-riches first-person story.

Thank you for reading! Have a rich day ❤