Day 22 Writing Short Stories

Mud

She hadn’t exactly expected her life to go like this. She had expected a normal life. One with all the houses, cars, and relationships, throwing dinner parties and dressing up all nice and pretty. Oh, she was dressed up nice and pretty now, on a swamp monster level. Her dress was all lacy with a bust to enchant her long neckline. But she was a swamp thing, and had been one since the world went to hell. She occasionally saw living things, but they thought it was a good idea to shoot at her and flee whenever she tried to get out of the water and ask for help.

She would ask for help from her fellow zombies, but they didn’t seem to have even one shared mind to call their own. She wasn’t sure what had happened to her, what had gone wrong with her death to make her aware of her predicament. And it was one. She was lonely as heck and stuck in the water, unable to free her feet from the mud. She didn’t feel good about eating an occasional brain she caught, especially when she had tried to chat with that said brain before accidentally killing the wearer. But she was a logical creature, and it seemed like a waste of a good brain to leave it to rot in the water.

Again, she watched as a huge RV rolled down the dusty road. She heard all the yee-haws and rapid gunfire in the air, and then they were gone. This time, they didn’t decide to ditch some imbecile for the zombies, for her.

She gurgled at them, cursing her rotted tongue and larynx.

She snapped at the zombie next to her, who had gotten overly excited by the sound she made. The man swayed his arms towards her, and she caught them, keeping a tight grip. The man yanked at her again and again. She could feel the mud around her ankles yield. There was another swift move from the zombie, who was getting agitated by the dead flesh around his arm. One of her feet popped out of the mud, and she released her grip. She kept swaying back and forth to release the second foot. Then it was easy to follow the tracks the RV had laid on the dusty road.

—

I finally get horror, and it’s to be horror, comedy done with an experimental style in third-person perspective. No experiments here. I don’t know how to begin to experiment with language. Language is the hard part for me in writing. I hear the words, the sentences; I feel them inside me, and I need to lay them as they are. I find it hard to play with them as the great wordsmiths do. I wonder if it’s due to a lack of confidence, being a non-native English speaker, or my dyslexia. Who knows? I had ample opportunity here to experiment with language, but I didn’t. Sigh. But I got horror, so I’m happy about that. I didn’t know I loved horror this much before I started writing these short stories.

Thank you for reading! Have an un-muddy day ❤