Day 25 Writing Short Stories

The Light I Used to Carry

To make it in the city, one has to give themselves to its rhythm of morals. It’s different from the ways of the countryside, where I came from. Not much, but enough to shape my heart and my will. If I’m to exist, I have to hurry my steps and shield my mind’s eye, not see the downfallen, and pity their existence. Back at home, I would have offered my helping hand, kept food and my ear always ready for the needy. Such was the way. Such it had been for centuries. But here in the concrete, in the glass windows, and the cathedrals of money, there was no room for compassion. It was only the downfall of the possibilities one could create. And I had created a magical existence, where money kept floating to me. I only had to look away.

But I wasn’t meant to look away. The heart of mine withered with every hurried step I took. It took me further away from the nature I knew as a child. I had become something I didn’t recognize. That heart seeped into everything. Every person I touched. My corruption. The glimpses of myself in the mirrors scared me. The dead eyes and the tight lips that drew deep lines on my face were the appearance of the dying.

And then she touched me with her kiss of invisibility. I was no more. What I had was divided. No one cared to remember me. I stood at the corners like the ones I had walked past not so long ago, unrecognized. Her mocking laugh prickled in my back, sending shivers down my spine.

“A year for every penny,” her mocking voice stated, leaving me there to stand my hand reaching out for any alms the city was willing to give me, barely remembering the soft, yellow sparkles of light cast in the brook where I used to tip my toes as a child.

—

I’m not sure what to make of this. This was to be horror, and it was. But not the one I had been wishing to write so long. I had been waiting for the random number generator to give me horror as a genre, and now, as it did, I couldn’t find the stories that had been haunting me all these days. There was only the sense of loss I feel in cities. The idea that we somehow all got this wrong. I seem to dwell in a false memory of my childhood and the collective memory of what it used to be like before we all moved to the cities and started dreaming dreams of status and money, working in factories and offices.

I want to be that child again, content to run along the riverbed and happy when I find the perfect clay to play with.

I have reached the age of nostalgia. Sigh.

Today’s prompt was to write a period horror story from rags to riches, in first person. Now, as I type this down, I could have written a manor horror with all the Gothic elements I love. But such a story didn’t seem to dwell in me. There was just her haunting expression.

Thank you for reading! Have a day of lightness of being ❤