Tag: writing

Two Sentence Stories (Part 8)

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As she lay in the hospital bed, her mother held her hand and told her to squeeze if the needle hurt. It did, but it was quick and her mother hurried to put the syringe back into her purse as she heard the doctors coming down the hall.

The best part of living in a haunted house is that I’m never alone. Plus if any of them depart or stop entertaining me, it’s very simple to create new friends.

He thought that the statue in the courtyard had been moving closer to his door each day and her was relieved to not see it from his window that morning. As he tried to leave through the front door, he found that he could not turn the knob, as thought it were gripped tightly from the other side of the door.

 

Excursion

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It is protocol to send the food first, before the passenger.

The appropriate food is placed on the platform. After five seconds it will disappear and it is very, very important to wait for confirmation from the other side that it has arrived and a report as to its condition. If the food does not appear at the other end, you must send more.

It is only safe to have the passenger step onto the platform when the destination platform receives more an item of food that is more than 75% untouched. It means that they are full.

The passenger must be transported once the recipient facility reports this condition has been met.  The window of time thereafter is not very long, a lesson learned quickly, if punitively. The hunger will always return.

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Rainfall

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The rain obscures the horizon
It swallows the lights and the dusk
Its approach inevitable
And I know that I cannot run

It has washed away the skyline
A bright city turned dark vista
Everything man made liquefied
A world of unprocessed design

No one has emerged from the squall
Some have managed to outrun it
But they do not pause to describe
What they saw behind the rainfall

My house was built by others' hands
I know that it will wash away
I am accountable for my form
And wonder if I will withstand

I will cross the border of rain
Trapping removed, I leave my home
To know however briefly
What parts of me may remain

A Shared History (Part 2)

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Part 2 is a lot longer than intended, but I didn’t want to split it into 3 parts

 

There was a shoe rack beside the front door and a table with keys on the other side. There were stairs directly ahead and two doors on either side of the hall.

He walked through the left door, confident with his knowledge of the house’s layout, into the loungeroom. Only the back wall showed damage, although the smoke would have not made this a safe place during the fire. He had analysed the information and come to the conclusion that there was no space that would have guaranteed safety in the house, anyone inside would have had to leave through the front door. Falling asleep in front of the television would not have save the woman who lived here.

He continued through the open doorway to the kitchen. It was much darker here, the back wall having largely collapsed. He peeked around, trying to find the source of the fire. The reports indicated that it had been an electrical fire, but he needed to know for himself so that he could accurately piece together the events.

The shelving on the right wall had been burned away. From the charring on the wall below, he deduced that the electrical socket on the wall beside the fridge had started the fire. He took only a few steps into the wall, staying under largely undamaged ceiling. He turned in a circle, his torch focusing on the highest point of the walls. He found what he was looking for above the doorway he had just come through. The smoke alarm.

He dragged a footstool from the loungeroom to the doorway and began to prise it from its holder.  With his feet sinking into the soft cushion, he could not quite get the height he needed. He leaned up onto his toes, the hand holding the torch pressed against the doorframe for balance. It was hard to twist the smoke alarm one handed, so he turned off the torch and put it on the footstool and blindly gripped it with both hands. The moment it clicked, he heard a noise from the entrance to the house and fell, the alarm thrown from his hands as he reached to catch himself. He landed on the charcoal smeared floor of the kitchen.  He quickly grabbed for the torch, pressing the lit end against his belly to smother it as he fumbled with the switch. The moment it was off, he froze and listened.

It would be so easy for someone to think that loud creaks were simply the house settling. He couldn’t have been that loud and he was sure that he had not screamed as he fell.

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A Shared History (Part 1)

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Ian considered himself an amateur historian. His area of interest was niche, but he spent many dark nights indulging his hobby.

He would find places of tragedy, whose last inhabitants had died in accidents there. He studied them as much as possible: blueprints, photographs, newspaper reports and even eyewitness interviews when he could. He would wait until night, then spend hours touring through the rotten interiors of once homely spaces. Once he was certain that the space lined up with his expectation, he would sit in silent judgement of the former inhabitants.

He would meditate in the most pertinent space with a torch, picturing the deaths and mistakes unfolding around him until the battery would die in his hand. It was calming to him, outwitting tragedy through his calm reasoning. He found it soothing in a way that nothing else in his life was.

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Between

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I lived here once, long ago
In the space where houses grow,
I had no walls, a roof or a bed
but had sweet rest, until I was dead

But life goes on and life must grow.
What lies beneath they need not know.
New families now live where I lie,
an unknown grave better utilised

It is soft peace to know their lives,
the families on either side.
They are my sisters and my brothers,
Aside my wall, strangers to each other.

My name does not need to be known.
I know theirs better than my own.
I am content as forgotten bones
at rest in the wall between two homes

Repetition

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Amelia awoke to the sound of rain on the tin roof.

The sound was so quiet at first that she wasn’t sure why she had woken up at all. As she lay in bed with her eyes stubbornly clenched shut, she found herself tapping a foot, as though she were impatiently waiting for her sleep to resume.

She regretted renting the attic room in this house, cheap as it was, as she had not slept well since she moved in. She found herself tired all through the day. Not just sleepy, but physically as though she had run marathons in her sleep. She found herself twitching at work and irritated. She’d been reprimanded for rapping her fingers impatiently during meetings.

It was worse when it rained, something that was increasingly regular. Every storm was amplified horribly and she found herself waking constantly to hear heavy raindrops falling what sounded like centimetres above her head.

At least, she reminded herself as she pushed her face into the pillow, her position at the top of the house meant that she couldn’t hear the inhabitants of the lower floors. No one seemed to board in the middle floor, the owners lived on the ground floor due to, she supposed, their frailty. Their faces didn’t look terribly old, but they wore thick, baggy clothes like they felt the cold acutely and they moved so slowly, hunched and stumbling around the house when she actually saw them.

Amelia rolled onto her back, expecting that she would need to wait out this period of restless energy. She tried to recall if she had been dreaming, as the feeling of stress in the pit of her stomach had not left her. Normally waking in her bed was a relief after a nightmare, but she couldn’t remember any nightmares.

Amelia straightened herself, folding her hands above the blanket over her stomach to emulate the perfect posture for sleep. Staring at the ceiling, she found her fingers tapping insistently without her conscious decision. They rapped at the back of her other hand, one after the other. One, two, three, four, pause… one, two, three, four.

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Appearance

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There is smoke in the air.

I smell it as I wake, wondering blearily what it could mean.

I stumble to the window, expecting to see a neighbour’s house burning.

Ever since the sickness began, we have been at war with each other. Paranoia ran through town faster than the virus and soon it was every household for themselves. Every person for themselves, I reminded myself as I tried to forget Mr Philips down the road burning a pile of his wife’s clothing, covering something that smelled like roasting meat when it finally caught fire. He had waved when he saw me staring through my window. I waved back, both of us seemingly terrified of seeming abnormal in this time.

Apart from the obvious physical conditions, the virus’ main effect is to dull response. A victim will be delayed in feeling pain, temperature, taste, even guilt. There is no cure, if they would even care for one.

Opening the curtain, I can see what looks like the entire town in my yard. They are holding torches and I do not see any mercy in their eyes.

Three Sentence Stories (Part 6)

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When my maternal grandmother died, she willed me her house on the strict condition that I not unlock the basement for the first month. This was easy, as I was out of the country for weeks immediately after the funeral. When I finally entered the house and opened the basement, I was horrified to find that my father had not run away years ago.

It took all night, but I have finally boarded up every window and door. There’s no way that the creatures can get to me now. I just hope that they don’t wake up before the fire consumes their house.

The voice over the speaker tells us that out of the ten of us, only one person will get to leave alive with one million dollars.

Looking around, I see that others are confused as one-by-one they realise there are eleven of us here. I can’t believe they forgot to change the announcement after all the money I paid to get into this.

The Arrangement

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Timothy Collins was not the rarest person to see in the hardware store. What was odd, the cashier thought, was the sudden regularity of his visits. He seemed to be wearing out his tools at an incredible rate.

As the town’s gravedigger, Mr Collins was expected to be ready to dig graves at fairly short notice. But, as the newspaper had joyfully proclaimed yesterday, the small town of Orwey had seen no deaths in just over a year.

So it was very odd for Mr Collins to be regularly replacing his tools. The cashier asked if someone had passed away. The reply was said with soft surprise, as though it was such an obvious answer that he had to think of how to phrase it.

“No, not yet”

The cashier assumed someone must have taken ill and decided not to press further. Mr Collins looked tired, but certainly seemed to be in good spirits. He did not, however, take his receipt.

 

The butcher was the first to see Timothy Collins digging in the park.

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