Tag: Prompts

Week 8 Post 2 – Shortcuts

On By MaryIn 2025, Prompts, WritingLeave a comment

Storymatic prompt cards were zombie and person who takes shortcuts, as well as an email that cannot be un-sent and success at last. It’s silly.

          Who breaks up with someone over an email? Dave, that’s who! It was the easiest, most expedient way to handle the situation. And he’d had a good reason. The cute new chick in the finance department seemed like she was hot to trot and he didn’t want to be a cheater. And it’s not cheating if you break up, right? So off the email went and off Dave went, straight to talking a pretty Penny into a closet for some hot, illicit office sex. Only she wasn’t at her desk, and she wasn’t in the break room, and by the time he found her she was already moaning up a storm in the closet with George (really? chucklefuck George?).

          And fuck, where did that leave Dave? He’d just flushed a three year relationship for this whore. He couldn’t unsend that email. Tina would see it and would probably throw his succulent at his head because Tina was crazy. He wondered if she’d even read it yet, if maybe he had time to try to hack her email account and delete it before she could see. He was beelining back to his own desk to try some damage control, checking his phone obsessively. He dreaded every buzz, wondering if it was going to be a text or a phone call, because when Tina read that email she was going to be blowing up his phone, absolutely chewing him out. It took him a moment to pay attention to all the headlines that kept making his phone buzz – it was the news app going bonkers, not his maybe-maybe-not-girlfriend.

          The zombie apocalypse had begun.

          The thing about the zombie apocalypse is that dipshits like Dave always think they’re going to be the ones to survive but they’re the first to get it. After all, Dave was always trying to find the easiest way out and sometimes there are no easy outs. So it wasn’t long at all before Dave was a zombie. The other thing is that being a zombie is a mite more horrific in reality – it turns out you can think. You’re not alive, you’re not able to return to life, you have to be inside your body as it rots and creaks and falls apart. You can’t control a damn thing you do. You’re stuck in that shambling corpse, wandering aimlessly until there’s food, and then you’re ripping it apart. And it’s not good food – it’s raw flesh. And zombies aren’t picky.

          So there you are, a ghost in a mindless eating machine, observing first hand the horrors you inflict on the world.

          And all that random aimless shambling between the murder mayhem? It was boring as fuck. Dave’s mind wandered, and he wondered if it was the same for all the other poor schmucks that were stuck. Or was it just him? Was he somehow the only one that was stuck, left behind in this strange hell?

          He spent so much time barely noting the world around him that he didn’t even realize he was in a familiar space until he was shambling through its doors. There had been no electricity anywhere in the city for months, so the bright lights attracted a lot of attention. Somehow one building had managed to become powered – maybe they had used some alternative source. He wasn’t sure. He could hardly direct his body towards investigating anything. Hordes of zombies before him had shattered the doors and windows and begun moving upstairs and into the rooms, looking for prey. He wasn’t sure if he had somehow managed to eke out some control of the corpse-that-was-formerly-he, or if perhaps the body held some memory of previous times. But somehow he found himself wandering into his old apartment. A computer screen flickered in front of him. He moved closer to it, barely able to make out the screen through his blurry vision, his almost useless dry eyes.

          It was open to an email inbox screen. How had they even managed to get the internet? Was the internet still a thing, somewhere out in the wider world? But there it was. Email. Not just anyone’s email either – Tina’s email. And – marked unread – his email to Tina.

          The rotting corpse hand shifted forward and awkwardly stiff hit something. The email deleted. He didn’t even know how it had managed that with one keystroke, but he felt a strange thrill of elation – success at last!

And that was when his head was bashed in by a potted succulent.

Tina sobbed as she recognized the zombie that had once been Dave, and smashed his head in again and again until there was no thinking matter left. Not that she was aware it was there.

Don’t Tell

On By MaryIn Prompts, WritingLeave a comment

I know, I haven’t been keeping up with my storymatic prompts as promised! But here’s a new haphazardly thrown together one!

The cards were “teller of secrets” and “what was that sound?”

          Andrea considered herself a little bit of a real life gossip girl, or maybe a real life Harriet the Spy. It was less of a blog and more of a social media account. And mostly it was pictures – she was just adept enough at stalking and snooping that she always managed to grab the best pics to really get the rumor mill running. It wasn’t a big town, they only had the one high school, but her follower list included nearly every resident of their city excepting the people that didn’t have social media. No one knew it was her, and it made her feel a little important every time people talked about it. She reveled in it, sometimes wishing she could reveal herself, but she knew it was best to never divulge the truth to anyone – she had told so many of her fellow student’s secrets, and everyone would hate her.

          Andrea was currently in the middle of looking into a really fun story she had picked up on – of the most popular couple in school, it was possible the girl was cheating. It might not even be true, but if Andrea could capture an image that suggested it was… and if it did turn out to be true, all the better.

          She was hanging out under the bleachers, half listening to the game and half listening to the girl in question talk to her best friend. But something kept catching her attention. It was almost like a creaking noise. She had heard it a few times and brushed it off as the shifting of the bleachers under the weight of the spectators. But the sound grew louder, loud enough to scare her. She studied the way the bleachers shifted above her and concluded they weren’t the source of the noise.

          But what was it? Ever curious, she followed the sound. At first it got fainter, so she turned back, playing a strange game of hot and cold as she attempted to narrow down where it was coming from. She finally found an especially dark corner, the creaking so fast and persistent that it sounded like a strange purr. She squinted, trying to see if she could spot what was making the noise.

          Something in the shadows shifted, turning. Bright glowing yellow eyes stared at her out of the darkness. The creaking stopped. Andrea drew in a deep breath, but before she could utter a single sound, it had jumped forward – she only had the nightmare visage of teeth glinting in the dim lights, inside of a mouth that came down to cover her head completely.

          For a moment she thought the blackness was death, but then she realized she was still there, alive, somewhere in that darkness. She felt the sudden burning sensation where the many teeth dug through her clothes and into her skin, and she tried to scream, but no sound came out. She tried to struggle but she was held firmly in place. A large, slimy tongue ran over her face, and she felt something like an intense burning pressure within her head…

          The sensation ended suddenly, the humid atmosphere of the creature’s gaping maw withdrawing, and Andrea found herself gasping in a whole lung full of clean, crisp night air. She tried to scream, but no sound came out. She twisted her head, trying to see where the creature was, but the whole of her vision was still a deep black. The world was strangely quiet. She ran blindly…

****

          “What do you think happened?” Andrea’s mother was distraught, looking at her daughter where she lay in the hospital bed.

          The doctor shook his head. “We have no clue. The damage is extensive – her eyes are gone, and all the internal organs of the ear are melted, damaged beyond repair. Her vocal chords are severed. The teeth marks make it look like an animal attack, but the residue left in the eye sockets and the ear canal almost suggests an acid was used. It almost looks like it was done on purpose. Do you know if anyone would have had a grudge against your daughter?”

          Andrea’s mother shook her head, staring absently into space, hardly able to comprehend. “Andrea doesn’t bother anyone. She keeps mostly to herself. What kind of monster would do this to a girl?”

Dinner With the Family

On By MaryIn Prompts, WritingLeave a comment

The prompt cards for this are “dinner with the family” and “butcher.”

I guess trigger warnings for dead babies and cannibalism if that’s a turn off for you.

If it’s a turn on for you, that’s not really good, but… enjoy?

   “You never sit and have a nice meal with your family anymore,” his wife complained often. It was a busy season for him as a butcher, and he welcomed the work. It was how he helped put that dinner on the table. There were the families that bought cows and hired him to cut and ground the meat so that they could freeze and use it through the year. There were hunters that did the same. On top of the usual labor of running his own small retail business, sometimes he came home late and exhausted. Despite how hard working he was, she always complained.

 It had been that way the night before also. He hadn’t really meant for anything to happen, but he was tired, and hardly responsive to her usual complaints, and she had become physical. She had pushed him, actually pushed him, while screaming in his face, and he had angrily pushed her back in retaliation. The baby had been on her hip through all of it, and she full just right to crush the poor thing – there was a brief terrified cry that cut off to an almost sickening silence.

When they both realized what had happened… it was instant grief, and instant blame. Why had she even tried to start a physical altercation when she was holding their child? Why had he even pushed back? He practically saw red as she screamed and wailed and laid the blame solely at his feet, and before he really understood what he was doing, could really stop what was happening… her face had turned a sickly purple as she gasped and fought for oxygen in his grip.

 For a brief moment, he realized he should stop. If he stopped, she’d be able to breathe again, and it’d all be just fine. But the baby was still dead, and nothing would be okay again. Instead, he tightened his grip, held tight to her neck and throttled until she passed out, and for several long moments after that.

 He sat panting at the exertion and adrenaline, staring at both of the bodies as a blind panic overtook him. What was he going to do? How was he going to get rid of them so no one knew?

It was an entire night of very hard work. Luckily, there was little blood splatter at the house – he tossed some of her belongings and some of the child’s things into a suitcase with her wallet and smashed her phone to bits to put in with it as well. He would dispose of those later, some small indication that maybe she had packed and left him. She’d never had her own vehicle because she didn’t like driving, so he didn’t have the headache of hiding a car that could be traced. When her friends and family came looking, all he’d have to do is morosely tell them that she took the kid and left – he vaguely knew that she complained about him constantly. The only thing that would stand out as strange to them was that she hadn’t gone to them… but certainly he could shrug that off and angrily say that he had no clue where or who she had gone to.

He took the bodies in to his shop, and he did the job he knew to do best. The bones might be problematic – he’d have to store those separately and figure out a way to dispose of them discreetly. But that still left all the properly cut and ground meat.

He sat down to dinner the next night, absently poking at the meatballs he had made for his spaghetti, slathered in a homemade meat based sauce, wondering what it would taste like. His stomach turned at the thought, but at the same time he couldn’t leave the evidence for long. He’d have to work through all of it over the next month. Eventually, someone might want to investigate what he had in his freezers, and there could be nothing left by the time they came searching.

He popped a whole meatball into his mouth and chewed, finding it to be surprisingly delicious. A funny thought popped into his head, and he laughed as he continued to eat. He was finally enjoying a nice dinner with his family.

The Notebook

On By MaryIn Prompts, WritingLeave a comment

Okay! I have finished Baldur’s Gate 3 and can maybe manage to keep my next playthroughs from taking over all my time. Also, I have created a page that lists all the chapters thus far for the 2023 writing challenge, so that they can be easier to access in order. The link is above next to the About link.

The cards for this one are: stranger’s diary, and a person who knows something other people don’t. I had the basic idea from the beginning and pretty much stuck with it. It’s been hard to keep these short because I feel like they need more details, but I also didn’t intend to create anything long with the prompt challenges (the goal being to write something very short in one sitting). Not sure if that makes this story more abrupt in some ways?

Anyhow: le bullshit.

          It was a plain composition book left in a common area of Richard’s dorm. He had picked it up and flipped through the first few pages thinking it might have a name and he could return it to its owner. Instead of the class notes that he expected, he found a diary. He had glanced around, asked a few nearby people if they’d seen who had left it, but no one claimed it. For a moment he was wracked with indecision. If he left it, whoever it belonged to might come back for it. But it would also be out for anyone to read, and he knew how embarrassing that could be for some.

          Richard considered himself respectful of other people’s privacy, so with the best of intentions he took the diary to his room. He’d flip through just enough entries to identify the person and then return the diary to them. And he’d never tell anyone what was in it. There was nothing that immediately identified the writer unfortunately. The first several entries were mundane – daily activities, to do lists that were crossed out. The person used initials instead of full names for the most part.

          Richard was about to give up and possibly take the book back to where he found it when something caught his eye. An actual name, fully spelled out. A girl’s name – Felicia.

          Richard found himself reading the entry carefully, drawn to the name by one fact – Felicia was also the name of a girl that had recently disappeared on campus. No one knew what had happened to her. The diary detailed her appearance, which matched the pictures Richard had remembered seeing of the missing girl. It listed other basic facts about her – the schedules she kept, the routes she took to her job or to her classes, the places she liked to hang out, the people she routinely interacted with.

          It was creepy, and Richard found that he suspected where it was going even before it got there. But reading the entry from the date she disappeared confirmed it.

          How she was kidnapped. Where she was taken. What was done with her.

          A strand of long dark hair was taped to the page in a squiggly spiral.

          Richard continued reading the next several pages. It looked like the diarist had continued as normal for several entries before detailing information about another young woman named Emily. From the description, Richard recognized her as a girl that lived in the same dorm as him. He guessed that the stalker had likely left the book behind after observing her downstairs.

          All of the information in the book suggested that the person that wrote it already knew enough about Emily to pull off a successful abduction, to repeat what he had done to Felicia, to possibly add her hair to the notebook.

          After reading the final entry, Richard closed the composition book and tapped the cover thoughtfully, considering his options.

*********

          Emily was abducted that night, before Richard had even brought the book to the police. He had handed it to the officers, explaining that he had found it in the dorms and wasn’t sure who it belonged to or if any of it was even real or some sick prank. Pointing out the more recent entries about Emily, Richard saw the officers exchange worried looks. “She was reported missing just hours ago,” one of them told him. “Would you mind staying and answering some questions?”

          “Not at all,” Richard said. Richard provided everything he knew would help, and wished them luck on the case.

          His fingerprints were all over the diary, so he knew it was a risk. But he felt almost certain that he handled what he left behind so much better. Certainly, he never left behind a full diary detailing his deeds. He drove a meandering route, making sure that no one was tailing him, returning to where he had been that evening. If he was lucky, the diarist would be pinned for the little spree he had started at the beginning of the semester. It had spiraled a bit out of control, admittedly – he should have started his hunts farther from where he lived. But if the idiot was caught for what he had done to Felicia – certainly he would seem a likely culprit for Richard’s victims. After all, how many college campuses had two active serial killers?

          All Richard had to do was cool his urges, keep them in check, be smarter about it in the future.

          But he could still enjoy the night with Emily.