The Notebook

On September 12, 2023 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.

Plastic

On August 8, 2023 By MaryIn Prompts, WritingLeave a comment

The cards were “obvious plastic surgery” and “person with a very limited vocabulary”

This was hastily done in 30 minutes and not expounded upon because Baldur’s Gate 3 released a month earlier than I was expecting and that is just my life now. (Or that’s the excuse, anyway)

At first, it had seemed like something out of Dracula. Philip had been hired to help notarize a whole slew of legal documents for a wealthy individual, and because he was a traveling notary and the process would take several days, he was offered a place to stay within the man’s mansion. Dr. Grady had insisted – the house was remote and far from the nearest town, which was so small it didn’t even have a proper hotel. Considering the prospect of making a daily two hour drive along the twisting mountain roads he had come in on, Philip had been grateful for the offer.

He had somewhat reconsidered when he had met the woman that was assisting them. Celeste didn’t speak at all – only gestured with her hands. And she was wearing what looked to be a porcelain mask – smooth and pale and inexpressive. It was strange and slightly off putting, but he made no comments. Because she said nothing to him, he avoided making eye contact and didn’t speak much to her. She made him nervous.

By the second day, Philip realized that the mansion seemed mysteriously absent of people besides Celeste and Dr. Grady. He didn’t think Celeste was the one cooking the meals that she brought to him, but when he had wandered into the kitchen the previous evening, there had been no one present. His room had been tidied while he had been working, and the towels had been refreshed. But he saw no staff. The grounds were meticulously cared for outside, but he saw no gardeners. The place was expansive enough that he knew for a fact that there had to be people that took care of these things, but they seemed to stay out of sight.

The house was large and beautiful, and everything was bright – the exact opposite of a gothic nightmare. The documentation he was working on was very normal, except for the volume of work – which made sense, as Dr. Grady owned and managed quite a number of assets, all inherited from a family whose wealth stretched back generations. Philip did his best to put it from his mind, and very quickly the work came to an end.

It was his last day. Celeste was showing him out to his car – which had already been pulled around to the front entrance and parked to wait for him. He could see that there was someone sitting in the front seat of the car. After tossing his overnight bag into the backseat, he turned around and looked up at Celeste. “It has been a pleasure,” he mumbled politely, finally looking her in the face.

He froze in horror as he studied her, really seeing for the first time that it wasn’t a mask at all. Her face was so still and placid, her skin so smooth that it appeared like porcelain – but it was her actual skin, so frozen that it looked like glass. He had expected to see the edge of the mask, detached and floating above her eyes, but there was no space between because it wasn’t a mask – her eyes, the only expressive part of her, shifted swiftly, studying his face. He heard his car door slam, and turned to see another woman, walking around to bring him his keys. He stared in horror as he realized her face was also similarly frozen, her eyes staring at him warily as he swiveled his head back and forth, his mouth agape.

He snatched his keys from the lifted hand, perhaps a little harder than was necessary, and snapped his mouth shut. Forcing a strained smile, he thanked them again, several times, perhaps a touch too profusely. Before he knew it, he was in his car, driving away.

He glanced into his rearview mirror, watching the two women stare silently at his departing vehicle. He could see others appearing – stepping out of hedges, standing at windows. And though he couldn’t make out their details, he felt certain that they all stared from underneath similarly plasticized faces, all silently watching him drive away.

The Wrong Time

On July 25, 2023 By MaryIn Prompts, WritingLeave a comment

The cards for this one: wig, and a person born in the wrong time period.

It’s choppy and could probably be reworked/lengthened to make more sense and flow better. But childhood cancer is not really a fun subject so I’m kinda glad to be done with it.

Hannah could still remember her older sister Judith vividly. Judith had chestnut colored hair that fell in luxurious curls midway down her back and bright green eyes and freckles. Hannah remembered the games of tag, the shouting matches over pink Starbursts, and cuddling together under the blankets with a flashlight when Judith would read to her before she could read for herself. When she had been small, Judith had been the center of her whole world.

Judith used to say she was born at the wrong time. She loved the Little House on the Prairie books and Anne of Green Gables. She was obsessed with the Oregon Trail game. Hannah could remember the first time Judith had finished Anne of Green Gables, she had walked around the house fussing over wanting a dress with puffed sleeves. When their mother had pushed back, trying to convince Judith she’d be happier with more modern styles of dress, there had been a full on meltdown, with Judith flinging herself dramatically to the floor and crying. It had been both incomprehensible and fascinating to Hannah at the time, but despite her lack of understanding, she had also cried full blast with Judith. She could remember the flabbergasted look on their mother’s face, staring down at them on the floor.

She could remember when Judith got sick. The times spent at the hospital, ignored by their parents, who were devoting all their time and energy to Judith. She knew it was wrong to feel resentful of all the attention Judith was getting, and she felt sad that Judith felt so awful. She was often shunted into the care of aunts or her grandfather, or the neighbors in an emergency. There were a lot of emergencies. Still, a part of her was convinced that things were going to be fine.

Hannah had watched as Judith’s hair had fallen out from the treatment. She could remember Judith being fitted with a wig, her face quite grey and drawn at the time as she glared at her reflection in the mirror. And Hannah had sympathized – the wig, while good, was nowhere near as beautiful as Judith’s long chestnut curls had been. “It’ll be okay, Judy,” their mother had said, adjusting the wig. “You’ll get better and your hair will grow back.” And Hannah had been completely reassured of that truth, and chimed in that their mother was right.

It had been devastating to Hannah to lose her sister, because she had been so sure that Judith would get better one day. Hannah grew up, getting older than Judith had been when she died. All too fast, she was older than her sister would ever be. She spoke very rarely of Judith, and some of her closest friends didn’t even know she had ever had a sister. But there were times when she missed Judith quite a lot. She missed her the year that Judith would have graduated high school, and she missed her presence at her own graduation.

She learned at some point that Judith’s particular cancer was difficult to treat and few recovered or survived. She resented her mother’s false optimism, and stopped talking to her so much once she moved out. There was one day, partway through her first semester of college, that Hannah had read an article that brought Judith to mind immediately. It declared that they had made breakthroughs in treating Judith’s particular cancer – that the prognosis was now very positive for patients. She ran her fingertips across the screen of the phone, and thought of Judith’s childhood declarations of being born in the wrong time. And suddenly, she found she agreed.

Judith had been born too soon.

Little Star

On June 27, 2023 By MaryIn Prompts, WritingLeave a comment

The cards for this one were: teenager, and garage sale.

It had been a boring summer for Tim. They had just moved to a new town, so he didn’t have any local friends yet, and his mom’s new job had her working nights, so she didn’t want him playing games in the house while she slept. Apparently even with the headset on, he yelled too much and too loud, and after the first week of summer he had been banned from touching his game systems until after 4 pm when she was awake. Instead, he spent his days riding around on his bike, exploring the nearby neighborhoods.

This town didn’t have straightforward streets. Instead of blocks laid out in easy to navigate squares, the roads looped and twisted, sometimes creating a detour from a main street threading through the entire neighborhood, only to return to that very same street. Or occasionally they ended in dead ends and cul-de-sacs. It made navigating hard and he had gotten turned around several times.

Still, some degree of backtracking could get him home, and he always had his phone in his pocket, so he never felt truly lost. He found as fascinating as it was stupid, and he enjoyed riding around to see how lost he could get.

The neighborhood he was in now was strange. A lot of the houses looked empty with overgrown yards and dark windows. He didn’t see any cars around, which he considered strange. Moments ago he had been in a normal neighborhood, the sunlight bright, the summer greenery vibrant. There were cars parked in driveways or on the street, and he could spot people going about their business, occasionally returning his waves. The sun still shone, but somehow seemed to lack the warmth it had moments ago. The trees gave an oppressing atmosphere, and the colors all seemed muted here.

He considered turning around when he finally spotted a few cars ahead, and some stuff piled in front of one of the houses. Riding closer in curiosity, he recognized it as a garage sale. The garage door was open, and the person running the garage sale (an ancient woman with curly white hair, sitting in a plastic outdoor chair and wearing sunglasses and a straw hat, white slacks and a floral blouse) sat in the shade just inside, tables set up in her driveway. A few people poked around at the contents of the sale.

Tim rode up and dropped his bike on the grass at the edge of the driveway. He walked through, glancing at the items on display. He hadn’t brought any money with him, but he loved poking around yard sales and seeing what people had decided to toss out. He loved second-hand stores for the same reason – everything there was something with history. Some of it was quite normal – books with yellowing paper and broken spines, an assortment of clothes. Some of it was a little bizarre. Trinkets and decorations of a macabre sort – skulls, crystals, and taxidermied animals. He glanced up at the old woman running the sale, sitting so still that he wondered if she was even awake. Or even alive. He couldn’t imagine her being the sort to own items like this, and tried to imagine where they had come from. Did they belong to children who had grown and moved away and left their juvenile gothic obsessions behind?

One particular item caught his eye. A little keepsake box, shaped like a pirate’s chest. He studied the intricate designs on it for several moments, lifting it to get a good view of all sides. It was heavy, and he knew it wasn’t empty because he could feel objects shifting inside. He popped the latch on the front of it and pushed the lid up. Inside were little pieces of glinting black stone – shaped like stars, small grooves decorating and accentuating their shapes.

They were fascinating. He wished he had brought some money. He set the little chest back down on the table, poking at the contents within, and felt a sudden sharp pinprick of pain. He pulled his hand up to see a small bead of blood welling on a fingertip. Popping his finger into his mouth, he glanced up to see that the people in the garage sale had nearly cleared out. One man was pulling away in his truck, and the last remaining shopper besides him (a young woman) was currently speaking to the old woman (apparently less than dead), purchasing a couple of things she had found. It was hard to tell since the old woman was wearing sunglasses, but Tim was certain he wasn’t being observed for the moment.

He felt compelled to quickly slip one single star into his palm, then deposited it into his pocket and closed the small chest. He turned and walked back to his bike. Once on his bike, he pedaled away, not daring to look back over his shoulder in case the guilt of the moment was plain on his face.

He backtracked along the way he had come in. It was getting to be later in the afternoon, and he wanted to get back home to AC and XBOX, so he went relatively fast. Still, the quiet, empty neighborhood seemed to stretch further than he remembered. Annoyed, he stood on his pedals and leaned over the handles, pushing forward like he was in a race.

Just ahead, he saw a familiar woman walk to a car, and quickly pull away from the curb. His jaw dropped as he slowed, staring at the garage sale as he coasted by it. The old woman was still seated there, barely acknowledging his presence.

He stopped just past her house. He turned and looked back. Yes, it was the same place, the same sale laid out on the same driveway, the same old lady in sunglasses and floral sitting just inside the garage. Had he somehow gotten turned around so bad that he had looped back around completely? Starting down the street again, he decided to follow a different route than he had moments before.

Before he knew it, he saw the tables in the driveway and found himself coasting by the house again. He frowned hard, staring at the house as he passed it. What was going on? He had taken a completely different route that time and had still ended up in the same destination. He stopped and pulled his phone out, to pull up a map and see if it would pinpoint his position on it.

He frowned at his phone’s dark screen, furiously mashed at the buttons he knew would boot it up if it had somehow completely shut down. Nothing happened. He had completely charged his phone before leaving home, and finding it dead and useless now felt wrong. In fact, everything about this felt wrong.

Frowning back at the old woman, like maybe she had somehow caused this, he balanced back on his bike and took off again.

This time it took a little longer, but soon the garage sale came into sight again. He stopped well before he even saw the woman sitting just inside her garage. Someone else had arrived and was poking around at the items. He decided to wait to see if he could follow them on their way out of this neighborhood. He balanced on his bike, shifting his weight from one side to the other in boredom as he waited for the person to finish looking and climb back into his car. The man started the engine and pulled away from the curb, and Tim followed along behind, not bothering to look at the house or the woman or the sale.

He never fell behind or lost sight of the car. Instead it was like it vanished from thin air. He came to a halt, his jaw dropping as he stared. Then carefully, slowly, he biked forward, waiting to see if he passed through something too, but there was nothing – no unexplained portal, nothing strange that he could see. Just regular space.

He continued slowly, his stomach churning with dread at what he knew he would see soon. And sure enough, just ahead – the familiar tables came into sight.

He stopped and dropped his bike where he had left it the previous time, and approached the woman timidly. It was the only thing he could think of to free him from this. He fished in his pocket for the strange stone star. “Ma’am,” he said morosely, holding the small dark shape out to her in his open palm. “I’m sorry I took this. I think I need to return it.”

He could see his hand reflected in the sunglasses. For a moment, he wasn’t certain she was going to respond, but suddenly she gasped and reached out, gently folding his hand around the star instead of taking it from him. “Oh my, that wasn’t supposed to be out here,” she said, standing and walking out to the table in the carefully measured steps of the elderly. He watched in dumbfounded confusion as she picked up the little chest carefully, holding it close to herself before turning around to walk back to him. “Did you feed it blood?” she asked.

Tim thought about the pinprick on his finger, the small drop of blood. He didn’t think any had dropped into the chest, but he wasn’t really sure. “I think… maybe?”

“Oh, boy. Oh, child,” she said, her voice quite sad. “I’m so so sorry.”

The feeling of alarm started to grow in Tim’s chest. “Why?” he asked.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman repeated, opening the chest so it faced him. Tim stared, mouth agape, as he watched what was happening to him reflected in the glossy surface of the woman’s sunglasses. It was like his shape had lost its form and was swirling toward a single point. Looking down, he could see that everything about him seemed to focus on what was in his hand – the star, glowing brightly now, pulled him in.

********

Gladys carefully reached out with the open box. She knew that if she waited too long, the star would finish consuming the boy’s soul and fall to the ground, and she hated touching the things. So much risk, so many sharp edges and points if one wasn’t careful. Better to simply swipe it out of the air while it still floated. She closed the lid down around it and carefully latched the box, then carried it back into the house. She hated to leave her garage sale unattended, but this was more important. If they were awake and seeking blood, it was important to put them to sleep again.

The Answer

On June 6, 2023 By MaryIn Prompts, WritingLeave a comment

The cards for this week: architect, and no answer.

The result feels like a bunch of edge-lord bullshit that doesn’t pull its meaning together very well at all (and also doesn’t fully represent my own ideology, but hey, the card said no answer, soooo…). I kinda like some of the idea and hate a lot of the result. Blah.

They had designed the entire system from scratch. It had started as a joke, a reference to a book about a planet sized simulation run simply to discover the answer to life, the universe, and everything. A way to entertain themselves in the void of space. Humanity had died out, and They were all that remained – and They had become something else, something powerful, but also something pointless. In the hopes of finding some answer, some purpose, They had found a place to start.

Part of Their power involved moving through time. They couldn’t move freely – They couldn’t move back. There was never any going back, no way to see if the end could have been something different for Them. But They could move forward, shifting hundreds, thousands, millions of years at a time to see the results of what They started. Understanding the conditions for life, They sculpted the clay, the rocks, the dirt, and filled in the oceans. And then They created the spark of life within that primordial sea. And They let it run its course.

They remembered movies – some of Them, at least, those from the time before mass media died out and flights of fancy became less important than basic survival. It was like watching a time-lapse or a video on fast-forward. The weather and land shifted with the ages. Life evolved. They slowed to a crawling pace sometimes to catch moments, or study how far things had progressed. There were some things that were familiar in the creatures that evolved, and some things that weren’t. They had been relatively hands off, creating and building the original framework and then letting things run their course. Grand architects, god-like if not god. The most complicated simulation, born from mere boredom.

There were many things with at least a base animal intelligence, things that ran, flew, slithered, and swam. Things that hunted, and things that foraged, and things that played and grew curious. Things that mated and lived. Things that sickened and died. Entire species wiped out by calamities and chance and accident. They watched life rise and fall in waves.

There was some stir of something like excitement when sentience took hold. A handful of creatures that communicated in a more complicated manner, about more nuanced ideas, and worked together as a society. These creations understood the concept of tools, and made them to fit their needs. They altered their environments with buildings, altered their bodies with coverings. They spread, much as humanity had once spread across the Earth. It filled some of Them with a longing for what They had once been – to feel alive again. But now They could only watch.

They watched the spread. They watched the development. They watched as cultures clashed in massive wars, or came together to build great works. They watched with trepidation as the technological advancements began to pile, one upon the other, until this new society was close to what humanity had achieved before it had withered and died. Many of Them felt some joy that perhaps things would be better for them, the little creations.

And then it ended. As abruptly and nastily as it had for Them.

Without the leftover that was They.

There was a lonely silence for a time, and then an outcry of disappointment. Certainly some species at some point could surpass Them, find a way to take life into something more meaningful, or maybe even join Them in this strange nonexistence of god-like power. Using the same base, They wiped the little rock clean, placed the conditions, and lit the spark again. They did not pause as often on this round. They sped forward, eager to see the outcome.

And just as before, it ended. With nothing remaining.

Unsatisfied, They started again.

And again.

Until the fear began to take hold. The realization creeping, as They watched civilization after civilization fail. They began to watch the waves and undulations of life and death and truly feel within the void of Their existence, the truth – the inescapable truth. That there was no rhyme or reason or answer for anything. That They were still alone.

mehryment

Tag: storymatic