drabble

Step Away from the Train

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Drabble

“Don’t stand too close to the tracks. Keep far away. Over here.”

The train is approaching. The wind is splitting around it, swirling and gathering sharp as blades. I stand back. I know it’s dangerous. I once saw that wind chop up a rabbit like a meatslicer.

“It used to be,” Julie goes on “that you could stand beside trains, right up against them if you dared. And the breeze would just ruffle your hair.”

We watch the train pass, and its horn blows sharp in our ears. The current slashes the blades of grass beside the tracks into trimmings.

Under the Birdhouse

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Drabble

I watched from the woods as the couple stopped on the path and approached the tree. I knew the rumor well. Apparently so did they. If you carved your initials into the bark under the birdhouse, you’d be together forever. They knew the rumor because it had spread all over campus. I knew the rumor because I had started it.

The boy took out a pocketknife, started carving. When they finished, I would follow them to their dorms. Nobody had yet connected the deaths of couples on campus to the tree, but they would when someone checked inside the birdhouse.

Procession

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I took a road trip.  Can you tell?

Drabble

When we drive through the mountains tonight, you may see a line of lights in the distance, traveling down a hillside. It may look like a line of cars driving down a dusty road, but if you look closer and harder you will see they are candles. If you look even closer and harder you will see the ones carrying the candles.

But look no closer, and strain your eyes no further, for if you see into the eyes of the candle bearers and they see into your eyes, you will join them in their never-ending march down the mountain.

It Decided

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From a visual prompt from Horror Writing Prompts.

Drabble: Steampunk maybe?

It clicked and whirred, gears grinding as it hobbled down the street. She walked before him, the sunlight glistening in her fair curls, swinging her arms like they blew in the wind. It had decided today was the day.

In the shade of a building it reached out for her with a hand of creaking metal and touched her yielding skin. She swung around, gasped, shrank back against the wall. It reached out again as she clutched at her breast, her eyes wide and frightened.

It wanted to tell her. But it had no mouth.

She ran, like the wind.

Pylons

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100 followers!  Thank you to all you guys!  Here’s a weird drabble in celebration!

Drabble: ?

We think it was four weeks ago the electricity pylons on Michigan Avenue between 14th and 15th started growing taller.

No one noticed at first, and if they did they didn’t want to admit it was happening, so we can’t say when exactly it started. But it started, slowly at first and then taller and taller, faster and faster.

As they rose up the electrical lines extended too, and after a while it was difficult to see the tops of the pylons at all.

Then the tops were completely lost in the clouds.

We can only wonder where they’re going.

Now

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Be aware this one involves cutting.

Drabble: I don’t know why do I write these

She set the flat of the blade against her skin, expecting to feel it cool and smooth and ready. She felt nothing, but that wasn’t too surprising. She felt nothing at all today. Isn’t that what this was for?

She turned it until the edge caught the light and the tip cut into her flesh, hoping to see the blood well in droplets turning to rivers. Nothing came out. That wasn’t surprising either.

She dropped the knife and reached into the mark it had made. She pulled out the wires, slick with oil. That wasn’t surprising. Nothing was surprising anymore.

Ouija

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Drabble: ?

“You’re moving it!”

“I am not!”

“Okay, okay.”  Alexis squared her shoulders and put her fingers back on the planchette.  “Let’s be serious here.”

“I’ve been serious this whole time!” Carrie argued, her fingers settling down beside Alexis’s.

“Let’s ask it something.  Like…  Who has a crush on me?”

It didn’t move at first.  Then Carrie sucked in a breath as the planchette shifted on the board.  Alexis’s heart was pounding as letter after letter was pointed out.

“C…” she whispered.

“A…” she went on.

“R…R…I…E…”

She looked up at Carrie in shock.

“I lied,” Carrie said, blushing.  “I was moving it.”

Scratch

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The blog hiatus was a lie.  All I did was play Breath of the Wild.

Drabble: ?

She noticed something on her arm, and looked closer.  A scratch.  She didn’t recall how she got it.

Her best friend had always told her that such mysterious injuries were echoes of the past, of harm experienced in a previous life.

It wasn’t the first scratch she had gotten on her arm.  About once or twice a week she would find a mark on her forearm, long and straight and stinging sharply.

Just in case her friend was right, every time she found a new scratch she always directed a thought into the past, into her self.

I feel you.

Goodbye

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Drabble: Drama

He heard the incessant whine of the machines as he flatlined and the shaky last exhale from his lungs, and he was gone.

Two floors down, she gave her first cry, covered in blood and mucus.  The doctor cut her cord and handed her to her mother.  She didn’t stop crying.  Her soulmate was gone, taken away from her two floors above.

He drifted down to her, following her screams.  She opened her eyes and was silenced.  He was beside her, smiling to her in their greeting and goodbye.  He turned, and left her, and she knew not to cry.

Planning

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Drabble: Horror?

He had studied for years, prepared for months.  He limited his diet to emaciate his body.  He tried different visualizations to free his mind.  One night he imagined his self floating in a reservoir, the water slowly draining through a hole.  He slipped through the hole, and out, and left his body, and was free.

He looked down upon his gently breathing shell on the bed and rejoiced.  He floated up, away, his soul unencumbered, and only when he was satisfied did he return.

But he returned to a state of shock.

He hadn’t planned how to reenter his body.