Creative Writing Prompts

It’s the middle of November and I'm trudging through three feet of snow because, much to my dismay, bodies don't just bury themselves.

It's why I'm a seasonal serial killer.

So is my friend--a serial killer, that is to say. Not seasonal. Definitely not seasonal. Because while I'm haunting homesteads and butchering blocks in the idyllic eighty-degree Springfield summer, Jack is an emotional, impulse-driven moron who kills when he feels like it, come wind or rain or seven fucking inches of snow. And because we'd made a promise all the way back then, when murder was an accident and not a treat, I’m out here with numb fingers and stinging cheeks to help him hide the body.

"What I don't understand," I say with a grunt, "is why you couldn't have picked someone less big-boned." And that's putting it nicely. My back is to Jack as he makes a path through the woods, tossing aside snow with a shovel to make my dragging of the corpse easier. I'm not sure it's doing much, to be honest, and the dead man is easily two hundred, two fifty pounds.

I can almost hear Jack shrug. "He was talking shit," he said.

"Oh? Like what, Jack? 'What are you doing in my house?' Or, 'I'm calling the cops, please don't hurt me or my family.'" I drop my voice as I speak, mimicking the dead guy's voice. Not that I knew what he sounded like. Jack did the killing, then called me to come and help with the aftermath.

"The former," Jack says dryly. "He was alone. You know I don't hunt families."

I sigh. "What a fucking saint you are."

We trudge on, the snow crunching underfoot. Neither of us said another word. I don't even need to ask him where we're taking the corpse, for the answer is obvious:

With the rest of the bodies.

The wind blows my hair. I’m standing on the edge again, my torn, off-white dress billowing out around me. A tunnel of blinding, bright light shines before me, beckoning me like a lullaby, and I swear I would cry if I still could. Legs straining, teeth clenched, I try to fight the heavy gusts, to reach out and touch that sweet sunlight, behind which I know paradise waits.

I am so close. I can hear the nightingales lilting, the people laughing. Feel the soft grass beneath my burning skin. The pounding pain in my head almost begins to ease, and my mind screams relief at the thought of rest. Reaching out, I see flashes of a new life race through my mind and for a split, blissful second, I actually think I’ve made it.

Then the corners of my vision go blurry. My joints buckle. Coarse wind slams into me, pushing me away from the light. Just like every other time I’ve tried to cross over for the past thirteen years.

“WHY?” My yell is muffled, as if my mouth were covered in dirt. Screaming and sobbing, clawing at the ground, I watch the glowing spirit of an old man climb effortlessly toward glory, his stance unwavering and triumphant. My own hands are dim, dusty, and pathetic in comparison.

The wind is still blowing as I walk the misty streets of my hometown, after the sun has gone to bed. Sometimes another figure will pass by—a jogger with a pickle green jacket and a dog, a grandparent with a stroller full of kids in princess dresses—and I will smile, only to remember I am completely invisible to them. And then I weep tears that aren’t really there and never will be. One would think I’d be accustomed to being dead by now, but not a day goes by that I don’t wonder. How long do I have until I fade away completely, until I am no longer a ghost, or even a distant memory? How long until I am simply an impression of energy, lost to the crying wind?

The prince searched far and wide for his princess, but there were no clues, no trace of her.

“It’s like she disappeared with some sort of magic,” the King said as the detectives came back to the castle. They all gathered in a large, grand chamber, sharing theories and evidence. The prince never thought anything much about that room, but suddenly it just seemed empty and cold now that the warm presence of his princess was gone. He stared up at the golden beams, unable to hide the somber look on his face.

The prince sighed, now his father would force him to spend the rest of his life with one of those bouncy, loud girls who seemed keen on getting his attention at the party. One even went out of their way to spill red wine over themselves and blame it on a guard. Oh, how he hated those kind of girls.

The King took notice of his son’s expression and turned to put a hand on his shoulder. The Prince looked up and met his eyes.

“I will send out another search. We will find the maiden, if we have to go looking for her house by house.”

The Prince straightened his shoulders, his fathers determination fueling his own. “Shall I go out looking for her myself, father?”

The King considered this, “I suppose that would be best, considering we have no evidence, no nothing! Quite a ghost this girl is.”

“Yes, father. But we will find her.” The Prince said, trying to convince himself more than the King. He would find his princess if it were the last thing he did.

He swore on every single thing that had value to him.

He would find her.

Wherever she was

White angels playing in your hair.

I crushed your big heart made of snow.

Hopes blooming like an early spring.

Sweet taste of raindrops on your lips.

We lay beneath a sky of cherry trees.

A teddy bear, white roses and your playful smile.

You paint the night sky on my sunkissed skin.

Dance me to the edge of heaven, my love.

Of falling leaves you made a promise ring.

You see that little sparrow? She’s leaving too.

Rain, poetry and tears upon my cup of tea.

Misplaced mistletoe. A perfect stranger’s friend request. My heart. Rediscovered. 💙

The universe, as any respectable physicist will tell you, can be a peculiar place. It is, after all, filled with peculiar things, holes (mostly black or wormy), dark matter, string, branes and so on. Come to think of it, there’s also the issue of toast. Specifically, its propensity to alway land. butter-side down. Luckily, there is Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Also known as the ‘8th Wonder of the World’.

Imagine…

Somewhere, far, far away, in either this universe or another parallel one, there exists a pub. A fine affair with a majolica tiled exterior and fine, carved walnut fittings. A multiplicity of snug little bars and fine ale. It floats, comfortably, in a gravitationally ambiguous pocket of a universe. This pub, is, obviously, named The Event Horizon, and is frequented by the kind of travellers who don’t generally bother concerning themselves with things like “up” or “down,” “now” or “then.” Patrons range from hyperintelligent octopodes to android poets who, rather ironically, lack the ability to rhyme, or, equally, not to rhyme, depending upon when you listen to them.

One evening, an unusually large crowd had gathered in the pub’s central public bar. An alien cove, small in stature and with three eyes was pointing excitedly at a poster which, not unlike the travel posters of the early twentieth century English railways, showed a beautiful rendering of a scene on an idyllic planet. Across the top of the poster, a banner headline said ‘Visit Earth, the home of E=mc²’.

“Think what that actually means,” said the three eyed geyser.

"The Theory of Relativity might not seem like a “wonder” in the sense of a Taj Mahal, or a Niagara Falls. It’s more of a thought so vast and intricate that it reshaped how we understand the universe.

Relativity is about relationships. Not the kind between people, no ‘Albert Loves Doris’ carved into a tree or ‘that’s my Grandad,’ but about the relationship between space, time, matter, and energy. So everything really. It started simply enough with Special Relativity, a theory that introduced the famous equation E=mc². Those five characters revealed that energy and matter were two sides of the same coin, interchangeable. The same thing in different forms. Suddenly, the stars weren’t just twinkling, far off suns, they were engines of immense energy, converting tiny amounts of mass into vast outpourings of light and heat.

But Special Relativity was only the start. A decade later came General Relativity, an altogether more whacky idea. Suddenly gravity wasn’t some mysterious force reaching out invisibly through space and causing apples to fall off trees. Instead, massive objects like planets and stars had enough gravity to warp space and time around them. Space wasn’t just a flat stage; it bent and curved in response to the mass and energy within it.

A whole industry of analogies sprung up. Perhaps the best known is the old ‘heavy bowling ball on a trampoline’ malarkey. The surface of the trampoline dips around the ball, and anything smaller, a marble, perhaps, rolls toward it. This is how Einstein described gravity. Not a thing that just pulled; it was the natural consequence of objects following the curves of space-time. Now we have a framework that not only explains why apples fall but also why light bends around stars, why planets follow their elliptical orbits, and why time itself slows down near massive objects.

And the practical implications of Relativity are as astonishing as the theory itself. Take GPS systems in phones and cars down on Earth, for example. They rely on Einstein’s equations. Without accounting for the warping of time caused by Earth’s gravity, GPS satellites would be off by several kilometres every day. They’d be useless. Not to mention an endless stream of technologies like nuclear energy, proving that a tiny amount of mass could unleash unimaginable power.

Yet the true wonder of Relativity lies not in its applications but in its reach. And for all its complexity, Einstein’s vision was surprisingly simple. He sought to understand the universe in the clearest terms possible, to uncover its underlying elegance. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,” he once wrote. It’s this spirit of wonder that makes his work timeless. That’s why it’s the 8th Wonder of the World not because it is visible, but because it illuminates the invisible. Nice poster too."

Another alien cove, a super-sized brown lipped snail named Brian took one look at the poster, slurped his pint of Gargle-Blaster, and said: “load of old twonk.”

“You’ll be going back to your Mother, then?” the housemaid asked as she set down the bowl of fresh fruit.

“I will,” Persephone replied. Zoe had become a good friend and confidente during her time in the foul, sulfur-smelling place.

“I hope your stay hasn’t been all bad.”

Persephone smiled. It hadn’t, actually. Hades had been a kind god, in his own way, living among a land of ghosts. In some ways he was a better god than any of the other men who had pursued her.

“What’s on your mind?” Zoe asked. Her fingers touched the bowl and pushed it toward the princess.

“You know I can’t eat while I’m down here, or I’ll have to stay forever.”

“A housemaid can but try?” Zoe took a chunk off the pomegranate. Several seeds fell off as she ate.

Mum was so upset at losing me, Persephone thought. But it’s my life, isn’t it? Maybe Hades is the best match for me. I can stay here maybe 6 months out of the year?

Without thinking further, Persephone snatched up 6 pomegranate needs and tossed them into her mouth.

Zoe looked up at her mistress, but not in surprise. “He will give you death, my princess, and you will love him for it.”

“I will,” Persephone replied.

The room disappeared and suddenly she was in Hades’ bedchamber.

“Welcome,” he said. “I hope you will be happy here.”

the thrill of thin ice the familiarity of worry the comfort of self pity the yearning for what is always sliding away the relief of not yet cracking through

Snowball was exploring her new home when she came across a big dark wardrobe.

The human was busy unpacking boxes, so the curious snowball shimmied her paw into a gap and opened the door.

It smelt of dust in here, and the kitten could feel coats brushing her back as she tried to find the back of the wardrobe. There was the sudden scent of pine, and then it was cold under her paws.

Something tickled her nose and made her sneeze.

Crunchy soft white stuff felt funny on her toe beans, and snowball looked around at the lovely scene of towering trees and tiny houses in the distance before doing a wee under a lamp-post.

Snowball spent hours in this amazing world, being pet by strange half-goat people, being fed by talking beavers, even having a visit from a tall man in a red jacket who gave her a mouse toy.

She explored and played in that amazing world for hours, but woke from a dancing fireplace nap to hear her human calling her.

Snowball rubbed all over the half-goat man who petted her sadly as she took the toy mouse in her mouth and headed home.

Brushing past coats, the kitten felt paws touch wood again, and came out of the wardrobe, into the world where her human was waiting…

Beach detritus. You always hope you’ll find Aladdin’s lamp or the corner of a buried treasure chest when you comb the beach. But there is always just beach detritus. And people’s garbage. People can be so disgusting. That’s when I saw it. Lying there amongst the mostly empty food containers and wrappers. A gold ring with a diamond.

The diamond ring glinted in the sunlight. A special ray of sunshine had hit it just right so that I was the only one who could see it. I walked, nay ran, to it. After all these years of beach combing, had I finally found a treasure worth keeping? I moved the wrappers and food containers (Did they have food in them?) away from my prize. “Come to me, my precious.”

I was just about to grab it when I realized that there was something inside the ring. A finger! Oh no. A detached finger! The horror. But then, it moved. And I saw my great folly. The finger was attached to a hand, which was attached to an arm, which was attached to a body. And the food containers were not garbage, which was why many of them still had food in them. It was somebody’s picnic. I had stumbled upon somebody’s messy picnic. And somebody lying amongst her own garbage. Or perhaps she had just been resting her hand on the ground near the wrappings. Leaning on her arm as she talked.

She noticed how close I was to her hand. She shouted, “Joey! Get that crab away from me!”

Joey laughed as he shooed me away. “It looked like he wanted your ring, Sophie.”

I obliged Joey and slinked away. He thwarted me this time, but he would be back. And I would be waiting. Waiting amongst the beach detritus.

[Note: There is a sequel called Again Amongst the Beach Detritus.]

When we met, all I saw was grey. Not the peaceful cool grey tones of the rainy PNW sky but rather the lifeless grey that felt like grief and loss personified. He made me so angry and was the literal grey cloud that followed me around everywhere and brought my spirits down making me more angry than I had ever been in my life. Before I met Callahan, I firmly believed that I didn't have an angry bone in my body because, in any situation where someone would typically feel furious, I always skipped that step and looked for a way to make it better. But never Callahan. At least not at first. Now looking at him across our favorite table in the basement of the library, I realize he wasn't ever just grey. His soul is the color of the inside of the many shells I have found on our long beach walks, the kind of shell that changes color depending on how you look at it. Sometimes, when you first pick it up, it's just grey. But if you shift it in your hand so the light hits it differently, you uncover pinks and blues and purples that are indescribably intriguing. That's how Cal's soul is. When I first looked at it, I caught a bad angle. But as I got to know him better, I could see that his soul also has exquisite pinks and blues and purples. You just have to look at him from a different angle. He doesn't deserve my anger. None of it is his fault. But he was an easy person to blame. And that short-sidedness cost me so much time spent misunderstanding the true colors of this man's soul.

He should have been told I wasn’t human. That was the worst part. But the crew found amusement in watching the fresh ones get all worked up over me.

The boy, whom I’d heard called Harrison or maybe Harold, was waxing the deck, his large eyes flitting over to me and then hastily back to the floor. I continued my song, closing my eyes to listen to it roll out over the waves, placating my kin who swam far below so our ship would sail to shore untouched.

When I concluded with one last lilting note, I turned to the captain, a greyed man with leathery skin from many a year aboard.

“The wind tells me a storm will stand between us tonight. I must rest my voice whilst we sail in sunlight.”

He only nodded. The captain, in his age, was superstitious against my kind. Remembered the days he and his men feared the song that now keeps them safe. Smart man.

I made my way down to the deck, where the foolish boy was daring to openly stare. He gripped his mop tightly, repeatedly swallowing as he seemed to be working up the nerve to speak. Thankfully, he was unsuccessful, and I made my way belowdecks in peace.

In the tiny mess hall, Kielman and O’Connell were playing some game of stabbing a knife between their fingers. They looked up at the clatter as I cracked open the saltwater barrel with my rations.

“Kid speak up yet? I got money on him screwin’ up the courage before the end of the voyage, you know.” said Kielman with a chuckle.

Even with our differences, most of the crewman weren’t so bad. Their humor was crude and they stunk like tobacco and alcohol, but as long as they had the good sense to mind their gazes and hands, we got along well enough.

“I would know, as my bet lays with yours. I predict he will become emboldened enough before nightfall.”

The door bangs open for none other than the foolish boy to stride in, face reddened and breathless. Kielman and O’Connell halt their knife game, stiffling their conversation at once.

“Uh. Um. Hello there. What’re you doing down here?” He sputters, then grimaces at his tactlessness.

I fix him with a sultry look, still standing over the open saltwater barrel. “I am fetching something to eat.“

“Of course, yeah. I, uh. I wanted to tell you something. If that’s alright.” He rubs the nape of his neck.

I wait, staring unblinkingly as he had earlier.

“I just, uh. I wanna tell you that I think you’re real pretty, and that I’d like to treat you to dinner or somethin’ next we dock.” His words come out in a single exhale, running together clumsily.

I sigh, turning my attention back to the saltwater barrel. I plunge my arms in, stirring the kelp as my clawed fingers search for slimy, tough skin.

“What’re you…”

With a splash, I pull a small squid from the forest of loose kelp, the thing still writhing in my grasp. Keeping my eyes locked with his, which now are filled with strained confusion instead of shy apprehension, I bite viscously into the head of it, its juices spurting out over my hands as it goes still.

“What do they call you, boy?” I say, licking the blue blood off my fingers one by one.

“Harrington.” He sqeaks.

“Do you know what I am now, Harrington?”

“You’re a siren.” His voice descends into a miserable whisper.

“That’s right, boy. Now, run along, back above deck, and ask those so-called friends of yours why they let you make such an ass of yourself these last few weeks.”

He turns and dashes right back out the door without another word while Kielman and O’Connell explode with laughter.

Pop Pin prick to cosmos Timeless to tempo Dilation to coalescence Dust to cloud to planet Crash Collisions, collapses, chaos Time Time Time

Pool Carbon to compound Chemistry to biology Bacteria to backbone to breath Bees, Crocodiles, dinosaurs Crash Time Time Time

Growth Divergence by populations Catching prey Dodging trouble Camouflage, tooth, poison, claw Tools, tribes, tech People Time Time Time

Conversion Crops to domestication Blade to bomb to bullet Cutting to burning to bombing Taking territory Grabbing, grasping, grinding Construction, cars, computers Grow, grow, grow, Cough to cancer Pestilence to death Greed to power Crash Crash Crash Time Time Time