I can’t remember the last time I wrote something creative that was not for an English class personal response to text assignment; so, with all this newfound time on my hands I thought I’d pick up a metaphorical quill (keyboard) again and try my hand at creative writing.
Today’s short story is inspired by a series of prompts taken from Seventh Sanctum and Writing Exercises. I used Seventh Sanctum to generate a setting and theme for the story, and Writing Exercises to produce my first line. Then, I took a random three-digit number generator to produce a word range that I would attempt to fulfill the story within. If you’re interested in exercising your creative writing skills and also in a challenge of brevity (or length, for that matter), I would recommend trying something similar! The word count, in particular, made this story a bit of a challenge.
Setting: Science-Fiction
Theme: Mythological life-after-death story
First Line: “He hadn’t meant to scare the child”
Word Range: 570-670 *
*My final word count for this story was exactly 670 words.
The names of characters in the story were drawn from ancient Greece and Rome, whereas to satisfy the mythological elements of the prompt I decided to draw on myths and cultural traditions of my own ethnic background, Chinese. I took some interest particularly in funeral rites and ideas of mortality, given that the theme I spun from the generator is “life-after-death.”
Paper Houses
He hadn’t meant to scare the child, but perhaps he should have foreseen it. Children were children, after all, and as mature as this one was, Kalliste was seven. The same Dreams still frightened him at forty, let alone, seven.
It was an oft-repeated saying amongst Oracles of Marcus’ age that as one grew older, so too grew their fear of death. There was a ring of truth to it, he thought—in his youth, nothing scared him, not even his Dreams. Not even when they pried into his head and played out the images for his eyes to see.
“Which one did you tell her?” Cyrus approached him, after the child had gone. Like Marcus, Cyrus was an Oracle; unlike Marcus, Cyrus had no cause to fear.
“Paper houses,” said Marcus. “I thought she was ready.”
Cyrus was aghast. “You thought a girl of seven was ready?”
“She asked.” Kalliste had told him she wanted to see his most important Dream. He had asked if she was certain—she was. “She was firm about it.”
“Heavens, that doesn’t mean you should give it to her.” Cyrus shook his head. “She isn’t twelve yet—if she quits, we’ve lost a talent.”
“Kalliste will not quit,” Marcus said. He didn’t think her frightened enough for that yet. “Besides, what of it? I’m not dying anytime soon, and in the case that I do, Constantine will take my place. It will be years before Kalliste is needed in our ranks, and if she does leave, there’s the new one—Atlas.”
“Atlas will be in my department, most like,” said Cyrus. “He has never Dreamed a tragedy before, and he’s already nine.”
Marcus went silent and stayed that way until Cyrus took his leave, his steps echoing on the polished floors. Marcus walked to his desk, a long surface made of dark teak. He’d always liked the antiquity of it, with its rounded edges and the curved brass handles that opened its drawers. There was something grounding about possessing a piece of the past when his line of work forced him to live in the future.
Oracles saw the world as it would be, but sometimes Marcus wished he only saw it as it was.
Your job is crucial, he was told, when his Dreams were first documented and his life first bound to the agency he would service for the next thirty-eight years. We need to see what lies in wait in our future in order to adequately prepare for it.
Certain things, he reflected were not meant to be prepared for. When the director of the Oracle Agency died, the one who had taken him on in his youth, Marcus had Dreamed it. He had done everything he could to prevent it, yet Marcus’ Dream was fulfilled. The director now, a grey, severe woman named Delphine, was more accepting. When Marcus learned that her heart would stop, she had said It will.
Not even the paper houses worried her, the Dream that scared even the young, the Dream in which mansions made of paper went up in flames in gardens of brimstone. Even so, Marcus could see people entering the flaming houses, taking their shoes off at the porch out of courtesy and walking through eighteen doors, each smaller than the last. Marcus could feel himself following them, through dimly lit halls made warm by the fire outside and handed burning paper luxuries as he went—a wallet of crocodile skin, a watch with a crystal face, an ornate porcelain vase that put the Delphine’s collection to shame. He would take them in his hands without much of a choice and cling to them like a drowning man holding onto driftwood to stay afloat, and walk alongside the others towards a deep fog that seemed to swallow up the rest of the house, leaving the fire behind them.
It was always there that the Dream ended. Marcus wondered what, when the day came that he took another step into the fog, he would find beyond it.
Featured Image – Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash