Instant Story

I attended another Writers Workshop, and I’m sharing something that I wrote with the following prompts:

“No one will ever find out.”

“Tanning bed”

“A dog’s leash”

No one will ever find out.

My body is big and hollow. I like to pull the shades down during the day so it’s very dark in my room. I crawl into my nest of pillows and curl up inside my body to take a nap, all warm and cozy. No one expects anything from me. I can’t work because I can’t focus on anything and it drives people crazy. No one has any patience for me. So I just stay at home and my grandmother brings me all the food I need. Gram works at a tanning salon. I think she has to prove that the product won’t cause cancer, so she spends a lot of time there tanning after hours. Her skin is really scary, so I don’t like to look directly at her. I’m afraid that if I look at her skin it will lurch off her body and wrap itself around me and clog my pores so I would die.

One day someone delivered a dozen roses to the house. I was home alone and I peeked through the window when I heard the hideous sound of the doorbell. I watched the guy stand there with the flowers. He was dressed in some kind of painfully bright florist uniform. He got tired of waiting and left the flowers on the doorstep. That was November 24th, 2011. I know that because Gram was in the hospital and I was home alone for four days. The flowers died out there. When my grandmother cmd home from the hospital she put the dead flowers in water anyway. I think those dead flowers are my siblings. They stayed a long time in the house, just like me, but they were already dead.

I found a dog leash in the basement when I was a kid. Must have belonged to the previous family. I took it upstairs and pretended I had a dog. I still like to drag it around, pretending I’m taking my dog for a walk in my room. But my dog, who’s name is Terrence, hides from everybody because he’s not a normal dog. He’s anxious and too easily distracted and overwhelmed by everything.

So I like to take naps inside my body. That way, I’m inside the house, in my room and also in my body, which is like a big metal protector of me. No one will ever find out where I go inside my body. It’s totally quiet in there, except for my heart beat, which stubbornly refuses to rest.

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Click this flower… if you dare: