Short stories
My Projects
Here, you can find a collection of short stories I have written. They were mostly written to practice my craft, but some of them were written as practice responses to GCSE English Language exam questions, and two others (Never Alone on Christmas Eve, Fight or Flight), which were submissions to short story competitions.
Please, enjoy!
Never Alone on Christmas Eve
On Hope.
My world doesn’t have colour. My world is black and white.
And I’m all alone on Christmas Eve.
I cuddle close to the fire, letting the prickly-hot hit my skin. My bare knees hurt from pressing against the callous cobblestone pavement. I’m warm on the outside, but on the inside I’m cold. I’m freezing. I need a blanket. A hug.
All alone on Christmas Eve.
“Poor kid.” The men from inside the pub say, looking down on me with sorry-sad eyes. But those eyes don’t see me. They aren’t looking at me. They’re looking at a thing; something they don’t understand. Something they don’t understand is human, as well.
They are as distant from my heart as my heart is distant from theirs.
All alone on Christmas Eve.
Warm tears crawl down my rosy red cheeks. Longing, reaching tears. My heart sobs too, throbbing with pangs of lonely. My heartbeat is loud in my chest. Only the crackling of the fire is louder.
All alone on Christmas Eve.
There is a woman that looks after me. “You’ll live with her ‘til we find you some real parents.” They said. She isn't here. She’s in the pub. I don’t think she likes me very much. Whenever she looks at me her eyes quickly dart away. They fill with the most awful, heart-stabbing look. A look of hatred. I don’t know why. And here, she’s left me. All alone. All alone with my dread.
All alone on Christmas Eve.
A blanket is wrapped around my small, shivering body. I don’t know why I’m shivering. I’m plenty warm. But I shiver. I look up at the full moon, and it stares right back. I imagine the moon smiling, laughing. I want to smile and laugh back. I want to hear the joke it’s laughing at, too. But the moon doesn’t laugh. And neither do I.
All alone on Christmas Eve.
A distant jingling tugs my eyes away from the gleaming moon, and off into the distance. A rushing of cold, winter wind soars past my face, blowing away my fear, my cold, and my sad, along with my tears. And before me is a beautiful sight.
A sight I never thought I’d see.
Swooping over the rooftops, pulled by eight oak-furred coursers, is a sleigh of crimson, zipping through the night sky. As it soars, the distant ringing of a jingle bell tickles my ears.
And suddenly, my world takes on a vibrant, magical red.
He need say no words.
And as the scarlet sleigh disappears over the moonlit rooftops, my dread disappears along with it.
I smile, as I realise, and remember.
With a jingle of a merry jingle bell, I realise that I’m never alone.
Never.
Never alone on Christmas Eve.
The Talisman
On Avarice.
The discarded remains of long-perished twigs and patches of stony gravel crackled beneath my feet, rattling into the claustrophobic, silent night like a distant murmur of long-gone gunfire. The air that clung to my frozen, skeletal face did so like the clasp of Death itself; its temperature akin to that of the Reaper’s scythe. My bones were clattering in trepidation. The stony arch that marked the border between life and death almost calling to me like a mouth spread wide open.
I stepped forwards.
The creaking, swinging gates fluttered invitingly in the shivering, pulse-quickening breeze of the silent yet uneasy winter night. It opened into the graveyard I sought: revealing a courtyard masked in the same fog that permeated my unwittingly laboured breaths. In the edgewaters of my mind, a single question was uttered:
“Why are those gates open?”
I crossed the threshold with trembling legs and quivering bones, my chest shutting out the cold of the stark-dead, jet-black night with a bonfire of roaring panic and curiosity that clashed in the manifolds of my racing heartbeat. The overgrown expanse before me seemed to crawl, slither, reach; reach out with tendrils of death. Reaching out.
Reaching out towards me.
Unwittingly, an excited grin ran rampant across my frost-licked face. Despite the blaring danger sirens of my heart bleating ceaselessly in my fiery hot chest, all that filled my mind were pangs of anticipation. Crude, unusual anticipation; an emotion that almost betrayed common sense. Everything was almost beckoning me forwards, towards my destination that existed omnipresent in my head.
My great-uncle’s grave.
Perhaps I should not be here, seeking that violet-tinted, gold-lined talisman that my family had been clamouring, clawing, clasping for for generations - but an almost innate intrapersonal force pulled me closer to that gaping mouth of Death, against any semblance of willpower I had left. And then, I could see it.
My great-uncle’s grave.
I approached slowly, contradicting my urge to break into an unfaltering, desperate sprint for it. But my legs trembled like a dingy boat out in the uncharted, stormy waters of the Atlantic, not allowing me to move any faster than a mere crawl. Just as I got close enough to see the glint of the all-important heirloom that pervaded us for so long, a sharp whistle blew past my ears, parting my scruffy, maddened hair. And then my questions were answered.
“Why are those gates open, and yet nobody had attained the talisman?”
I fell to my knees, clutching my throat that now leaked a sickening, crimson-black substance: blood. My vision grew foggy, and my body began to ring with pins-and-needles. My life was draining. Death was beckoning me forwards. No.
I realise now, that it had been from the very start.
And as I collapsed to the floor, lifeless as the trees that engulfed me, the discarded remains of the long-perished twigs and stony gravel crackled beneath the weight of my body, rattling into the claustrophobic, silent night like ear-splitting, omnipresent gunfire.
The Salem Trial
On Accusation.
What a truly sorry place this was.
Chugging and chopping down the rattling, stone-scattered pathway: the cart rumbled with an unpleasant scratching sound. Scattered with an infinite pitter-patter of rubble and eroded rock-segments, the pavement that marked the road to my destination ebbed away at the back of my stagnant mind with an ever-so-quiet, yet ever-so-loud scuttling.
My destination.
I looked out of the open window, my eyes dragging from the orderly, monotonous rubble-rock walls that lined the irritating pavement with columns of neatly eroded lifelessness, to the unending stretch of plains and fields. It was strange. Strangely eerie - strangely quiet. Not even a grazing sheep could be seen for what felt like a thousand miles. My irises drooped over the textureless expanse, the unending conformity of green massaging my eyes with a likeness to velvet - a likeness to silk. Strange. Strangely, it soothed my anxious, perturbed mind.
Yet it refused to settle.
I gazed at a solitary, single-floored abode as we passed it, standing out from the rolling plains of monotony as a sole survivor of the war on uniqueness that had seemed to cleanse this land.
It was as if nature too was waging that war.
The primrose-tinted windows allowed me to peer into it. It was dark. Brooding. Old. Looming. A million ghost stories could be told there, the cloggy air that oozed from its hole-ridden walls echoing the cries of phantoms and ghosts that clung to their identity. Despite their surroundings. Their surroundings of lifelessness.
Yet my mind did not quiver at the thought of a haunting, no.
I shifted my attention to the sole protrusion on the horizon; a cloud-wrapped, moaning mountain, its sad, sorry excuse for a peak rising sluggishly into the glaringly gray sky. The clouds. Clouds so grey you could almost call it night.
Night the way its presence loomed over my head; refusing to disperse.
If only I could be left to travel this infinite expanse for endless time; left to the comfort of the velvet of the grass, rattling of the stones and the whispers of the forsaken souls. But no - the foreboding doused the ironic tranquil in an oozing cider. A cider of sickly sweet unease. Thoughts of trepidation plagued my mind:
How much longer is this going to go on for?
How much longer will I get to live?
As the slow cart began to follow a bend on the sandpaper that was the road, my heart sank in my stomach with a wave of shock, as my questions were answered. The comfort of the interminably flitting green of the fields disappeared from sight behind a cruel, curt, cobblestone wall. As did my life. My life, vanishing along with the light of the cloud-lensed sun.
It’s over.
As the cart entered the castle walls, I could hear a thousand million voices jeering my name. Chanting. Yelling.
“Fiend! Fiend!”
They were calling for me - for my death.
“Witch! Witch!”
Their unforgiving wails begged for retribution, every syllable ripping into my soul. Their voices were gravelly, like the pavement I rode to my death upon, spitting, spitting, spitting rumours.
Rumours. That’s all they were.
How was any of this fair?
My blood boiled, animosity rising into my throat as I peered at the passing, porcine faces that ran by mine as I gazed out of the window with disgust. Animosity rang like tinnitus in my ears, a billion protests forming the sound of a restless, beach wave tossing up sand in my brain.
Why did I have to die like this?
The Last Note
On Grief.
A battlefield long lost to the churning tides of time. A pilgrimage I wasn’t sure I would make. For I knew what would lie in wait for me if I did.
I recalled the battle. A battle that still seemed to rage indomitably in my mind even to this day, despite ending in its now world-renowned travesty a year ago to the hour. Here, in these quiet, tranquil woods, I fought along my brothers-in-arms, putting our passion to the fire, stoking it until it erupted into a roaring bonfire of blitzing gunfire. I also recalled the calm before the storm; an environment not so dissimilar to this. I remember this was the spot Cooper had retreated to in the lead up to the battle. He was my sergeant, who I’d grown close to over the span of those blurry, yet unforgettable years of our abruptly short youths. He had told me before leaving that he hadn’t expected to make it through the battle, and had something to do before he greeted his Lord up in heaven.
He was right. He didn’t see the sun rise that morning.
I trudged through the ashen remains of the fell leaves of gray, each step sending a snap of a crackle throughout the silent forest. The sound pierced the forever tarnished land, whispering memories in my ears. Memories, remnants of the rustle that had once churned away endlessly in the back of my mind as I had rushed and darted through these very trees that sickening, terrible Autumn last.
I turned into a clearing, the trees making way for an almost barren expanse, apart from the dust-stained, gray-tinted carpet of death that separated it from the earth.
Almost barren.
Standing amidst the clearing of dead trees, in the spot where Cooper had taken his final solace, was a piano, minted and untouched by the haze of dust that permeated the forest. I trodded forwards with a hesitant catch in my breath, my eyes glued to its allure. The cloud-masked sunlight beat down on its bonnet, glinting with stillness, with silence.
As I got close enough to discern the black keys from the white, I spotted something that clutched my heart like a violent, crushing fist: a note. A singular, piece of paper, untouched by the dust, untouched by the wind, as still as if it were as heavy and unmoveable as the piano it lay upon. I no longer had any heed for the sound of my footsteps; I pounced on the note, upturning a flurry of pallid leaves from the soles of my feet as I did. My mind churned with flashes of his vivacious, toothy grin. I recalled the molar he had lost in a near-death duel with an adversary long before I had enlisted, the one that’s lack of presence had always drawn my eyes towards it like a black hole. The freckles that dotted his face like komorebi through leaved trees, the ones so vibrant and plentiful that it had made the word become synonymous with him. I scrambled to pick up the letter, scurrying for my friend’s last words. Perhaps I had hoped for a conformation that he was still alive; that he had deserted on that fateful day.
But instead, my chest exploded with a violent mix of emotions that I could not pinpoint as my eyes fell over the sentence scrawled on the pamphlet.
Frustration, longing, melancholy, regret, perhaps even joy.
“Let this final song be an ample requiem to the fine life I lived.
- J.V. Cooper.”
I felt the sting of tears well in my nose and behind my eyes, a taste that had grown to be all too familiar. I reread, I reread, I reread, the droplets that leaked from my eyes falling onto the small, thin piece of paper, dampening and smudging the words. I crumpled to my knees, clasping the note tightly to my chest. My shoulders shook as the tears flooded from my eyes.
I did not know what he played that sickening, terrible Autumn last.
But I’m sure it was good song.
No.
I’m sure it was a great one.
The Assassin
On Revenge.
Droplets of blood flowed down from my forehead and pooled on the tip of my nose. Forming a bead that tickled my numb senses, it threatened to separate and drip onto the sullen, torn earth at my feet.
My laboured breaths ripped into my lungs like razor blades. Yet that feeling was engulfed by the rocketing pangs that drummed in my chest everytime my heart took a beat. I gazed down at the head at my toes, locking eyes with the lightless, dead remains of the man I had just slaughtered. I watched, unable to pry my eyes away, as the colour slowly drained from his face, as did an ocean of blood from the mangled, gory remnants of his throat. My synapses were filled with tar, glue, hot cement that solidified in my brain, preventing any thoughts from crossing my mind in my transfixation. I let my crimson-tinted blade drop to the floor as my fists unwittingly unclenched. The clang that it made upon impacting the coarse, brown-black dirt that was littered with rumours of organs, tissues and blood did not reach my ears past the incessant, ringing tinnitus.
After an eon and an eon longer, my face suddenly bursted into an empty smile. It creased my scarred-scabbed face, morphing into an expression that I could only guess one looking at me could liken to madness. But anyone that could have, were scattered into a thousand, ten-thousand pieces across the expanse of earth upon which I stood.
“H-how’d you like that!?”
I bellowed up to the sagging, stormy sky of grey-black clouds that hung above me, it murmuring back with distant, indecipherable roars of thunder and lightning. My voice quivered with a multitude of levels of emotion; glee, adrenaline…
…fear.
I no longer felt fear of any foe or adversary that may approach me. But rather I felt fear for an adversary I could not cut with my blade. That being the words I ever so desperately tried to stifle as raindrops trickled, flitted into my eyes. They remained unblinking, fixed upon the grey melancholy of the clouds.
I had killed them. The clan that stole away the life of my own. The mission that had razed my mind to cinders, and built it afresh as a tempered blade. Accomplished. My retribution was complete. My life had surmounted, and in this moment, joy was my very being.
Now, I have nothing.
Now, nothing but the blood in my body, the blood on my hands, and the blood scattered in my memory.
Blood without satiation.
Blood without cease.
Blood without end.
Fight or Flight
On Consequence.
And as time screeches towards the inevitable moment of decision – the distance between this moment and the next is stretched out into infinity. The blood roars through my flesh, pooling into the finger shivering upon the trigger, and the world around me implodes; my vision collapsing in on the gut-grinding cruelty of the black of the gun.
The gun goes off. I reel in shock as the explosion rattles through the bones in my hands – as the world is stolen by light for a singular instant – and the bloody result of my bloody decision is laid out before me.