“You have been a great comfort to me, softening the hard times and cushioning the blows. Without your support, I would have found it much more challenging to sleep on so many difficult nights.”
With these words, and a waterfall of tears, I eulogized my dear, old friend, the sofa.
“There’s a monster under my bed!” whimpered Sophie.
“I know,” said Mom. “I put it there. It likes dark places.”
“Won’t it come out at night and eat me!?”
“No, it’s a vegetarian.”
Sophie put fresh heads of lettuce under her bed every day for the rest of her life.
“You are eighteen, Ahradok. Here is your sword. Come join the fighting men!”
“Father,” said Ahradok, “I wish to remain in the kitchens.”
“Son, men work with drawn swords, not wooden spoons.”
Ahradok honoured his father’s advice, but soon found that a sword is highly impractical for chopping and dicing.
“Who is that? Why are they treating her like a celebrity?”
“Maybe she is a celebrity.”
“I don’t think so. I read every gossipy blog and magazine out there, and I’ve never seen her in any of them.”
“Maybe she’s a really well-behaved celebrity.”
“Ha, like that’s even a thing…”
Darla’s commute was awful: it took two hours to get from her downtown apartment to the wastelands, where she hunted the secret dragons.
Her friends thought she was a paralegal. They might ask uncomfortable questions if she moved to the suburbs, and it was already hard enough hiding the scars.
A mouse lived inside my walls. I tried to feed it cheese and peanut butter and other tasty things.
“I cannot take your gifts, sir,” it said. “I am afraid you will trap me!”
I convinced it I wouldn’t. We became friends.
A small problem: my rodent-phobic wife found out.
This story is based on a title suggested by @eikoandmog.
There is a monster in the mountains that preys on bumblebees, daffodils, and woodland creatures, swallowing them whole into its enormous belly.
Some say there’s a garden in there, a paradise where the flowers bloom and the wildlife lives on, frolicking. They’ve forgotten that the monster once swallowed a bear.
This story was based on the prompt “in the mountains” on TypeTrigger.
She transferred to four different buses at random, closed her eyes and spun in a circle, walked down a few unfamiliar side streets, and wound up right in front of her house.
Again.
There was only one explanation: Mom hadn’t been lying; her father really had been a homing pigeon.
She sang beautifully. When it ended they rose to their feet in awe and appreciation, begging for more.
“Ever heard of having too much of a good thing?” she chided them. Still they implored her: a little longer!
To prove her point, she barred the exits during her three-day encore.
“I’m a world-class artiste!” the actress pronounced. “I require the perfect environment to nurture my delicate muse.”
“So it’s your muse who eats six pounds of blue Smarties every day, then?” muttered her browbeaten young assistant.
“Silly boy; we don’t eat them! We throw them out the window at people.”
Creative people are weird. Cough.
This story was based on a title suggested by @Vigafray.