"Cousin" - Prompted Free Write

Prompt: A visit from a strange cousin
Word Count: ~550
Written Today

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He arrives on the third of May.

What, who?

A strange knocking on door, a certain rhythm, a tune – sounding as if someone were thumping away on your front door with a spoon. In fact he is doing just that, a long spoon made of wood firmly in his grasp and raised for another round when you finally drag yourself across the apartment to respond to the noise. The sun isn’t up yet. He hadn’t called or written, of course.

He never does, this cousin of yours. When you were twelve he showed up for the first time on the front porch of your house, with a small blue suitcase and a toothy grin. He said something to your mother you couldn’t quite hear. You watched her grow pale and nod. “This is your cousin,” she told you, hustling the boy into the house. After that there were no more questions about his origins. Your mother said “It’s none of your concern” when you tried to ask. He simply laughed at you.

He stayed for three months. You would spent long, lazy summer afternoons playing in the shade among the trees, venturing far into the forest that surrounded your house, playing the most fantastic games. He could make the leaves on the forest floor spin around in awesome spirals, or chase after you, taking on all kinds of menacing forms as you ran screaming. You would burst out into the sun, your yard, tumbling in the grass.

He broke almost all of your favorite toys, eventually. There was no point in yelling at him for it; he never bothered to apologize and you always grew bored enough alone to forgive him anyway.

And now he is here again, standing in the hallway of your apartment building a good hour before dawn. This time it is his hair, otherwise neatly cropped and quite unremarkable, that is bright blue. If you didn’t know better you could swear there was glitter it it.

“Andy!” he exclaims, and tackle-hugs you before you can respond. You fumble for words. He invites himself inside in the meantime.

Who is he, really? Where did he come from? You never really did find out. How exactly are you related? You’ve never seen so much as a picture of any of your relatives, when you pause to think.

Why exactly do you believe him? Is it the way he conjures shortcuts in the metro after a night out, musty passages beneath the earth that you could have sworn never existed until he exclaimed, “look here!”? Is that enough? He never really speaks with any kind of consistency. There is no root, no pattern to his actions or words.

Perhaps you are inclined to believe in anything. Perhaps when you were seventeen you saw your mother simply glimmer out of existence. Did that really happen? You never spoke of it to anyone, never translated mind-images to words. There are things you do not speak of. You do not introduce this cousin of yours to your neighbors, colleagues, friends. He is nameless.

The space between sound and silence. An echo. The pile of laundry in the bathroom, a pasta stain on the kitchen floor, the vague scent of cigarette smoke and earth that lingers long after a departure, sudden and unannounced as always.

'paranoia' - short prompted free-write

trying to get into the habit of actually doing a bit of creative writing again, now that i have some time; this is me dipping a toe into the water, I guess.


Prompt: A loud knock on the door
Wordcount: 312
Written Today


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You always jump, when you hear a loud knock on the door. Always the moment of muscles tensed, pulse suddenly shot up - the expectation of disaster, surely present, surely waiting for you behind a single slab of wood and a half-rusted doorknob.

Always you wait with dread for the thumping of boots up the stairs, the particular sound of a certain type of tire and engine pulling up to the curb. Cause and effect: you hear the knock at the door and you gasp. Your hands shake when you go to undo the locks. You fumble it, stretch out the time before the door must, inevitably, open up.

When it does you sigh. It's the post man, with a package and a clipboard for you to sign. Or the neighbor from down the hall, housedress a mess, asking to borrow a cup or two of salt. Or a newspaper salesmen, looking to talk you into a subscription. Or a Jehovah's Witness, with literature for you to read. And so on.

You answer them quickly, eyes darting behind them, down the hall, relieved and yet unwilling to believe your luck, quite. Yes, no, please, okay I will look, go now, you have to go. Sometimes they give you strange looks, when you shut the door so quickly, do up the lucks again. But you must - do up the locks and then sink down on the floor, back against that old door, knowing you can finally breath.

Then you wait again, anxiously, for the next knock on the door, the loud start of a car in the night, the sound of footsteps in the distance. Disaster lurks everywhere, waiting to grab you, to swallow you up the way it did your father when you were four, in a country that no longer exists, decades ago. You wait for it and watch, trembling.

character study - a murderer

Gibrant kills for money because he knows it is what he is good at doing - better than most men could be. He knows how to kill with a sharpened axe, with well polished knives, with a rope. He knows how to snap a man's neck with his bare hands, the kind of instinctive knowledge that comes only from having done something many times before.

He knows how to kill quickly, and silently. He doesn't do it with any particular bloodlust or frenzy or need, the way some men - the really dangerous ones - do. He doesn't do it with revulsion, disgust. In fact, he doesn't do it with any particular feeling at all. There's always a curious disconnect between him and his target, a certain absence of emotion so that, in snapping that neck or slicing that throat, it feels no different than it would to slice open a sack of good, fresh grain - the slightest twinge of pity at the loss, and then nothing.

This makes him a very efficient - and expensive - killer indeed.

Gibrant only kills for money because, while he never feels very much at all for those whose lives he is ending he does, in fact, still have the ability to feel. He doesn't like the looks people give him when he kills, or when he enters a tavern or shop where his reputation precedes him: disgust, nervousness, anger, a certain fear-tinged awe. The witnesses are, of course, the worst. He still remembers the look a certain girl gave him: she was maybe fourteen, pretty though very small, and it was her father's throat Gibrant had been very entusiastically paid to slice open. He had done so, not bothering to pause at the man's desperate, furious begging, offers of bribes and pleas, no. But afterwards, when she'd stumbled in....the girl hadn't screamed. She hadn't cried or cursed or gone into hysterics or any of that. Instead she had stood there, backed up into a wall, shaking. Shaking and staring at him with a look of pure horror, a haunting look, a look that made it perfectly clear that in her eyes he was a monster, totally inhuman, despicable. It was all he could do, in that moment, to leave, and quickly.

No, he didn't like it, the way people that knew who he was looked at him. Neither fear from good men nor admiration from despicable ones was desireable. He didn't like being seen as something apart, something instead of someone, a force of nature rather than simply a man who was good at what he had been trained to do.

He didn't want to be a monster. In doing it for money - only ever for money - he drew a line. He was not a monster but a mercenary, a professional. If someone attacked him, even viciously, sneakily in an alley or pub, he would only disable them, knock them out, perhaps break a few bones. But never the killing blow, no.

It haunted him, the idea that one day, if he wasn't very, very careful, he'd stop feeling anything at all, stop being a man entirely and become the thing so many people already thought him to be.