Short Stories

The sudden eruption of applause brought Yusef back to his senses.

A shower of confetti rained onto the stage, a clear signal for him to make an appearance. Despite the three long rehearsals from the day before, he still could not make his legs move the rest of his body out of the comforts of backstage. His heart beat painfully against his chest, like a bird trying to escape its cage.

My dear reader,

If you could change the world with a drop of ink, would you?

Because if all the ink I have left is the blood flowing in my veins, then I’ll tell a story till they find my drained corpse on the floor.

Despite my resolve, the uncertainties still cause my fingers to shake and my mind to be clouded with doubt.

I don’t know what came over me to write this letter. I don’t even know if this will get anywhere. However, if by chance, someone is reading this—if you are reading this… well, these words would serve as my last. Quite unfortunate, I would say. But then again, is there really any point in telling you? After all, humans couldn’t care less when it comes to the well-being of people they do not know. 

The young boy knew he had lost but that didn’t stop him from running. From a distance, he could hear the sounds of fake and obnoxiously high-pitched gunshots gaining upon him. He made the careless mistake of looking back while sprinting, causing his legs to trip over one another and send him flat onto the muddy ground.

At the stroke of midnight, his watch started to beep. With a mild exasperation, David Arthur decided to abandon his task to cross over to the desk where his belongings lay. 

The laboratory was dark – well, except his workspace. Under the fluorescent lights, he looked into a microscope to examine the tiny viral organism he had been researching for the past several months. It was an odd little thing. Both airborne and waterborne, it was contagious to both humans and animals. The virus had an acidic quality to it – after numbing your whole body, it would proceed to corrode all your internal organs. Though the incubation period was insidiously unpredictable, symptoms may include black blood oozing from every pore and bodily cavity. If not, there would be a show of nausea and fever that could potentially kill you. 

I never knew why she insisted on sunflowers.

I used to think that it was because of Vincent van Gogh; the whole yellow paint and happiness spiel that she was so enthralled with. I knew that she used to paint because she loved his paintings. When I was younger, I watched her in the alcove of our living room, using the windowsill as an easel. She never used a palette, instead she mixed acrylic paints on the back of her hands and on her arms. The tubes of blue, yellow, and white paints ran out the quickest. She would put white paint on top of everything she drew, when the first coat of paint was still wet.

He threw his violin bow with such force that it narrowly missed her feet. Her tense muscles only moved to flinch before freezing up once more.