i took a creative writing class this fall (2024) and wrote a lot of these shorter pieces that i wanted to upload but didn’t want to give them each their own page. so here’s a collection of all of them together! (though not in any sort of order.) there’s also one piece on this page that i wrote last summer but liked enough that i wanted to upload it somewhere...see if you can guess which it is!
the sentence: december 5
This was how it went, the morning of the fifth of December, when the air was crisp and cold and the sky was heavy and low and even though I didn't have to go to work, I decided to leave the house and go downtown to the art gallery because I hadn't been in what felt like ages: I left my apartment and locked the door behind me, I took the stairs down because the elevator was still broken, I gave a bite of my granola bar to the stray cat who hung around the back door -- who cared if it was bad for him, he liked it -- and I stuck my arm out for the bus just in case it thought I was waiting for something else, and three stops after I got on it stopped and an announcement came over the PA that said "we apologize for the inconvenience, we're switching drivers, we'll be back on our way in just ten minutes," but after fifteen minutes the bus still hadn't started moving again so I got up and thought perhaps I could walk to the river instead, that would be nice, and I started walking north towards the river and it began to snow, I realized I hadn't checked the weather that morning but it probably wouldn't even stick, there was nothing to worry about, so I kept walking, and in the chilly morning of course it stuck to the ground instantly and traffic began to slow and I thought, I should probably walk home but let's see where this goes, and so I kept walking north and the snow kept piling up and the day went on.
a ghost story
When I was young my grandmother would tell me about the ghost in her house. How after my mother and her siblings all had moved out, while my grandfather was at work, a man knocked on the door and said, "I used to live here, could I look around?" My grandmother let him in because people from her generation think nothing of strangers knocking on the door, and she showed him around -- they went to the attic and that was where she saw her, a young girl as tall as the man's waist, running around him like an excited dog, dressed in clothes forty years out of date, hovering slightly above the ground. The man couldn't see her, but my grandmother described him to her and he began to tear up. "My daughter," he told her later over tea, his long legs barely fitting under the kitchen table. "It was a terrible accident when she died." The ghost stood behind him, staring out the window at cars rushing past.
My grandmother asked how it happened, if he didn't mind telling her. It couldn't have been less than twenty years ago -- she'd owned the house since before her youngest was born.
"She fell," the man said, slowly, nervously. He asked if she was still there, and my grandmother nodded. The girl was watching them now, perched on a chair as if she'd joined the conversation, and my grandmother noticed that her legs did indeed hang at crooked angles. "Her brother pushed her. It was meant to be a game."
The ghost shook her head slowly.
"Pushed her down the stairs?" repeated my grandmother.
The man nodded. "Not on purpose," he said.
The ghost shook her head again. At this point my grandmother always told me, "It was startling how much they looked alike, I realized. They could have been twins. And he was far too young to be her father."
She never elaborated on that. I didn't realize until I was older what she meant. I never saw the ghost myself, but I was terrified of those stairs for years and years.
100-word story: the arena
It had been an arena, before everything. And then suddenly it was forced to become everything under the sun, hospital, home, school, farm, the list went on. And then we abandoned it, as we did all things, and we walked out and vines and moss and something much worse overtook the frames of its walls that had once held glass, the concrete steps we made into beds, the former Astroturf field that we wore down to dirt beneath our shoes before planting with a thousand things that were good to eat. And then we left. And we never looked back.
the castle on the hill
There was a castle at the end of Kate’s street. It was six hundred years old, if not older, and crumbled half to ruin: the absolute perfect place to play spies or thieves or princesses. Technically it was a Historical Landmark meant to be maintained by the government, but no one ever kicked Kate or her friends out of it, so they were free to scheme and get hurt in it to their hearts’ content. Kate preferred to be a general who balanced precariously on the remains of the top floor to patrol for enemies on the horizon, while James preferred to be a spy who infiltrated the royal court to steal their values and redistribute the wealth, and Ellie liked to be the evil queen who threw everyone else into the muddy dungeons. Every child in Collmore spent long summer days in the place, and their parents never stopped them because twenty years ago they’d done the exact same, and they all had the scars and broken bones to prove it. The castle was the center of town in the childrens’ hearts, and it would stay that way until its stones crumbled to dust.
Or so everyone thought, until the cold February day when the evil wizard moved in.
The wizard would be the first person to tell you that she was evil, thank you very much. Perhaps there were good wizards out there, but she was not one of them. She hated sunny days, she hated fuzzy animals, and most importantly, she hated children.
After her last castle had been taken over by the Office of Public Works, the wizard had been forced to find somewhere new, and Castle Collmore was absolutely perfect. It was drafty, it was crumbling, and it was absolutely filled with spiderwebs. She could set up her laboratory in the cellar and she could terrorize the town from the roof. There was just the problem of the children. She would have to get rid of the children.
dialogue exercise: night security
“Excuse me, sorry, do you know how to get to the history museum?” said a woman’s voice behind him, accompanied by a light tap on his shoulder.
“I’m heading over that way, so I could just show you.”
“Thank you so much!”
“But it’s closed right now.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Just come back tomorrow morning. It opens at ten. I’m turning left here.”
She turned around to catch up: she’d been walking ahead of him and walked clean past the turn. “Ten tomorrow will be too late.”
“Too late for what?”
She ignored him and changed the subject. “So where are you headed?”
“Work. Why are you trying to go to the museum at quarter to midnight?”
“What do you do?”
“Night security. If you’re trying to steal something, you’ve asked the wrong person for directions.”
“Ooh, like Night at the Museum? Of course I’m not stealing anything. I’m putting back what my idiot brother stole.”
“I’m calling the police.”
“No!” she said, sharply enough to make him stop and turn around. “Don’t do that. Look, I’m just putting it back. And I want it back before anyone notices it’s missing. What if you help me get in? So I don’t trip any alarms. And then I’ll put it back and leave and you’ll never have to see me again.”
“No,” he said, and took out his phone as he started to walk again.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she said. “What if I just give it to you and you put it back and I never even go in?”
“No.”
“This isn’t going to stop me from getting in. Wouldn’t you rather keep an eye on me?”
“No.” He paused. Curiosity got the better of him. “What are you returning?”
She grinned. “I knew you wanted to know! Come here -- I’ll show you, but I don’t want to wave it around in plain sight.” She opened her bag and against his better judgement, he leaned in to peer inside.
“That’s not -- that’s not one of ours. You can’t leave that there.”
“Look, I’ve got the catalogue entry all written up and everything. Don’t even worry.”
“You. What?”
“And I just need you to help me get into one of the exhibit cases to put it in.”
“Is this a bomb threat?”
“Of course not. That would be terribly boring. Look, I’m just doing this to see if I can. And I have this pottery shard of yours that my brother took that I want to give back. He took it from the archives so it wouldn’t get noticed as quickly.”
“You can’t do any of that.”
“I know. That’s the point. Oh, here we are!”
“Give me the bag and stay outside. My supervisor can deal with this.”
“Absolutely not. I’ll come back tomorrow if you won’t let me in tonight.”
“I won’t let you in tomorrow, either.”
“Then I’ll find the schedule and come back when someone else is working. You might as well just let me in now.”
“I’m not getting fired for your whims.”
“Oh, please. You wouldn’t get fired on my account.”
“No.” He cut across the grass to a hidden side door and pulled out his keys.
“We could go on like this forever,” she said, running to follow him.
“We won’t,” he said, and he opened the door, entered, and closed it with a surprising swiftness, not giving her a chance to follow. She looked dejected and after a second walked away.
In the morning he found a pottery shard and a human skull on the curator’s desk.
Not a single alarm had gone off all night.
imitation of seven or eight things i know about her (a stolen biography) by martin ondaatje: we chose the headings together as a class
1. SIDEWALKS
When she was six years old, she decided that sidewalk cracks were portals to another world. Her friends made an extravagant game of avoiding them, repeating the same old rhyme, step on a crack, break your mother’s back, but she made a game out of stepping on as many as she could, in the hopes that one day she would find the one that could take her somewhere else.
2. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
Every Friday since she was young, the plaza outside the movie theater came alive. Local musicians played eighties hits from a two-foot-high stage, children ran around screaming, parents sipped cans of beer, teenagers slipped into the shadows together. The sun set midway through the party -- sometimes in the winter, it set before it even began -- and then the lights would come on, shining down upon the town, not quite bright as day.
3. BEDTIME
She always slept with her arms thrown around her gigantic Great Pyrenees, even in the midst of summer. There was never room for another person in her bed.
4. LAST KISS
It was a Friday night behind the movie theater, it was July, the air was sticky and hot, the sky was dark with impending clouds, and around the corner, the party had been cast in an eerie blue light. She was home from college for the summer, still unsure of who she was supposed to be. A boy she had known in high school had his arms around her, and she held hers halfheartedly around him. Everything felt bad, but she couldn’t put a finger on why. Lightning lit up the sky above them, and when the rain started in seconds later, she slipped out of the arms of the boy whose name she couldn’t remember and let it soak her to the bone while the rest of the town fled for cover.
5. DUSTY CORNERS
Her parents’ house was old. Nineteenth-century old. Originally-built-without-running- water old. Freezing-cold-all-winter old, fireplaces-in-every-bedroom old, splinters-in- the-hardwood-floors old. When she got her own place, it was built-within-the-last-ten- years new. She refused to sweep the corners because without dust it doesn’t feel like a home.
6. RECURRING DREAM
She was in a foreign city and fog was creeping in, ever so slowly, down every narrow alleyway, across every delicate bridge. Despite this, she was at ease. She always woke up right when the fog caught her. You’re there too, she told me once with a frown. You want me to run away from the fog. But I want you to come into it with me.
7. AWAY FROM THEM
She wanted me to run away with her. When I asked her where we would go, she said, The city from my dream.
And how would we get there, then?
She smiled in response. It will find us.