A Collection of Short Stories and Poems

Deadly Objects

Prompt 3: This was called the Tray Story. I was supposed to look into a tray full of random things and write a story of whatever came to mind within ten minutes. The items in the tray: Two wooden figurines or an elderly man, a baseball, four paint swatches of different colours, an old and dried out bouquet of flowers, and a doily.

**Also, I think it seems the moment to give this chapter a proper trigger warning caution, so if you're easily triggered by cutting or blood, then you probably shouldn't be reading any of the stories I write in here. Let's all be honest with each other.**

The room smelled like extinguished sunsets and felt like the old denim jeans in my closet I couldn't wear anymore. One wall is a tangerine, the other wall my headboard touched a dark lilac, the third a dirty hothorn yellow that hung around the window over my dresser, and a white wall that had a narrow door for a mouth faced my bed. I remember when we first coloured my room these colours, my mother, father, and I, after I saw that one sunset eating into the dulled points of the mountain. Sunsets became what I lived for after that day. Though, now they were so dull that the colours only hurt the part of my brain they both lived in now.

Cheering still echoed in my ears from the last baseball game my father took me to, where I saw that one sunset that changed my life. A crack of a bat and the slap of a white ball striped in red falling in a leather glove beside my head. Father always was faster than I was when it came to catching; I was more of a runner. The ball he caught was signed by one of the Red Soxs after the game. Of course, his signature is so worn from its surface now that I could only see fragments of faded ink from where it now sat. That was Father's prized possession when he caught it, and it's hard to believe he thought I was mature enough to keep it safe for him before he left for the last time. Now, it just looked like a dirty baseball; perhaps that's all it ever really was.

Father loved baseball almost more than the things I learned to whittle in the Cub Scouts, or at least that's what he'd tell me when I handed him a wooden sheep or fish everyday after I learned how to whittle. I know, though, he really meant that when I made a miniature version of him a year or two before he passed. I'd planned to give that gray-haired figurine to his grave because he treasured it so much, but I couldn't bring myself to give a man himself while he slept forever in the dirt. I was nine and I didn't quite understand that that man in the ground had been the same that caught the baseball or the same one that painted my room with me. Baseball, whittling, and war were the things he loved most, and he died while in the depth of one of those things. I will leave it to you to take a guess as to which one killed him; I made it easy for you.

A chuckle licked my lips when my eyes scanned over the hard petals sitting below the baseball's glass stand. Lavender turned a purplish gray and white roses shriveled into a pale, aged yellow, all of which was bounded with a once lively red ribbon that grayed into a maroon. Mother was always making those little bouquets for everyone; she liked to brighten everyone's day, and more importantly, Father's day. She'd work all afternoon to find the perfect group of flowers and garnishing so Father could be greeted with a handful of stems and kiss for the tip of his long nose. It was my idea to make flowers with her one day when Father seemed to be struggling at his office, and she sort of took it over to give to everyone since her bouquets were always better than my own. But after he died, Mother stopped going outside ever so gradually so I wouldn't notice. Flowers became her enemies because they held too many kisses and their stars tormented her with the night walks they'd share in the meadow behind our house. Lavender and white roses turned into her last cluster of flowers-- the last bouquet would end with the person she'd made her first one for. Such a compassionate woman.

And, for all of you who don't think someone can die from a broken heart: you would change your mind in an instant if you saw how dead my mother was before she left her body behind in Father's chair. I was nineteen when those ten years of mute suffering finally darkened every inch of her heart. Broken hearts are lethal weapons that destroy us from within. A man once said that our own minds kill is like no other living being on this planet.

Now she lives next to Father's baseball in the item she was supposed to share with him. Personally, though, I think it's better that they're separate because Mother would reprobate Father for getting himself killed when she specifically told him not to. May God have mercy on his soul because she sure as hell won't. But, with her mother's green and white doily keeping the bottom of her bouquet warm, I'm sure she'll go easy on him if they ever find each other; my grandmother always loved my father, so she'll keep him safe.

I turned away from the shelf that held them all, the things my family was while they lived-- before they all left me; I would want to stay longer if I kept looking at them. It was difficult looking at the things that were taken from me and then the things that were given to me. Happiness and suffering, family and loneliness, and sunsets and darkness, all of those heavy, overwhelming things I never wanted. I inherited them all nonetheless.

My hand wrapped around the brass handle of my bedroom door when I stood to greet the door, and before I could twist it, my eyes fell back to my bed where a body was pushing into the neatly made covers. The man had my coco hair, my thin-framed glasses, his vacant brown eyes mirrored mine, his pale skin that also covered my body, and our wrists bled out with the same crimson streams.

I'm not as strong as Mother was all those ten years, even if she was already dead in life. In fact, I was never one for handling pain as well as either of my parents. I was twenty-five, and so was that man on my bed--our bed-- before we lost to the soothing embrace of death.

I slowly opened my bedroom door, that same squeak yelling out, only this time I was met with a blinding white light that could make three suns look dull. Even a breeze caressed my cheeks before I turned my head back to the man still spilling blood into our quilt. My eyes met the ball, the flowers, the wooden figure of my stoic father, the torn green doily, and the sunset that bathed our room in daylight. Through a tear burned down my cheek, I smiled at that man-- I could finally smile at what'd become of me--, and I gazed back into the pure light enveloping my body in warmth.

"I will find you, Mama and Papa. . . we will be together again. . ."

~Whoa, I remember this being a lot better when I made it. Oh well. I hope you enjoyed this chapter. Also, I wanted to inform you all reading this that I will no longer keep a scheduled updating time; I will post whenever I like, whether it be everyday of the week or only once. Thursdays bothered me for some reason. And, as always, this is unedited, so commenting wonky sentences/ words are also super helpful to me!~