1. This is where things change– these next few words control their future. Only it’s not about saving the world anymore, only how badly they’ll destroy it.

2. “Do you know what time it is?” He grinned over the counter, hands conspicuously behind his back.

“I swear, if you have what I think you have–”

“Da-da-da Banana Time!” He unloaded the bag of groceries with a flourish of unrepentant glee. Only Darren could sneak ice cream sundaes into the house without fearing mom’s wrath. Being the baby of the family has its benefits… plus the rest of us get ice cream, so we can’t complain.

3. Cats are well known for being able to see spirits. Mittens was fine with that, it was the part about spirits being able to see her that the kitten found unnerving.

4. There are levels to pain and she worked her way down through each one, unraveling as she went.

5. It was easier to live in forests than the wide open plains. After a decade shipboard they’d grown used to enclosed areas and the unending horizons unnerved them. Yolan took it hardest, always pushing himself to go a little further from the shade, furious when the sense of impending danger finally sent him scurrying back.

These story prompts are released into the wild per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, so sayth their author Martha McMahon Bechtel.

Technotari Tags: Writing Prompts

1. She can’t remember when she stopped being scared, but it’s gone now. Instead she’s just tired and cold and ready to die.

2. “Mmm, smells like rain.”
“You can’t smell water, it’s probably just the ozone from the lightning.”
“No, it smells like rain. You know, a little bit cold, sort of crisp and wet– it’s just, well, rain-smelling.”
“And you wonder why your psych profile has all those little asterisks in it…”

3. It shouldn’t have been hard to invent a wheel, after all he knew what they looking like, but getting two round bits of wood to make the leap from ‘more-or-less round’ to ‘functional wheels’ was apparently a little more difficult than it looked.

4. Some people approached life with the idea that sanity was optional and if they managed to accumulate enough disadvantages the universe would reward them with fame and fortune just to balance the scales. Sadly, life was a lot less like a GURPS game than they imagined.

5. The problem with following deer paths were that deer were inherently fickle animals. He looked down the three foot drop that neatly bisected the trail and sighed.

These story prompts are released into the wild per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, so sayth their author Martha McMahon Bechtel.

Technotari Tags: Writing Prompts