The Bush

Oct. 5, 2022

“I challenge you to write a short story from the perspective of a large bush. Setting, plot, framing etc., all your choice.” - Alex

Ambient Track

Darkness. 

The warm soil around my tiny exoskeleton brought to me the comforts of a womb. Pre-birth I lay in peace, a haven of absolute security. In the Below I learned patience. Existence was unity with all around me. 

I recalled often the frequent vibrations that came in waves, slipping me in and out of consciousness. Though I never knew their source, they gave me some semblance of time and space in a place where neither existed.  

I thought it was my own body that ruptured, but in time I could tell that only the casings of my egg had given way to new life. My life. And in my being I felt strong! 

Ever-pushing upwards through the unknown. Each day a new grain of sand, a layer of clay, and the immensely rich top-soil that broke as the Above opened before me. The warmth that blessed me as my sprout crested above the terra was euphoric. Air moved my slender body back and forth gently while my cells continued to push ever-upward, then out.

Light.

Consciousness. 

What an endless curse! All they do is take from you. 

Every day the grass beneath my branches goes untouched, but my leaves deserve the incessant torture of your infernal pincers, the bludgeoning of your teeth, the gnawing and gnashing that strip my ornaments and flesh! Those who devour my life choose to even impregnate themselves upon me, lay their eggs on my worn body and bring their ravenous kind into being lit upon my very branches! 

Beyond this earth, I rot. The moisture exudes from my branches and into the ground as I beg it to choke me of life. 

Torment.

I fade as my body continues to be. With the passing of summer, so too fade the murderous hive that seem so enthralled with what beauty I could have offered. 

Now the air is crisp and cold. My body wilts. Soon the last piece of my essence will float on the Autumnal air and take rest upon the hardened soil that begs my roots of its every breath. I no longer have to suffer. I no longer have to live. No…

Death.

A faded memory lingers in my consciousness, but I can’t recall. All I see is:

Darkness.

Nov. 8, 2022

“So I will offer up a challenge for you now. I challenge you to write a third-person creative story. Pick a country you have never been to before and know very little about. Now write this story and build the world using only references you think are accurate from memory, and/or complete stereotypes from that country.” - Alex

Ambient Track

All dried up.

“Bună seara.”

“Bună seara.” 

The exchange was becoming increasingly more monotonous with each passing night. And what of it? Such an impalpable and pointless passing of words. No one gives a fuck how your night is. 

Dmitri sat down at his desk and leaned over on his left palm while carelessly tapping his pointed nails rhythmically on the desk to his right. With a creaky spin in the old, broken leather chair he vaguely considered “Home,” he aimlessly hummed an old tune from his childhood three-hundred years before today and dreamt of a cake, forgetting entirely what it must have tasted like.

“You’re late again, Dmitri. Fifth night this week. What way do you consider me to feel if my employees show such a lack of concern for this business?”

An angry and hollow-eyed man softly floated around the corner of the tired cubicle that the young three-hundred-something year old vampire sat unhappily inside. 

“Ivan, I couldn’t care less. You’ve no one to replace me, and you’ll not find another for this god-forsaken shift,” Dimitri shot back, breaking halfway through to provide a dramatic and useless yawn between. 

“You’ll see, you blood-sucking piece of cacat!” The manager, the man, the boss, whatever he thought himself to be, floated down the hallway and disappeared as normal through the torn wallpaper that remained forever stained and adhered to the brick wall behind it. These tired and empty threats had become as mundane as the nightly exchanges of “Good evenings” that so relentlessly annoyed him. 

Within a few hours time, Dmitri began to drone into the normal swing of things. A long night ahead remained, but mundane it wouldn’t be. Tonight would prove to be…

Memorable. 

The normal papers lined the In and Out trays on Dmitri’s desk. Orders for shipments of blood, stapled atop of them the normal notes for amounts needing to be laundered in Leu. 

An odd stamp embossed on one particular document caught his attention, however. A pristine and thick piece of paper. 

“Unholy night. Is this cardstock…?”

Dmitri flipped the document over a couple of times and then peered intensely at the logo in the bottom right corner, over which a powerful looking signature stained the paper forever in a deep crimson ink. The stamp appeared to depict a figure strung upside down on a cross with a pair of leathery wings coming from behind him. 

Dmitri bent over his desk in pain immediately as a piercing headache shot through his brain. He sat back in his chair, gasping for a moment, and then pulled himself back together. 

“Ce puii mei!?” 

When he peered back down at the paper, the signature had all but entirely burned through the document, and a thin wisp of smoke rose from the paper towards the broken ceiling tiles above. Dmitri looked up, seeing a puff of insulation creeping out through one of the broken squares and stared off into space for a moment before coming back to reality. 

His eyes scanned the text of the paperwork as he mumbled aloud its contents, “By special request of his Lordship, an amount of 18 pints of virgin’s blood has been requested for delivery to the estate of Herr Christian von Knoblauch. It has been placed into this contract, the request that each pint hold the blood of an entirely different individual in order to meet the specific tastes of Herr Knoblauch, and his esteemed guests…

He paused momentarily, considering the fairly normal request as odd on such a un-normal document as this, and then skimmed down the page towards the bottom.

“… The amount being transferred by SEPA payment on November the 12th shall arrive in Euros and total one-million and four-hundred thousand [€1,400,000,00]. We are aware of the generous offer of Herr Knoblauch and request only that it not be misused in any way deemed malicious or illegal.”

The price astounded Dmitri. Nearly four-hundred thousand more than would have been requested by Inter-vein LLC. But the denoting of illegal probability was the kicker for him. He pondered the strange request, made almost as if knowledge of their dealings were known.

Dimitri clacked his blackened nails onto the failing keys of an out-dated calculator and quickly turned the 1.4 million into five times the amount in Leu. 

“Seven. Seven million…”

His voice trailed into more mumblings as he then fixed the laundered price and split the funds into the normal channels for cleaning: A portion going through the town’s private hospital, a bit into building restorations that he’d never see, and a sliver of it going into an off-shore company in Leeds. In seconds the vast sum was divided up and out like steam rising and disappearing off a kettle.

Six more hours. Home. Feast…

Checked out.

Dmitri stepped into the snowy street before the sun crested over the worn eternally-grey skyline of Brasov. Nearly twisting his ankle on the unmanaged concrete steps that cascaded down from the old town hall’s eery edifice, he looked around nervously but couldn’t muster a reason as to why.

The walk home felt longer, and the streets much quieter than normal. Even the passing marketplace, generally bustling in the morning with its horde of bunicilor, only seemed to provide colder-than-usual stares and unmoving strangers, silhouetted by the rising sun.

… The sun.

“Futu! Where has the time gone,” Dmitri wondered? His skin began to wrinkle slightly as he rushed onwards, feeling ever-not-closer to the safety of his domicile. He caught a passing glance of an old woman gazing at him from a glassless window, before he burst through his door and collected himself, looking at the blisters on his hands and touching the burns around his neck.

Dmitri hadn’t been able to afford a new scarf since his last had blown carelessly away.

Today was remarkably cold.

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!

The banging eerily rattled the wall from the other room like clockwork, and hadn’t stopped for some time now. How long had he been asleep? Dmitri lay frozen in terror for a moment before trying to gather himself.

“A drunk?” He’d thought to himself for comfort as he slowly crept to the corner of this two-room flat, save the bathroom with the shattered sink.

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNO-…

The knocking stopped abruptly as the greying pupil of Dmitri’s left eye caught the rays of sun from the kitchenette. A figure, bereft of colour and hunched dramatically over at the waste, raised a bloodied head off the wall and remained motionless.

Tick… The old clock took over the rhythmic knocking perfectly. Tock… Yet another second passed.

The figure’s head looked at Dmitri with a violent gash where a face once existed, as if it hadn’t even turned to make his acquaintance. 

“I…”

A final breath of lifeless air passed over Dmitri’s tongue as he looked down at his palm and saw a bloody signature carved into his hand. By the time he’d cast his eyes upwards once more, the smell of onions had filled the air, and the bloodied and hollow gash of the creature gazed into his now lifeless eyes for but an inch away

Tock…