Sunrise: A Short Story

I sometimes attend a free-writing Meetup in my city.  The organizer gives a single word, and then the goal is to free-write for 30 minutes without self-editing.  I like to use it as a writing challenge, to write a short story in half an hour.  I haven't done things like that in almost a decade, not since grade school.

In grade school, I was part of a writing group called Power of the Pen.  It was a chapter of a state-wide writing competition with the same name.  For the first meeting, we'd be given a sealed one-sentence prompt (also known as a strip of paper stapled in half), and then we'd be responsible for writing on that prompt for 40 minutes, timed.  We'd then share our writings at the following meeting, critique one another, and be given another prompt.  All of this was in preparation for the competitions, where there would be three timed rounds of 40 minutes, each with their own prompt.  At the district competition, the top 50% would go on to the regional competition; at the regional competition, the top 15% would go on to the state competition.  My first year, I placed third at the regional competition and went to states, but didn't make it to the final round.  The second year, I came in twelfth place at the district competition and went to regionals, but didn't qualify for the state competition.  Oh well.  I was disappointed that there wasn't a similar organization for high school, and if I'd been a little more proactive I probably could've created one, but I didn't think of that until right now.  

ANYWAY.  I promise there's more of a point to this than my not-so-discreet humblebragging.

So I attend this Meetup group, which is kind of similar to Power of the Pen.  The most recent prompt was "Sunrise," which I thought would churn out something maudlin and lovey-dovey, but strangely it turned into horror.  Writing this was kind of weird, like it took on its own life and almost...wrote itself...creepy.  

Here's "Sunrise."

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Sunrise.  Sunrise over what?  Over a lake.  And on the edge of the lake, just a little ways from where you’re standing, the breeze blowing those little feathery downy hairs into your face, there is a cottage.  It’s not a nice cottage – you wouldn’t want to spend your summers there as a child, if you ever were a child of the sort whose family spent summers in cottages on lakes – but something draws you to it.  You crunch through broken glass and fish bones, washed up by the most recent tide, left there to rot and die.  The sand beneath the debris squishes under your feet.  Brackish water oozes out, soaking the soles of your shoes.  You hate that.

The cottage is close now, and you can smell the scent of rotting wood and sadness and decay.  Sadness?  Why is it sad?  You don’t know yet, but something is telling you to find out.

You tentatively step up onto the porch.  It’s not much of a porch, just a few planks of wood someone hammered together very unskillfully and more or less duct-taped to the rest of the cottage, the wood slanting with age.  Underneath is a space not big enough to hold more than a raccoon or a cat, but the sight of the darkness under the porch makes a chill run up your spine.  Like something bad could happen there.

Like maybe something did.

You push the thought from your mind as the rising rays of the sun repaint the chipping, faded walls of the cottage a garish orange.  The door is bent, broken, as if someone – or something – very very big attacked it.  You feel a thrill rush through you as you notice a set of scores in the wood, old and faded as if they got there many years ago.  It only takes a moment for your brain to process them.  Fingernails. 

You want to turn and run.  You want to get out of this place, where something bad happened.  After all, why else would there – could there – be fingernail marks on the floor? 

Was someone dragged out or in?

Against all better judgement – against the screaming in your brain that this very well may be the last thing you do – you step across the threshold into the cottage.  The sound of the tiny waves on the cluttered beach is slightly dampened by the walls.  Your eyes take a moment to adjust to the shadows, lying patiently just beyond the reach of the sunlight now flooding in through the open door.  The room, surprisingly, is nothing special.  Or perhaps you’re not surprised.  Perhaps you knew what you would see.  A waterlogged sofa, lumps beneath the cushions moving occasionally and alerting you to the inevitable presence of mice within the delicious filling.  A few 70s-era dining room chairs clumped around a Formica-topped table, a forgotten salt shaker lying crusted on its side.  Seven years bad luck, you think to yourself, trying to resist the urge to toss a pinch over your shoulder even though it wasn’t you who knocked it over.  In the corner, there’s a broken-down easy chair and a squat end table with faded magazines tossed carelessly over its surface.  A set of stairs leads – beckons you – to the upper floor. 

Every step is marred with at least one long line etched by a fingernail in some unremembered time past. 

You decide to go upstairs.  After all, the place must be empty.  It’s the only cottage – the only house – for miles around, as if this lake was forgotten by a mapmaker and somehow disappeared from the world.  If there was someone upstairs, you would’ve heard them moving around by now.  Unless they’re sleeping.  In which case they pose no threat to you, do they?  You’ve got the jump on them. 

You pause.  Where did that thought come from?  The jump on who? 

You shake your head like a wet dog, as if trying to jimmy that thought out your ear and into the world where it can become someone else’s problem like all the trash on the beach.  The upstairs is calling you, calling, calling.  Come on up, it tells you, a girlfriend you know is wearing something scandalous underneath those clothes.  You obey.  You raise your foot and slowly release your weight onto the first step.  The wood creaks loudly underneath you and you freeze, holding your breath, before you realize how ridiculous you’re being.  This cottage is uninhabitable.  The only living things you’re likely to find up there are birds and squirrels. 

Each step groans in protest as you ascend.  Partway up the stairs, the walls suddenly change texture, as if there was a flood that only made it up so far.  The peeling wallpaper is still tacky to the touch, but no longer crumbles under your fingers – at least, it doesn’t crumble quite so much.  There are slightly-lighter spots where photos must have hung at some point.  Now, though, they’re just ghosts of things that were, the shadows of windows to memories. 

You step onto the landing and wait.  What you’re waiting for, you’re not certain.  The upstairs is darker than the lower level, likely since the windows, small to begin with, have all been boarded up.  Spatters of white and black on the floor mark the telltale signs of bird nests, and when you look up, you can see at least a dozen little hoards of twigs and twine.  Even further up – and you’re not quite certain – but you think you see a bat clinging to the rafters at the very apex of the ceiling, somehow undisturbed by your racket. 

You take a look around.  The landing is bare save a worn throw rug someone made out of rags.  A small bathroom lies to your left, the floor sloping down to a drain so that there’s no need for a shower stall to selfishly take up room.  The shower head has long since fallen down, rusted and broken, and lies in the corner.  This is nothing.  This is just a bathroom.  No unusual things have happened here.  You’re not sure how you know this, but you do. 

Perhaps it’s whatever is making the hairs on the back of your head stand up.  Perhaps it’s the open door across the hall, the one you haven’t looked at yet, and the one you’re afraid to see. 

But you have to see.

You need to see.

You turn slowly, ever so slowly, on your heel, your shoes grinding on the floor like mismatched gears.  Overhead, the bat lets out an angry squeak and drops down nearly onto your head, but you are unperturbed.  Because there is something else here, something much more…sinister.  The word comes unbidden, but you know where it’s coming from.  The door across the hall yawns open like a mouth ready to swallow you whole.  The room is dark, darker than it should be even with wood hammered over the windows, as if it’s the place where light goes to die.  Your feet slide across the floor, catching a little on the rag rug at the top of the stairs.  Below, out of the corner of your eye, you can see light filling the lower level, yet somehow it doesn’t make its way up here to you.

It’s scared of what it will find, what it will illuminate.

You’re at the threshold of the room now.  Shapes begin to take form in the dark, and you know what they are before your eyes can tell your brain what you’re seeing.  You know about the bed, its mattress so thin that you could always feel the bars holding it up from underneath.  You know about the tiny closet, large enough only to hold a few shirts and a pair of shoes – when you weren’t in it, that is.  You know about the dresser, perpetually empty as if waiting for better times.

And just as much as all of that, you know about your body, lying broken and dead beneath the boarded-up window.