One Word Writing Prompt: Uncle

Everyone knows that when you reach your limit, you cry out "Uncle!" for instant escape. Got an arm twisted behind your back? Shout "Uncle!" Pinned to the floor by your older, bigger sister? Shout "Uncle!" However, people forget that if you say "Uncle" three times, you summon the ghost of Uncle Darren.

The kiddies call him Dark Darren, but in changing his nickname, they leave out the most important warning: do not say "Uncle" three times. When he's not called Uncle Darren, it's easy to forget that rule. Of course, he's not my real uncle. He's my great-uncle, my grandmother's mischievous brother who disappeared in mysterious circumstances some time around the turn of the century.

He's not the kind of ghost you want to summon. Some ghosts are benign and harmless; they drift around and bemoan their fate, but they leave the living alone. Uncle Darren is far from harmless. In the last fifty years, there have been nearly 200 unsolved murders in Jericho County: that's all his work. According to Grandma, he was dangerous in life, and he remains dangerous in death. Decapitations, drownings, dismemberment--all by Uncle Darren.

So be careful how often you back out of a tussle. If you say "Uncle" three times, it'll probably be the last thing you say.

One Word Writing Prompt: Cruelty

I had heard that the tea shop on the corner was the most bizarre place to visit after nightfall. The proprietor put away her selection of black teas, green teas, leaf teas--all the regular fare--at sundown, and she brought out otherworldly mixes. When I walked in late one Friday night, I was surrounded by conflicting scents. I stopped on the threshold and inhaled deeply, trying to identify the different aromas. Lavender, oregano, something sulfuric. There were too many from too broad a spectrum: sweet, bitter, savory, sour. I coughed once, twice. A head appeared from being a towering stack of something labeled Identi-Tea.

"Welcome. How may I help you?"

The saleswoman was tall and birdlike, with thin bones and narrowed eyes. She stepped behind the counter and spread her hands out as if to gesture to the whole store.

I looked up, down, all around. The store was quite small. There were no freestanding shelves, only enough room for shelves along the walls. Even the large windows at the front of the store had shelves against them. A long, slender door on the back wall indicated further storage space. It was supposedly through this door that the saleswoman exchanged the day goods for these strange night ones. It was just me and her that night.

"I was just curious," I said. "I heard you had some unique teas."

"Ah, would you like some Curiosi-Tea?" She snatched a box from the shelf behind her and held it up like a woman in a soap commercial.

"What's in it?" I asked.

"Oh no," she replied with a smile. "That's part of the fun. I can't tell you what's in these teas."

"Then how do I know I will like it?"

"You just know."

I frowned. "What am I smelling?"

"A bit of everything," she said vaguely.

"Right. What else do you have?"

"Hmmm. I think I'm getting a good read on you. Try some of this."

She handed me a small gold box. I moved it around to find the name of the tea.

"There's not much here," I said.

"A little bit of Cruel-Tea goes a long way."

"Can you at least tell me if it's sweet or bitter?"

"Oh, very bitter."

I placed it on the counter and reached for my back pocket. "I'll take it."

I paid for it and left, feeling like wisps of tea smoke trailed out the door in my wake. It had been warm in the shop, but the night had fallen cold. A light drizzle had started to fall, and I was without hat or umbrella. The street was deserted, most of the shop doors shuttered and the lights off. With no taxi in sight, I decided to hoof it home, my specialty tea tucked safely in my pocket. I buttoned my coat all the way to my chin.

A homeless man suddenly reached out from the shadows on the sidewalk. "Do you have any spare change? I have had nothing to eat today."

I stopped and gazed down at him, but my eyes wouldn't adjust the darkness. But I could smell him. I longed to back in the cacophony of the tea scents. I spat at the sidewalk beside him.

"Rot and die," I said. "Then you won't have to eat."

And I hurried on to get away from him. It wasn't until several blocks later, when I was nearly home, that I realized my pocket was empty. I must have dropped my Cruel-Tea near the tramp.

One Word Writing Prompt: Winter

Every winter, as the air freezes and the snow falls, the animals retreat to the forest. There are no raccoons digging through garbage cans. No foxes mince through the park at twilight. Not even the songbirds come out in the morning to sing. Some of the animals bury themselves underground for all the winter months. Others just keep themselves warm by living in the close embrace of the trees, protected from wind and ice by the ancient, thick foliage. The city streets, open and barren, don only the footprints of the city folk as they trudge through rain and sleet, their coats tugged up to their ears. Even the ghosts hibernate for the winter.

At the first sign of frost, the ghosts fall back from their various haunts to the bury themselves underground. They don't join the bears and the skunks in their dens or the groundhogs in their holes. The ghosts nestle down in their tombs instead, to sleep the winter away with their bodies. Some fly out to sea on the west wind to join their bones in the salty depths. But most of them find their final resting places in the cemeteries and graveyards at the edges of the city. They whisper their farewells to friends and foes before slipping beneath the dirt or the marble or the stone that protects their remains. 

All except Sarah. 

She hovers at the graveyard gates, peering in at the sleepy spirits as they find their own graves and settle down for a wintry nap. This is her first winter as a ghost, and she isn't sure what to do. She died in a fire in the spring; there was nothing left of her to bury. Her bones were ground to dust when someone bulldozed the ashes of her house to build a new house for a new family. There is no grave, no marker, no memorial. Her family left after the fire, and she didn't follow them. Her past life has completely disappeared, unremembered, so she wanders aimlessly as a ghost, not even bothering to haunt or spook or chill. Her ghostly instinct tells her to hibernate, to seek the shelter that she knew in life before the storms come, but there is nowhere for her to go. 

She looks through the gates and wonders, What happens to a ghost in winter? She's about to find out.

One Word Writing Prompt: Resurface

From time to time, a dead body washes up on the shore of Lake Waterton. Deep in the fields and forests, it's a scenic dumping ground for the mobs of surrounding cities. They'll make the hour-long drive out to the lake with a body or two in the trunk, hoping that no one will notice that they are putting things into the water instead of taking things out like the local fishermen. They think the lake will hide the bodies for a long time or that the wildlife will destroy all the evidence. But sooner or later, the lake spits out what has gone in.

So the criminals got clever. They started chaining the corpses' feet to blocks of cement. Cement doesn't float, so the bodies won't either. But the lake has outwitted them. As the bodies decompose, the ligaments in the ankle break and the feet stay at the bottom while the rest of the bodies wash ashore.

So the criminals got cleverer. They wrapped the bodies with netting and chained the netting to the cement blocks, and for several months, no new bodies appeared on the beaches. But one cannot defeat Lake Waterton. She knows what she does not want. It stopped raining. The mountain rivers that usually flowed into the lake stopped running. The waterline began to recede. And then one day, a fisherman ventured onto the dwindling lake and saw dozens of people bobbing in the water's surface, caught in fishing net.

The water always wins.

One Word Writing Prompt: Wind

I am the Ghost of Wind.

I disturb the universe. I swirl around and through people's lives. Some claim to be startled by me, but in truth, they always know I'm coming. I'm always a direct result of earlier actions; you can't create wind out of nothing.

On occasion, I find my origins in the wispy, scratchy acres of a farmer's fields. Then I build up momentum traveling down roads and through marketplaces and open-air cafes before I trundle through a backyard barbecue, teasing the air from guests' noses. They always scatter at my presence, either silently and surreptitiously or with a groan and laughter. Some say that I stink, but I don't always. And people have developed the most fascinating way to describe my entrance: they call it "breaking wind." But the term that Mother Nature uses is flatulation.

One Word Writing Prompt: Lesson

"Always peel toward the nose. You're going to fold everything over the nose and then, with the final snip, we have a complete pelt ready for the next step."

I watched the taxidermist carefully. If I missed a single instruction, I could tear the tissue or ruin the skin of whatever poor, dead creature I was working on. Sweat dribbled onto my nose, so intense was the demonstration. All the same, I was grateful that the library was hosting this series of DIY classes: I now knew how to remove my own appendix, skin a mouse, and summon a four-tailed demon.

Feeling only the slightest bit squeamish, I glanced away from the exposed viscera and instead scanned the handout for information about next week's lecture.

"Oh good," I whispered, leaning over to the pale woman seated beside me. "The next class will be about releasing spirits to the afterlife."

She nodded and, without looking fully in my direction, pointed a quivering finger at my shoulder.

"Perfect timing," she said.

I looked down at where she was pointing. The tiny, wispy ghost of a mouse was perched on my shoulder, gaping in horror at the demonstration.

One Word Writing Prompt: Bullet

His friends called him Bullet, thinking him dangerous, volatile, all-around cool. They envied the slicked-back aerodynamics of his hair and the way he wore his tight, cuffed jeans. He didn't bruise when taking a punch, didn't blink when the sirens approached. He was stoic, unchanging, easy-going. Forever clad in leather. Never afraid of anything. He was their Bullet, and they had fun with him all day long.

The guilt didn't hit them until days later, when it plowed right through their consciences. They realized how cruel it had been to name him after the very thing they had used to kill him. That his life had flashed and burnt out like the gunpowder of his namesake. The hole in his greased hair seemed to open wider with each passing hour, like a mouth opening wide to consume them.

So they finally got rid of their cool corpse, though one of them returned later to steal his jeans.