A little late with this week’s story update. After two hours of exercise followed by a few hours of socializing at a luncheon, I was too exhausted to do much yesterday. I blame the socializing, mostly. I always need quite a bit of recharge time after parties.
Anyway, this is the fourth story I wrote for my “365 Days of Shorts” project. It was originally a bit longer in the middle, but I cut out a few paragraphs that didn’t seem to add anything to the story. It actually feels like I took out more than I did, because of how much more I like it now.
Length: 793 words
Prompt: Pick a novel and take the first line off of every page to use as a prompt.
Novel used: The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow by Fuyumi Ono.
#46. It was coming from her leg.
She had never been one for ghost stories. While others would gasp or get scared, she would always list out the logical explanations for why this or that scary event couldn’t possibly have been paranormal at all. A glass moving on its own? Water on the bottom of the glass sliding across the water on the table. Voices with no apparent source? The traveling of voices from distant conversations, televisions, or radios. Sleep paralysis, faulty wiring, high electromagnetic fields; any number of perfectly reasonable things could easily account for all of the odd occurrences in the ghost stories she heard.
Of course, people seemed to like their ghost stories. They liked that “what if?” and pretending that there was more our there than what was understood as part of the observable world. Much the same way that people liked watching “magic” tricks and unrealistic movies with obvious plot holes and impracticalities. Space travel? Aliens? Ridiculous.
She had never understood the appeal of any of those things or why so many people seemed to get angry at her when she pointed out the logical solutions in the “entertainment” she was watching or listening to. She had been called many things over the years: a “party pooper”, “boring”, etc. People stopped inviting her out to movies, to shows, or even over to their homes. She lost touch with old friends one by one to the point where her last remaining friend warned that she might become a “crazy cat lady”. Ridiculous since she didn’t like animals. Eventually even that friend fell out of contact with her. Then, she was alone.
Which meant she was content. Everything in her life had a purpose. Each of her possessions had a proper place in her apartment. Every book was sorted logically. Every decoration near other decorations similar in shape, color, or size. No plants because they would die. No animals, because they were filthy. No TV or DVD player or other useless things. Just her, her books, and a computer with the bare minimum in specs. All she needed it for was to research new facts and scientific developments on the internet.
She didn’t need much from life and she had all she wanted.
Now, the only silly stories she ever heard were from a nosy neighbor that loved to gossip about noises that she refused to accept had to be rats. It was tolerable since she only crossed paths with the woman once or twice a week. Overall, her life was orderly and ordinary.
Which was why the voices she heard in her apartment one day disturbed her so much.
She didn’t have a TV or a radio, so those crackly male voices couldn’t be coming from inside her apartment. And most of her neighbors were single women, so it didn’t make sense for multiple male voices to be coming through the walls. At least, not without a female voice mixed in there. The window was also sealed tight; she didn’t think that voices could get in through the cracks. The voices didn’t sound any closer when she pressed her ear to the glass.
Maybe the apartment above hers? Or below?
She was fairly certain that the neighbors above were still on vacation. They’d made a point to tell her before they left in case a pipe ruptured up there and she noticed water dripping through her ceiling.
The apartment below was a possibility. She couldn’t quite remember who lived there. A man that seemed to like to keep to himself. Perhaps he had male company? She wasn’t one to judge.
It didn’t matter anyway. When she got down on her knees in the living room to press an ear to the floor, the voices stopped as abruptly as they’d started.
She managed to put the voices out of her mind until a couple of weeks later when she heard them again. They were the same voices, she was positive about that. Louder, though. She could make out the pauses between words, but she couldn’t understand any of it. What language was that? She considered herself a cultured, worldly individual due to the time she spent researching. It bothered her that she’d never heard that language before. She’d have to ask her downstairs neighbor where he was from later.
Which was when it hit her. That neighbor had moved out two months before. The apartment was still empty. She got down on the floor to listen. The sound of the voices did get louder.
But the voices weren’t coming through the floor.
She sat up and touched the bruise on her leg that had yet to heal. She never had remembered where she’d gotten it. The voices stopped, then started again when she lifted her finger.
The voices were coming from her leg.
Skyebun Studio 