Do you guys know what the shortest horror story ever written in history was? It's known by many names and I'm not sure which title it goes by, but it was written by Fredric Brown. It goes something like this...
A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the world; every other living thing is dead.
The door bell rings.
Our newest english assignment is to continue the story with a limit of no more than 4 pages (I bent the rules a bit. After all, rules are made to be broken!)
This is my version. Enjoy.
A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world; every other living thing is dead.
The doorbell rings.
She leaned against the aged table with her wrinkled hands, needing as much support as she can get to do as simple of a task as standing up. She shuffled her worn body across the floor, her feet dragging across the tattered carpet, now a fading gray. Her body moved automatically, neither with nor against her will simply because she no longer has a will for anything.
She froze, her elderly hands reaching for the doorknob, her fingertips brushing against the brass handle. Awareness crept in and she took a moment to recompose herself. She decided it was nothing. It must be a mistake. Perhaps she had heard wrong. Perhaps she was getting too old and hearing things. Perhaps the doorbell was broken. Perhaps one of the intricate wires woven beneath the plastic button grew rusted with time. After all, nothing can last forever.
Mistaken with age or broken with time, it does not matter, she thought but she could conjure no explanation as she suddenly turn the lock on the door. She does not know what made her do it. She can't even recall seeing a lock here before. Or maybe she had overlooked, like how she had neglected the time that had passed. There is no point in keeping the details with no one to share. It doesn't make sense. But then again, nothing ever makes sense nowadays.
She rocked back and forth, letting the cries of the chair attempt to fill the empty silence. She tried to remember the last time she had imagined something of the sort.
She never had an imaginary friend, but she did have an unseen friend who followed her around. He was her protector, her guardian. He might have been an angel; he might have been a ghost. She really didn't care. He didn't talk to her; he just was there, watching her watching him. She was aware of others out there watching too, but they weren't there for her. They were there for others.
Eventually, her friend talked-in her head, in a conversation as clear yet opaque as the doorbell she thought she'd just heard. She wasn't going insane, she wasn't on drugs. She was simply learning about life.
She had been in the hospital with severe bronchitis when she was seven and was in an oxygen tent and supposedly she had almost died. She can't remember much about it, just the foggy part of playing with the zipper on the oxygen tent. She was alone and bored. Then she had an unexpected visitor at the hospital.
He was a boy. She couldn't tell what he looked like or even what he was wearing because he hid behind the tent in a secluded corner apart from her vision. When you are a kid, you can't figure out what is make-believe and what is real; it all kind of melts together.
He had put a coin through the opened zipper of the oxygen tent.
The coin was rusted; aged and ancient. She ran her thumb on the surface, her fingers tingling at the indents marked throughout the coin. She can't remember what the carvings were a picture of-just the fact that both faces are of different pictures; one with the markings as indents while the other was popped out of the surface. She would close the zipper and laugh and then open up the zipper and put it in his palm to try to guess which side of the coin she'd get.
After a while, a nurse came in and asked why she was laughing and talking to herself. She thought she was a jerk. She wasn't talking to herself.
He would visit in the early evening and stay and leave in his own will. She didn't know who he was but he stayed every day to entertain her until she was discharged. She remembered him standing behind the doctor and nurse when she was first admitted. She thought it was odd that they ignored him.