Thread: Prompt

I love writing prompts and it has been a while since I've seen one, so here goes:

Write up to 800 words (I like people to have room) using one of the following somewhere in the story:

1. "It was hot within the confines...."

2. "If you only knew my game...."

3. "She was of no use to me."

4. "Could the world be a better place if...."

5. "Her life was the end...."


Have fun!

Sorry I went over by five words:

THE KINGS FOOL
BY: CHARLIE ELEANOR

It was hot within the confines of his rage. She had never felt someone radiate the emotion in such magnitude. The king was right to fear this man. He was uncontrollable.

Now he began to pace the room. His muddy boots landed heavily on the floor, pieces of dried earth fell from their soles and Kikkima was sorry for the maid that would have the unpleasant task of cleaning up after this guest. The anger within him was growing, but she could not tell why. For five days now she had traveled within him. Never had he given any clues to the rising fury. Never had he behaved rudely to people he came in contact with. In fact, he had been particularly cordial.

Suddenly he stopped in front of the body length mirror that resided in the corner of the room. His handsome face stared back. She had never seen it this closely before.

“Get out,” he said flatly. Strange thing to say, she thought. “Yes you. I can feel you acknowledge me.” Kikkima was startled. Was he referring to her? But no, it was impossible to feel a watcher. He continued, “We have a lot to talk about.”

He was talking to her! Always before people had gone about their day unknowing that someone had infiltrated their soul. Never had they known she was violating their privacy. The man was understandably angry. It was time to end the charade. But, she hesitated.

“I will not harm you,” he said, as if he had heard her thoughts.

The air became dense as she left him. Her body began to build itself again from the ground up. Soon she stood before him; red hair hanging loosely down her back, green eyes that flickered even in the darkest of places, and a white cloak covering her seventeen year old body. The white was a mark of her allegiance to the king. She knew the man would recognize it.

Immediately his face lightened into a smile, “Now, that is better. I must admit I have never met such a beautiful watcher before.”

Kikkima felt the compliment play on your emotion, but she quickly subdued the urge to blush. “How did you now I was watching you?”

“You are young. Did the king not tell you?” She was silent. “I am a watcher myself. Many years ago I pledged loyalty to the king. But, I am sad to say, my soul was full of treason.”

“I thought,” she stammered, bewildered by the concept of another watcher.

“What? That you were the only one the gods blessed with this gift?” He chuckled. “You are not alone Kikkima. You have never been alone, you have never been free, and you never will be until you join us.”

“Us?” she asked.

“Please allow me to explain. Would you like some water?” he asked. Her eyebrows furrowed in a quizzical manner. He of all people should know she did not need nourishment from food or water. “I know you don’t need it, but have you ever considered the possibility that you might simply want some water?” She did not know what to say. “You see,” he continued. “There are options for you. You do not have to be the king’s whore.”

Her face grew pale. What was he implying?

“I know that he comes to you, says that he is your king and that you must serve him. And then, he makes you serve him. I know Kikkima. I remember the way he treated women when I was in the castle. I know.”

This was too much. She was becoming unstable in her thoughts. She tried to slow them, but she could feel the anxiety welling up within her.

“It is not your fault, you know? He is evil, a demon among mankind. You are not to fear him any longer. Join us, Kikkima.”

“Join who?” Kikkima drew back, surprised by the ferocity in her voice. It was a strange feeling; to be angered.

“Does it feel good, Kikkima? Feel good to forget complacency and feel rage!?”

Suddenly it took over, “I am not feeling rage!”

He smiled at her and then disappeared. Kikkima’s eyes grew wide. Where was he!?

‘Here I am.’ She felt the thought bubble up within her, and for the first time she felt fear. ‘Do you feel me?’ He asked. She did not answer. She knew he was moving through her thoughts. He knew instantly the answer to any question he asked. Without hesitation she picked up the sword he had laid on the bed upon entering the room and shoved it through her heart.

Tiatt left the now lifeless body. He looked down at her and smiled, “Why Kikkima? The emotion was too much for you? Your loyalty to the king was too great?” Only silence. “Fool.”

Very short, only around 200. And I must say to Charlie, what an excellent story you wrote! If I were you i'd continue it into something more.

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It was hot within the confines of the crate. The steam from the engines didn't help much either; and they were right beneath his hiding place.
Surely I've waited long enough.

He broke out of the crate, needle pistol in his hand. He wildly aimed around the room, it was empty. He strode over to the door and failed to see the sensor.

"WARNING INTRUDER ALERT, WARNING INTRUDER ALERT, WARNING INTRUDER ALERT" the mechanical voice resounded through the craft at such a volume that everyone would hear it.
Even the damned whales.

He started to run down the corridor, he saw a cook aiming a needle rifle his way.
Duck, roll, stop, aim, FIRE.
The body hit the deck, but before that he had risen and started to run once again. A symphony of noise above his head heralded the presence of a repeater rifle.
Shit, how do I kill the bugger with a repeater?
He didn't have to, from behind him came the slow hissing sound of a energy blade. He tried to turn, but it was too late; the blade was already protruding from his breastplate.

It must of been there the whole time... damn Xeno.

It is hot within the confines of hell. Fiery flames engulf my spirit as I choke on black ash. I walk among the morally challenged and satanic zealots. And the thing of it is, I can't remember what I did to get in here. My feet are weighed down by more than gravity but I push on until I reach the corner of the underworld where I find her mangled body. Falling to my knees, I cry out in sheer animal pain. Half of me is relieved that I remember, but the other greater half of my soul is weeping from the torturous guilt. She was the doorway to hell.

December 25th 1989

The Audi slams to a halt. My forehead connects to the dashboard. Stubs hits the wheel so hard that the airbag blows open reminding me of the shrooms we just had back at Jillian's apartment. I fucked her during Spring Break this year after her and Stubs had broken up only a week before. I don't know why I'm thinking of this but images of her brownish gold hair plastered against her forehead secrete into my blazing skull.

"Stubs," I whisper loudly shaking his shoulder. Blood pulses out of his nose giving the shroom/airbag a twisted red smile. "Stubby!" He finally opens his right eye, his pupil larger than life. "You alright man?"

"Hmffmfmmhh," He mumbles sitting up straight. His nose has stopped bleeding.

The car is off. FUCK. "Dude, Stubs. I'm gonna drive okay?"

He leans back against the seat groaning softly. Throwing open the passenger door, an avalanche of snow falls in. "Damn it." I swim through the thigh high white sea making my way around the rear. Everything is pitch-fucking-black so I keep my hands in contact with the car at all times. Fumbling for the door handle, I yank it open. "Get up," I order nudging his shoulder again. He groans but complies crawling over the console. I climb into the driver's seat turning on the ignition. The headlights burst on revealing a tiny oak we hit. Oh My God.

"Stubs, you shovel out the snow while I check out the bumper, k?"

"K," He mumbles tossing out the white shit.

I crawl back out using the headlights as a guide. Reaching the front of the roaring engine, I survey the damage. There's a huge ass dent in the bumper followed by some serious scratches on the hood. All in all, we made out like bandits. Relieved, I turn to head back to the car. That's when I hear a cry of agony followed by a few groans. Stubs? I peer at him threw the windshield. He's shoveling the snow by the armful. No, it's not him. I look into the darkness as far as the headlights reach. There's something writhing in the distance tossing the snow this way and that. Like a possessed person making seizure stricken snow angels.

“Help”, a feminine voice calls piteously in the Christmas night.

That's when I slam the door throwing the Audi in reverse. We spin out a bit but we're moving like bats out of hell. The farther we drive away from the body, the more at ease I feel.

I looked at her. In fact, I gazed. It was not often that I permitted myself to gaze, but as I sat by the window, giving myself chicken-skin with the cool breeze, smoking a cigarette, naked, I allowed myself to gaze at her.

She was sprawled on the bed. Spread-eagle, in fact. Her long legs were haphazardly splayed across the muddled sheets, contemplating whether to bend and fluctuate or straighten out. Her toes were a noxious purple, but only a tint. It wouldn't be long now. Her naked torso sagged beneath the weight of things unsaid, and actions untaken.

I took another drag and grazed a hand idly down my body, down to my tepid groin. My fingers played with the hair. I took another drag off of my cigarette, and exhaled the smoke in a circle, framing her sedate form.

Now, I realized, she was of no use to me.

Another puff. Finally, she stirred. I was frozen in my seat. My armpits began to sweat a thin, watery sweat, a tired, used sweat that barely smelled but was unbelivably pungent in paradox. Her hand twitched once, again.

She sat up and looked at me.

“If you only knew my game…” said the shadow-wreathed figure softly, “If you only knew the forces with which I play…”

Dieter Marks cocked the hammer back on the pistol that was aimed unwaveringly at the figure. The gun didn’t need cocking, but it made a satisfyingly ominous sound, echoing around the bare underground room. “Game?” he spat, “You killed those people in cold blood, and now you tell me it was for a game?”

The figure laughed softly, to itself. “Oh, but you do not comprehend the immense scale of this game. It is a game played across the entirety of human existence, a grand competition between forces beyond mortal reckoning, with the very universe as the prize.”

“Cut the crap, Tradeq. There is no game. It’s all a big delusion in that little, fucked up piece of shit you call a brain.” He swung his free hand up, holding the pistol in a two-handed grip. “Now come out of the shadows before I shoot you.”

“Very well, Officer Marks. I will come out of the shadow. Although, I warn you, you may not like what you see.”

Tradeq stepped fluidly from the darkness. Dieter fought to keep his gun straight past the shock as the murderer’s features came into view. His face was pitted and scarred, the skin slickly fluid. Burns, thought Dieter in revulsion, so many burns. Tradeq looked as if he had been locked in an oven. His twisted skin shone in the dim artificial light.

Pitch black eyes stared out from the horribly disfigured face, piercing in their intensity. A shock of unruly black hair fell past his shoulders, but despite its scruffiness it only accentuated the feel of dread, the sense of command that Tradeq somehow exuded.

“What are you,” whispered Dieter, his aim faltering.

“I?” replied Tradeq, “I am no more than you, Officer Marks. I may have been unlucky,” He reached up and ran a gloved finger down his cheek. “in my younger years, but I am still human. Where we differ, Officer Marks, is that I follow a higher power. I know the unpleasant truths behind existence. I see, Officer Marks.”

The pistol came back up, pointed squarely at Tradeq’s chest. “Your game is over, Tradeq. There will be no more murders, no more hostages, no more of anything for you. There is no chance of you escaping now. At least have the dignity to come quietly.”

“Even at this late point, you do not see, Officer Marks. All those crimes served a higher purpose. They were for the greater good.” Tradeq’s hand rose slightly and Dieter nearly pulled the trigger. Damn, he was nervous. “The world cannot be improved solely through good acts, Officer Marks. There is always a need for violence. Violence may not be able to stop violence, but it does a much better job than peaceful submission.”

“Bull,” replied Dieter, but the words echoed in his mind. There was a ring of sense to them, something that appealed to the hard, cynical part of him that he had tried to bury since before he could remember. “If there is no law, there is no society. Even someone as mad as you should be able to see that.”

Tradeq slipped his half-raised hand into the pocket of his long coat. “I know that perfectly well, Officer Marks, perhaps better than you do yourself. That is the reason why I have always worked from the shadows, from outside the law. There will always be a need for people like me, Officer Marks, just as there will always be a need for people like you. You just cannot bring yourself to see it.”

“You lie, murderer,” growled Dieter, but the almost-truth of Tradeq’s words haunted him. “There will never be a place for your kind.”

Tradeq brought his hand out of his pocket. His long fingers were wrapped around something, something matt black and gun-shaped. “Oh but there wi-”

A massive, deafening explosion filled the room. Smoke trailed aimlessly upwards from the barrel of Dieter’s shaking pistol. He was going to shoot me, Dieter protested to himself. He was going to shoot me so I shot him first. Self-defence. I had to do it.

So why did he feel so cold?

Clicking the safety on the pistol, he knelt by Tradeq’s sprawled body. There was something – the gun – held loosely between dead fingers. Dieter pried back the unnaturally slender fingers to reveal what it was.

It was a phone.

Not a gun. Not a gun at all. I just shot him for nothing. I just killed him for nothing. Dieter pulled out his radio with numb fingers. Nothing, nothing at all. Just a goddamned phone. “Suspect down,” he said into the crackling radio.

He knelt in the slowly spreading pool of blood until the sirens arrived outside the door, and only stood up under the attention of two other officers. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Tradeq had been right. He had been right and Dieter had killed – murdered – him in cold blood.

Thoughts spinning, he let his partner drive him back to his home

It was hot within the confines of the sailboat. The water in the marina was glass smooth; the early morning sun had already begun to bake the small sailboat in an oven like heat.

If you only knew my game Tom thought as he looked over at the yacht across the marina. The yachts crew was already up, washing the decks of the evenings due and polishing the bright work and chrome. Tom knew that Angie was probably still sleeping off last night’s party. She moved from provider to provider, sucking them dry of both emotion and money…she had a ravenous appetite for the "good things."

She was of no use to me now. I’d been one of her early conquests; we were both young and full of dreams. Tom had not been surprised when he saw her on the yachts deck upon it’s arrival.

Drugs and alcohol has captured her body and soul before we departed. Years had gone by, I had lost track of her. I went on to a conventional life, becoming a policeman no less…a real stretch from those days. Undercover work and the idealist thought that the world could the world be a better place if drugs weren’t so pervasive had reunited them.

Tom had been part of a surveillance group assigned to watch the Southern Star, a large Burger yacht that was docked at the marina. Intelligence had tracked the yacht from the Caribbean. A stream of nefarious characters had been boarding and departing at each stop. The "word" was that they carried terrorist and drugs to fund their projects. Either or both weren’t good and Tom’s group was going to stop them.

Hours went by; little activity was seen on the yacht. The sun continued to rise and bake the little surveillance sailboat. Suddenly sirens could be heard in the distance, as they got closer Tom attentions were drawn to the ambulance as it stopped at the big yacht….what was this all about he thought.

Eventually the paramedics came up with a woman on the stretcher. Zooming in with his powerful binoculars Tom could see it was Angie and from the attitude of the paramedics he could tell she was dead.

Her life was the end of an insatiable search for possessions, drugs, alcohol and endless parties. As the ambulance pulled away Tom, shaking his head, thought what a waste and how sad it was that she was never happy…always needing more and more and ending up with nothing.

I took her to be nearing 80 years of age but the way she seemed to sprint across the landings and eagerly attack flights of stairs made me recalculate again and again, glancing at her from the corner of my eye to discern where my estimation error lay.
Speaking briskly and with little sign of exertion, Madame du Clare fired a continuous stream of information about the building, the business, and the employees over her shoulder.
“We’re passing the QA department which used to be located in the basement until the staff complained of a foul odor and a strange mold growing there in 1975 and were promptly moved to the attic wherein they commenced complaining about low flying aircraft and inebriated (or so they said) foul striking the windows (the birds, not the planes, you know). Mr. Simon was inclined to turn the whole lot of them into the streets (the employees, not the birds, you know) but was persuaded by someone over in the art department (her name was Teresa – she was of no use to me) to keep them so they finally were settled on this floor but we aren’t stopping here…come along”.
The pain in my side was really asserting itself now but I didn’t want to ask the elderly woman for a break for fear she would think that I wasn’t physically strong enough to be an assistant editor.

“I think that the artists were better mannered when we had a strict dress code,” she said while pivoting tireless to face another set of stairs with an air that I thought betrayed glee. “At least then one need not see a plethora of exposed flesh in the summer; sleeves were invented for prudent reasons and sandals made only for the beach, you know.”

Was it possible she was walking so swiftly to ‘break’ the job applicant, I wondered? Irritated by the thought, I clenched my teeth and tried to reposition, with my left hand, what I took to be fatigued internal organs while I tightened my abdomen and straightened my shoulders. I placed my leaden foot on the first stair of the next flight and tried to envision the dream job, perched farther up, that could be mine if I could just endure the stairs that lead to it.
“Wait!”, she said, whirling to stand facing me upon the higher stair. This put us at almost eye level and I was annoyed to see that she was not visibly breathing through her mouth and that her pinched nostrils, like those of sand-dwelling camels, appeared to be closed as well. “How CAN she breathe!” I thought to myself.

“Was it a man or a woman who called to arrange this interview?” she asked. I was reluctant to speak for fear that my ragged breath would surely blow her hair back and disturb her perfectly starched bun.

I pretended to look down while I exhaled the word “Man” in a mighty gust and shamefacedly took guilty gulps of air.

“Are you sick?” she inquired, while neatly crossing her arms in front of her.
“No, no I just am recovering from having a sprained ankle so I …I could use the exercise,” I explained.

That I should lie about such a simple failing surprised me, but not her.


Staring at me through pursed lips, she seemed to be waiting for me to fold under the weight of my own out-of-shape conscience but even so, I was glad to catch my breath at her leisure – even if it meant looking at her. I still thought it wise not to attempt a smile. I’m sure I was right.

“Well…”she said, perhaps loathe to give up her position so clearly above me. “Why didn’t you say so before?” she snapped. “You failed to tell me that it was a man. You only told me the position you were applying for but I am sure you didn’t say it was a man. If you had said so, I wouldn’t waste my time taking you to the editorial department.” She stepped down to my right, saying “You want the temp pool.” The way her lips curled back from her teeth when she said “temp” indicated that she mentally donned rubber gloves to handle the filthy word in a sanitary fashion.

She seemed to disappear as she descended stairs far more rapidly than she climbed them. I bolted after her in a futile attempt to catch up. “If only you had told me before, I could be doing something productive instead of taking you to the 5th floor when you wanted the 1st,” she said.
There was simply no keeping up with her now. I watched her race down to the landing, turn with mechanical precision, and sweep permanently from my sight.

“She was of no use to me. Too small, too young, too stupid. There was no room for hangers on, not then, not ever. I don’t suffer fools gladly in the best of circumstances, you know that; you also know that these are not the best of circumstances.” Stan is unrepentant, as always. As expected.

He doesn’t understand how much it would have meant to her, to feel that she was helping in some way, no matter how small. He doesn’t know what it feels like to have to wait in the wings while everyone you love is out risking their lives. No-one ever told him he couldn’t fight. He was twenty-four when the FF began, over a decade ago, and one of the first members.

In WW2, I’m told, even civilians were part of the war effort. They made sacrifices. They gave away spare pots to be melted and turned into bullets and armour. They rationed themselves fiercely, until jam was an unforgivable luxury. The women went and did the jobs that the soldiers had been doing before, and couldn’t now. Civilians made bandages, and set up bomb shelters and charities for the wounded. People died, lots and lots of people, and were buried with honour.

The soldiers dying in this war aren’t buried with honour. They are reviled, spat upon, slandered. They are labelled traitors for fighting for what they believe in. Their parents, spouses and children curse their names. In public. Or else.

There are no charities for the wounded. There are no wounded. There are only the survivors, and the dead.

The non-combatants can’t give things to our war effort, cooking pots or jam or pencils, because everything they have is recorded. There are people who go round the houses checking to make sure that everything is exactly as the papers say it should be, that everyone has everything they say they have. And if one pencil is missing, or a window left open, or a family seems ever so slightly too sullen or even too helpful, that family may never be seen again. Or worse yet, set in some public place for friends and neighbours to see and spit at, dead or dying and either way humiliated.

Women are not allowed to work, at all, ever. Not in the outside world. In the secret world, we have the opportunity to prove ourselves as I have done, but a woman must still be twice as good as a man to gain half his reputation. My sister is only as good as a man, and so she is sent home to twiddle her thumbs while our brothers and I battle the forces of injustice.

I can sympathise. I’m seventeen, and only succeeded in winning my place a year ago. Before that, I stayed home twiddling my thumbs with her. We were home twiddling our thumbs when our parents were caught out after curfew and tortured to death. Trust me, the fighting part and even the killing part is easier by far than the waiting and the wondering. And a year ago, we had each other to confide in, and to distract the other when it all grew too much. Now she has no company but her own thoughts, which are unlikely to be much comfort.

I wouldn’t stay behind for anything. Call me selfish until you are blue in the face, I will still fight. I fight for liberty, for the Freedom Foundation, and I will not stop while a boy who wants to be an engineer is forced to be a farmer, or a girl who wants to be a scientist is forced to be a mother; I will not stop until we get to choose our careers, our spouses, our lovers, our pregnancies (or otherwise). I will not stop living and start surviving. I will not let them drag me down into their grey, meaningless paradise of material luxury and secure little lies. I will not, even if nothing I do can stop them. Even if my fourteen year old sister could be (probably will be) left frightened and alone, an orphan in a world where people take care of themselves and their families and leave the rest to rot. Even if, at the end, if there is an end, I suddenly discover that I have forgotten how to be anything but a soldier, a rebel, a murderer, and find myself unable to break the habit. I won’t stop, even if my sister begs me to, even if I don’t have the time or the energy for the life I’m fighting for, even if I’ve developed seven phobias in the past year, even if I can’t stop scrubbing my hands to wash off the blood before someone sees, before someone knows what I am, what I’ve done. I won’t stop.

Charlie Eleanor,
I really enjoyed reading your story and hope you develop it further

317 words

I know my eyes are empty. My hands don't shake anymore, not like when I had first picked up the gun so long ago. My feet are planted, despite the fact that my bulk doesn't require extra bracing against the gunshot.

I don't hear her pleas. I see her lips moving, forming words, her streaming eyes wide and terrified, but nothing registers in my mind. I feel nothing.

It's not the nothingness of rage I felt so long ago. I used to be hot with fury, in that vague so-long-ago, but now my thoughts are clear as the terror in her eyes.

My eyes travel over the lank black hair that frames her face to her small hands, held up as if she can ward off the bullet. Her slim fingers shake violently. I look at my steady hands. I was just like her once.

I was saved from the weakness of my so-long-ago, but this girl has failed. She is not the apprentice I seek. She is weak and cowardly and trembling. She is frail, and frailty does not survive in my business.

She will have no memories. She will have no so-long-ago.

I thrust the gun forward and it hits her between the eyes. Her head is driven back and she freezes, panting softly, as if one tremble will set the gun off. She is unmoving, pleading on her knees; my hands are still, the gun aiming at the bridge of her nose.

My finger twitches. Blood sprays across the floor behind her. She collapses to the side, her face covered in blood and tears.

The door slams open. My master walks in to find me washing my hands.

"What happened here?" His deep voice resonates inside my skull; when I look at him, my heart leaps happily. He is the only one who makes me feel anymore.

"She was of no use to me."

Um... yeah. So this turned out a tad more... bleakly... than I had intended. Maybe I'll do one of the other prompts later.

717 words


NO USE

She was of no use to me, not anymore, not like this.

I plucked the butt of the cigarette from between my lips and flicked it away. There was no need to crush the lingering spark of life from its ashen stub; it died with a faint splutter somewhere within the murky damp of the alley. Which, I guess, is what she’d been left here to do, too.

It’s not that I’m callous, not that I have no regard for a human life. More just that I’m numb. I’d spent months searching the city for her. First the places people told me she used to go, the places people told me she had been seen at recently. Then, the people she had been seen with, the people who could get the stuff she’d been seen doing, the people who would want the things she’d been seen doing. When you start looking in those kinds of places, meeting those kinds of people, in this kind of city, you learn to get numb pretty quickly. Now, finally, I had found her.

And it was no use at all. She was alive; that I could tell because she was shivering almost convulsively in the cold dark of the late autumn night. But looking down at the pitiful, broken rag-doll of a girl sprawled across the mound of festering garbage at my feet, I doubted if she could remember her own name or what day of the week it was, let alone the answer to the months-old riddle only she could solve. The answer I had to have, to the question I had to ask. She was of no use to me.

She’d been of use to someone, though. Invisible stains glowed violet and indigo across her tattered black hoodie, brought to luminescent life by the cold, uncaring blacklights of the club entrance across the street from the alley. That was the best way to describe her, now, I thought – Stained. And though she was of no use to me, though I was colder and number than I’d ever been, though I’d seen it all a dozen times before, I couldn’t just walk away. Not this time.

I knelt down beside her, trying not to gag at the stench of the rotting trash she had chosen for this night’s bed. Long, lank black hair damp with sweat from the fever of withdrawal, tangled in dirty knots across her face. Ripped fishnet stockings, knee-high boots; nothing remotely like warm clothing beyond the ratty, stained hoodie. Smeared mascara blackly tracing the tracks of frequent tears down her puffy, pallid cheeks. Skin so pale it looked almost translucent, except where the bruises bled blue-black and dirty yellow just beneath its thin, drawn surface. And she was still beautiful.

Gently – with more tenderness than I believed myself capable of, anymore – I reached out and brushed a lock of matted hair aside so I could see her face. With what seemed like great effort she raised her head and stared – through me, not at me – with hollow eyes that were already as dark and dead as the embers of my cigarette.

I lit another.

Sometimes, I wished I could do that to people. Re-light them once their fire has gone out. But looking at her then and there, at the blue spiderweb tracery of collapsed veins tangled and knotted around her fragile alabaster wrist, it occurred to me that maybe she wouldn’t want it that way. That she was probably better off not remembering.

And then, all at once, I had the answer to the question I had longed to ask. I finally knew why she had left. It was because I had never considered what she might have wanted, before now. It was because she hadn’t wanted it that way. Lightly, I kissed her on the forehead, tucked my half-burnt cigarette between her lips, and stood. She was of no use to me, anymore.

The first, heavy drops of rain pattered around my feet as I dragged them along the slick, brickwork pavement, drifting aimlessly towards the riverwalk and the bridge back home. So much the better, I thought, as the skies opened with a peal of thunder and the rain began in earnest. No one will notice our tears in the rain.

1. "It was hot within the confines...."

2. "If you only knew my game...."

3. "She was of no use to me."

4. "Could the world be a better place if...."

5. "Her life was the end...."

I walked for quite some time before the car stopped following me. It had stalked me for several blocks, and I knew if I did not lose it, they would kill me. I walked in the opposite direction of my apartment, making sure they didn't know where I lived. It didn't matter, my apartment was probably flooded wiht their kind anyway, awaiting my return. I could never go back, they'd kill me.

The problem was, I had no idea who "they" were. I remember it vividly, the one time "they" were mentioned. I was down in the bowls of a building in New York City, I didn't know which. I had been kidnapped and brought there.

Something moved behind me, and then I feel to the ground, uncosious.

I had awoken to a man mumbling before me.

"Could the world be a better place if I never existed? I wonder, how different would poeple's lives be without hav met me? I've done such horrible things. "

He looked at his chain, and let out a small chuckle.

"I guess that's why I'm down here."

He turned his face filled with the dirt and greese. It looked as if he had taken a bath in months.

"So, you're finally awake. It's been two weeks since you've been out. You've said things i wouldn't expect people to say."

I swalled, and sweat started to form on my face. Did he know something? Did he know she was no use to me, an that I'd used her? Oh god, if he did...

"You had something like 'I can't believe you still like me. If you only knew my game, I believe that would cahnge drastically.'"

Good. He hadn't revealed everything, this man didn't know anything.

"It was just a dream I guess."

"No, it wasn't. " There was a woman, standing in front of the cell doors. It was her, she had been the one behind all this.

"God damn it." was all I could muster up. It was hot within the confines at that exact moment. And I realized one thing as i was being dragged to my execution.

Her life was the end. I had messed with her, and she was going to do away with me. How lucky I was.

I sort of went over the limit. .__. I'm sorry. WORD COUNT: 906.
[Prompt was here.]