Today’s prompt word is demand!1
A.N. This is an excerpt from a “silly romance” story I published about a decade ago. Enjoy the silliness!
Elise stumbled to the edge of the dock, her tattered dress billowing in the storm. She cried out as the wind whipped around her and the waves climbed higher and higher, never ceasing their ominous crashes. Her delicate hand stretched as far as it could towards the lake – the last place she had seen her love.
“Miss! Come here! You need to get off the dock!” Through the driving rain, she could barely make out a figure holding a lamp. “Come on!” the apparition shouted. With one final search of the lake, Elise ran towards the mysterious figure and together made their way to a small, sturdy shack.
The flimsy door closed behind them. “My name is Henry,” the man said as he set the lamp down.
Elise sat down hard on a chair and promptly began to sob exhaustedly, her pronounced bosom heaving with sadness. “Wh-who are y-you?” she stuttered through the tears.
“My name is Henry,” he repeated. “I’m a foil. I live here in this shack in the middle of nowhere (nearby the old docks) waiting for beautiful girls like you with the long hair and the heaving bosoms. My job is to help you through the night and heed your demands. Experience says you’ll have second thoughts over my age… but just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there aren’t logs in the fireplace!” Henry winked.
Her tears now having slowed, Elise sniffled as she looked up at Henry with a dazed look in her hazel eyes. “It’s nice to meet you, Harry…”
Henry gazed into her eyes, and then nodded. “Come on, honey, time to get you some rest.” He helped her up, and then walked her slowly to the rear of the kitchen to a small door. “Guest room’s right through here. I know the place doesn’t look big enough for more than one room from the outside, but no one cares about spatial limitations in this kind of story.”
She stumbled into the room. It was sparsely furnished with nothing more than a bed, chair, and dresser, but she didn’t mind. She sank onto the bed and quickly fell into a deep, restless sleep.
The prompts are selected on a rotating basis by my friends in Discord! The rules are simple:
- It can be any word, idea, or concept
- Keep it interesting within the 2000-character limit that Discord imposes on a single message
- Keep the editing to an absolute minimum
You should give it a try too – they’re fantastic opportunities to practice storytelling in a small window of time. What can you come up with for demand? ↩︎