Each day there will be a new daily prompt. At the end of the day, a “Best of The Daily Prompt” will be selected, and posted in this section.
Rules:
- Use the prompt in the way it’s intended (starting a sentence, the title of the piece, theme, etc)
- You may write in any format you see fit (fiction, non-fiction, poem, song, script, etc.)
- Post your piece of writing in the comments section of the website to be considered for the prizes given
- The winner of each daily prompt will be published on the site in “Best of The Daily Prompt” section
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He is the empire state building, towering so high into the air his lungs must ache every time he sucks in a breathe because of how low the oxygen level is near his hollow brain. His arms, bigger than my entire torso, ripple with unnatural waves of steroid fed muscle. The hair all over his skin is thicker than Sasquatch’s pubes, but as yellow as big birds feathers you could almost mistake the hairs for stringy snot wrapped around his beefy mess of a body. His skin is so clear I can see the sunlight pass through, making his veins bulge to the surface and swell with blood I’m sure tastes like sweat. He has a stomach larger than my morbidly obese pregnant neighbor, it flows out from his shirt like a slutty 2000′s Brittany Spears; but not nearly as flat and smooth. His layers of fat fold like cottage cheese. His eyes are the color of bloody shit in the bottom of a toilet that has gone so long without tending black mold surrounds the bowl. The “manly” neck flows into his head as if they were meant to always be equal in size, it bulges with lumps that resemble puss filled boils. I can imagine poking one ever so softly with the sharpest needle in my mothers sewing kit, and watching bubbling puss ooze from his neck, like a whitehead that has awaited popping for 7 days. His head is in the shape of a box, with a buzz cut so short you can see the patches where his hair has been pulled out. The strings from his scalp are so white he should be 73 or albino. He holds himself high, looks down from his tower upon the littler people in disgust. His weightlifting fills him up with false confidence, only enhancing how empty his skull is. The voice in this monster is a deep mess, like a roaring machine with no density behind the topics he speaks of. Always commenting on the girls image and the final score. His voice holds that ting of stupidity, like Ed Edd and Eddy. He smells like a football field, sweat and blood, mucus filled spit, dipping tobacco, and my dogs anus. He walks through the hallways, stomping his gorilla feet and booming out mating calls of shitty pick up lines that reveal the dominance and sexism held in his tiny heart. He is the epitome of a brainless jock, a rectal gland, a day spent hungover. But I mean, everyone is beautiful.
Best of The Daily Prompt – May 15th
Stream of Consciousness
By Jim Aldrich
stream of consciousness.
i consciously stream
all the time anyways. whats writing
about it it going to mean?
be any different, or take me
places i haven’t been to,
or blogs i haven’t seen,
or streams
i haven’t walked in, or touched
the parts that make it meaningful.
but wheres the irony dammit.
there’s rhyme
but the timing
is off. you are mining softly.
now work it. out. please, this is no time
for quitting on some punch
, lunch-time and bad timing to stop
, talk a lot about streams DING
Best of The Daily Prompt – Tuesday, May 14th
“I Wanna Know”
Best of The Daily Prompt – Monday, May 13th
The bible may say
“God made the world in six days.”
But on the seventh,
Satan made politics.
Best of The Daily Prompt – Friday, May 10th
Jenn Crowder
Untitled
Even the knock on the door sounded seductive, but she knew what he had done, and she wrapped the towel just a little tighter around her body. She wasn’t sure if she should answer it. She wasn’t really sure what she wanted. All she knew was that if she opened the door, there was only one way this would end.
He left not a half an hour ago, after a long and drawn out verbal fight over the pile of dishes in the sink. Assumptions. She had been home a blink of an eye before him, which meant that she would have prioritized his breakfast dishes over showering after a long and dusty day on the construction site, naturally. She was covered in dust; cement flaked off of her skin and her nails were no longer visible under the cakey residue of a 12-hour shift that started before the sun was up. So no, she didn’t do the dishes. This was another judo mouth-to-mouth match that ended in a slammed door and his best magic trick—the disappearing man.
Lately he would return a bourbon-breathed, apologetic mess. “I love you, baby. I’m sorry.” So the knock on the door meant that she would be greeted with the remnants of an oak-aged barrel and the sour eyes of a downtrodden man who once meant it when he said he loved her. Tired and knowing that she deserves more, she sighs a heavy, “just a minute”. She dresses, opens the door and in the final round regains her confidence. She stands poised and in a quiet assertiveness tells him what he has been afraid to hear for so long. “Goodbye”.
Best of The Daily Prompt – Thursday, May 9th
Mekenzie F.
Untitled
“Until I cleaned it up, I couldn’t tell what it was.” I glanced back over at the lump of metallic pieces, scrap metal and an assortment of grime.
“Really? So you just found this pile of garbage and picked it up? No thought just up and go?”
I nodded, trying not to let the lights blind me, or the faces of the audience distract me. I was never one for television, and being on a live show? Terrifying. I suppose it was necessary, even if I felt my skin crawl whenever their cameras quickly zoomed in on my face. What I had found should be told to the world, I guess.
“So, after you found it, what did you do with it?” asked the man sitting across from me in his done up hair, freshly pressed suite and plastic face. His voice grated against my ears, too perfect and polished. A deep breath, force out a response.
“Well, Tim, I took it to my garage and cleaned it up a bit, as I said earlier.”
The interview continued and I left without the thing I had found, the only thing in my rugged pocket was a crisp check.
Best of The Daily Prompt – Wednesday, May 8th
The Sound of Silence
Carole Chase
There is no silence at my house anymore. A city work crew has taken over the street where I live. What they’re doing out there is a mystery to me, but whatever it is, it seems they’re constantly at it. Since it’s a city crew I imagine they knock off at five on the dot, but even when I lie in bed at night I think I can still hear their noise.
Even though the kids are at school, the TV is off, and the washing machine sits idle, I hear the dull hum of giant excavators wresting chunks of earth in great spoonfuls and dumping them in the back of a hollow truck, punctuated by the metallic ping of gravel falling.
The beeeep beeeep beeeep of the back-up signals is what bothers me the most. As a kid, for fun, did you ever pick a word and say it aloud, over and over, until the sound of it suddenly became foreign in its monotony? The beeps are like that; robotic, high-pitched, almost feminine-sounding. Sometimes I wryly imagine that Ke$ha is driving the truck and speak-singing the beeps, in between smacks of gum.
I hear the voices of men yelling at one another to move this way or that, redirecting traffic. I recognize a voice above the others, from a rather dour, middle-aged man, whose sole job is to hold a stop sign, and alternately flip the sign to say “slow.” I don’t like him. He clearly gets off on the power of his position, the chancellor of stop-and-go. Yesterday he left me sitting at a stop for five full minutes, exactly four feet from my driveway. He held the sign with great authority and stared me solidly in the eyes. I wonder if he’d ever known a finer moment in all his life.
Best of The Daily Prompt – Tuesday, May 7th:
Kenny Norris
The Fight
It took 7 hours, 48 minutes, 16 seconds to get out of bed. Ok, I don’t know if 16 seconds is accurate but is anyone really keeping score? The unmentionables I dabbled in last night had caused this room to smell of summer sweat and hot breath; on top of that, I was having a hell of a time figuring out where I had left my shoes.
I kicked a couple of piles of clothes with no success. Late afternoon mornings like this were becoming routine even though I was trying to fight them. I guess that I just don’t have much fight left. Much like a housewife who has given up on cleaning up after her family, I had given up on sleep and the possibility of a normal schedule.
After checking my phone I decided to do something out of the ordinary. This night, this very night, I was going to stay in and relax, clear my mind, and maybe see about my soul. I cracked a beer, walked to the porch, and swallowed in a cool breath of twilight. “This is going to be a good night,” I thought to myself.
7 hours, 48 minutes and 17 seconds later it was closing time. The whiskey and conversation had flown like the mighty Deschutes with no signs of stopping. There’s just not that much fight left.
I apologise for its length, but this was one of my worst nightmares, literally….a dream I had.
On the outside it was simply a house, had you of seen it in any neighborhood you would have passed it by without ever assuming it was anything significant. It was an oversized ranch style home that looked like it was built in the 50’s and had touch-ups in the 70’s, the majority of the outside was done in a dusky green wood paneling but it was accented by stonework around the columns and the doors. The only thing that made it look different on the outside was that for a typical house in this style it was rather large.
Of course, it was no longer a house but it had been recently converted into a museum; A dark remembrance of the sinister dealings within a small community. This is where I would be working. I knew some of the history at simply seeing the home, I knew that the owner had passed a few years before and the new owners had gone about restoring it only to find something so shocking and disturbing they had abandoned it. In truth, when anyone found out what evils the house had contained they were no longer interested in buying it but It was an easy way to trap a tourist and since you couldn’t keep young teens from looking for thrills away from such a site, it was decided that it would be open to the public.
Upon entering the house the first sight which assaulted your gaze was a picture of the former owner. He had died of natural causes at an old age, quite peacefully actually and the portrait had been done a few years before his death. Age had not been kind to the man his face was slender and worn looking, his ears were sharp and his nose though large bent down with a crook. His hair had barely been there any more with a few patches over each ear and just a couple of strands on top. His slender neck led to wiry shoulders and from there he bulked up. The picture and the story of the old man made him creepy but too look at him; he just looked like a very old man.
Had I of been a tourist this is where the tour would begin but I was to be the hostess for today’s tours so I waited until my supervisor would show me around. The house was dark, and had the sense of being abandoned, whether this was merely ambience for the guests I could not tell but it felt so genuine. Finally my guide showed up, the first room she took me through was the kitchen. IT was a working kitchen but also the most unusual I had ever seen. Centered in the room and up against the wall was a giant steel stove, there was a steel sink and a long steel counter to the left of it. Instead of a regular kitchen table this kitchen had several tables, the kind of which you would find in a science lab. They weren’t that tall and their tops were covered in black in rubber.
We didn’t stay long in the kitchens and finally I began to hear the story of what had happened in the house.
“The owner of the house had seemed a very friendly man he was kind to his neighbors, chatty and always with a smile on his face. He had charmed the town and was a name that everyone knew and thought kindly of but not someone anyone would really spend their time with,” as the guide talked we kept walking and I was led into another room. IT was covered with newspaper clippings, all of a missing kid named Billy. He was young, about 8 years old in the picture. I didn’t know how I knew it but staring at the picture I knew what had happened to Billy, he had disappeared from his family and his life from then on was Hell. Billy was tortured and molested, an old man’s own little play thing and no one could hear him, no one helped him, he died about 2 years later in the same situation he had been kidnapped into.
All of this had been kept a secret. No one knew the true nature of the old man who had lived here or of the fate of Billy until the new owners had knocked down a wall they were wanting to expand. Where they expected to tear down a wall and find the outside and fresh air they found another room. That is where I was led to now, I knew what the room was and I was dreading going in it but when I was brought to it I was relieved to find there was no way in. For sake of the museum it had been closed off behind a glass window pane. The room had been kept in the exact same condition and nothing had been moved since it had been discovered.
The room was Billy’s. The bed was in the center, it was a simply bed and not with many coverings, to look at it it was just a bed but knowing what Billy had gone through on that bed made it terrifying and disgusting. On the wall to the left of the bed was what looked to be an old phone, it was so old it looked like a telegraph and obviously never worked. What a torture that in itself would have been, to see a device that maybe could have saved him if it was only functional. On the floor there were some toys, and a little metal school desk, things to keep him occupied. Other than these few items the room was empty, the walls themselves had nothing special on them but they were padded leather a tool which was meant to insulate and keep noise from entering or exiting. Here Billy had been trapped for years, no one but the old man and no communications except for those torturous sessions.
Billy died before the old man, that much was known but it wasn’t really clear how or when. There had been other victims of the old man but Billy was the only that I kept thinking of. I caught glimpses of him, walking round his room as I stared at it, trying not to cry for the pain he had felt. What was truly heart breaking and devastating was that the man who had done this to him, never knew justice, there was no trial, no public humiliation, he died in his bed an old man; a right he had denied Billy. I was brought back to the present by my boss, who expected me to give the tour just as she had given it to me.
Time passed and I was now familiar with the house and all the other people who worked there. I had given the tour a hundred times, I knew the story and still every time I told it I could only think of Billy. I had been there long enough now that I was expected to help keep the museum clean and that day I was assigned Billy’s room and it was the first clean. Of course the museum had found a way in. It was the same one the old man used but it had a trick to it so the mind of a 8 year old never would have thought to use it. I stood for a long time, just staring at his room, the brown leather walls, the empty bed, the useless phone. I felt as though Billy was there and I hated going into his room but I had to, it was my job so my friend and I went in to clean.
I was working fast, it felt like Billy was there and I found it unnerving so I cleaned with a speed I never had before and when I was all finished my friend, who saw how scared I was decided to tease me about it.
She pointed to one of his toys I had been careful not to move it. I had been careful not move anything because everything was in the same position as when Billy had last touched it. The toy she pointed at was his rubber ball “So what would you do if I touched this,” and she moved her hand closer to the ball.
It didn’t feel right, too much had happened to this boy, I had seen glimpses of his ghost before and I felt he was watching, I didn’t want any of his peace to be disturbed and I didn’t feel right touching the belongings of a dead boy who had gone through so much. “If you do I will kill you!” The word “you” was barely even out when a high pitch scream hit the air. It was high pitched scream of a terrified little boy and the realization hit me, it was a threat he had heard many times and a threat that eventually did end his life. My threat to my friend he had taken as a threat to himself so I shouted at the air.
“No I didn’t mean it, no one here is going to die! You are ok!” And the room went silent.
I woke up.