Much like my book reviews, in order to keep up with my resolutions and write more this year, I've taken on writing prompts. When I was in high school, I took a creative writing class, and everyday we were given a different prompt to write about. This eventually made me a better writer, and this very class is what inspired my college major of journalism. In keeping with becoming a better writer, I've found a page of 365 writing prompts to follow this year. I'm not going to promise that I write everyday, or that my writing is award-winning, but I really want to try this. Here goes nothing!
First prompt: The wind howled through the window. The girl sat huddling her knees waiting for the storm to be over.
It was a dark and stormy night. Outside Abby's bedroom window, the naked tree branch slapped the glass. It woke her from an otherwise restful sleep. Normally, Abby could sleep through storms like these, and they even often comforted her. But not tonight. Tonight would be different from any storm she had experienced before.
The wind howled like a wolf against the brick and mortar of her house. Banging her head against the pillow, and finding that she couldn't go back to sleep, Abby decided that getting a glass of milk from the kitchen would help. She pulled the warm covers back and traded them for a cold floor against her bare feet. She walked through the darkness of the house, relying not on light but rather on her 16 years of living there to guide her to the kitchen. The light nearly blinded her as she opened the door of the fridge and fumbled for the carton of milk. After pouring herself a glass, Abby drank the milk and headed back to her room, already feeling more at ease and ready to go back to bed.
The bright red numbers of her alarm clock told her it was nearly 4 in the morning. She groaned, hating having the burden of trying to go back to sleep. The drops of rain against the window, like other storms, seemed comforting to her, and she quickly began to listen to their lullaby and drift off.
An alarm began screaming in the distance. Abby jolted up in her bed, recognizing the sound to be a tornado siren. Crack! The same naked tree branch that had awakened her minutes ago was now reaching for her through the window it had broken into. Abby ran from her bed and into her closet. She could hear things like the strong and menacing wind that was swirling around the house. Her parents were calling for her to come down to the basement with them, but fear had paralyzed Abby and she couldn't move. The new hole in her window allowed the elements that were raging outside to find a home in Abby's room. The wind howled through the window. Abby sat in her closet, huddling her knees, waiting and praying for the storm to be over.
Woosh! Her closet's French doors swung open, and Abby was being pulled against her will by the suction of the wind. She tried holding onto the doorway of the closet, but she couldn't hold on forever. Her fingers finally gave, and she went hurtling through the air toward to broken window.
Buzz buzz, went the alarm clock. Abby rose up in bed, dripping with sweat. Instinctively, she took her hands and felt herself to make sure she was still in one piece. She looked around the room to see the lemon-colored sunbeams of early morning streaming into her room. Nothing was broken, not even the window. Things were not strewn about, and everything was as it should be. Abby breathed a long and heavy sigh of relief. While she was getting dressed for school, Abby noticed something strange. There was a glass on her bedside table with the creamy residue of milk on the inside of it. "Was it a dream?" she wondered to herself. She shrugged, took the glass to the kitchen, and hoped tonight's dream would simply be better.
The end.
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