Short Stories [Original versions of Re-Writes]

1. Trapped

Hi there! If you've read the previews for this story—and you're reading this somewhat close to the day I've published it—then you know that it's been a good while since I wrote anything on here. I can partly blame school for that, but I didn't have that much homework over the last month...or two. (Seriously? My last update was in August? Wow.) Anyway, as I'm writing this it's the last day of my first quarter, which means I just finished my finals. That means I'll hopefully be more productive and manage my time better with the fresh start of a new quarter, and therefore have more time to write. However, I do have quite a few extracurriculars, and on top of that, I just started a fashion club at my school, so this book—as well as my other works-in-progress—might get pushed down to the bottom of my priorities pretty quickly.

On the bright side, I have had a bit more time over the last week to work on editing and touching up the original version of Trapped, so hopefully, I'll have this out in the next day or two. I made the 'first draft' of the story, as I guess you could call it, over a year ago for a summer camp, and since then I've wanted to turn Trapped into a fully developed story. I decided that the first step to doing so would be to refine the original story—that was created for a flash fiction assignment—before starting to work on the more in-depth version.

So, here's the moment you've been waiting for: the story itself! This 'original' is 2,307 words in length, so I hope you enjoy it and look forward to the full story!

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Trapped. That's all I could think of while I stared out the window like a child. Snow was falling, a layer of the white substance coating the ground that was way too far away for a safe jump. I turned back to face the room, scouring the vast space for anything I could use to get out of here.

I could have called for help long ago, but the people who used to live in this old place had probably never even heard of Wi-Fi. That made my phone practically useless.

Resuming my scan for a way out, I was interrupted so very rudely by a loud, clear knock on the door. What door? Apparently, the one I had missed throughout my various attempts at observing my surroundings when I had come to realize that I was locked in my hotel room. Though I wouldn't consider a mansion that had probably been abandoned even before the second millennium and currently had only five or so of its rooms open to be a hotel. How did I even end up staying in one of them? Come to think of it, why am I here in the first place?

"Who's there?" I attempted to seem like I knew what I was doing, but I ended up sounding like every horror movie's main character that had no courage whatsoever. I nervously approached the door, unsure if my mind was playing tricks on me as I hadn't heard anything after that first moment.

I had always been told as a child that I had a vivid imagination. I would often dream up scenarios with made-up characters and go on adventures with them. Quite a few times, my sense of creativity overpowered the logical side of my brain, as I was, after all, left-handed. So it wasn't that big of a surprise to me when the part of my mind that thought of all these crazy things proposed something a bit out of the ordinary: maybe there was some sort of man-eating monster waiting on the other side for me to open the door. Pretty quickly, though, my left brain—which was the logical side—came in and took over.

What are you waiting for? A fanfare? Just hurry up and open the door! Get it over with already, my conscience mused. Gosh, how I hated that menace to my inner peace. I returned my focus to the real world, moving closer to the door...by three inches. Hey, it was some form of progress!

It seemed as though whatever was on the other side of the wall wasn't planning on giving up any time soon, as I once again heard knocks on the old wooden door. This time, since the sounds were lighter than before, I assumed that whatever was doing the knocking was indeed a human hand. Gathering myself and my confidence, I reached out to the doorknob. I unlocked the door, peeking into the room on the other side. The second my eyes adjusted to the somewhat dimmer lighting, I was met with a pair of eyes in a shade of green similar to my own—which surprised me since it seemed to be that the owner of those alluring eyes was a girl of Hispanic descent. Green eyes were a rare trait for someone of that ethnicity; on the other hand, being born in an Irish family, I had my eyes passed down from both of my parents since green is not an uncommon color for people of Irish descent to have.