8. A rippling glare…
Today’s Prompt
8. A rippling glare of whiteness accompanied a disorienting sensation.
400 Creative Writing Prompts Workbook Story Prompts for Journaling, Blogging, and Overcoming Writer’s Block Compiled by Debra Chapoton All rights reserved Copyright © 2020 by Debra Chapoton
Response
Presley was pissed. She was going to kill Ashley. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this mad at her little sister. Maybe from the same trip that’s the source of her rage right now.
Last summer, the girls’ parents had taken them to New Orleans, in the hope that a big road trip and forced togetherness would provide a break through in their “broken relationship” as Mom continued to insist on calling the feud between the sisters.
The bottom line, that Mom and Dad both refused to accept, is that we are just two different people who are, well, too different from each other to get along. Presley liked boys and worried about her rep and didn’t care about grades or college or the future. She was interested in enjoying the right now. The future was coming whether she liked it or not and there wasn’t anything she could do about that. Presley carefully recreated TikTok dances with her friends and took a long time figuring out just the right outfit to debut at the football game. Presley was a normal teenager who cared about normal teenager stuff and Ashley kept messing things up for her by being so weird.
Ashley loved books. And not in a, from-time-to-time-enjoyed-a-good-book kind of way, but in an obsessive, always reading kind of way. She even read a book between classes, having honed her peripheral vision to allow her to swerve around other people and navigate the halls while keeping up with her latest nerd novel. Even though she was only a freshman and Presley was a junior, people asked her about Ashley. It was humiliating!
The only time the girls seemed to get along was in that funky little jewelry store in the French Quarter where Presley thought the pieces were pretty and Ashley thought them ‘fascinating from the perspective of crystal beliefs about energy storage’ - whatever the hell that meant. They both browsed extensively and finally each chose what they wanted. Presley begged for an entire set, of course (earrings, necklace, bracelet, even an anklet that all matched), while Ashley went for a single simple pendant and, also of course, a book she found near the back of the shop claiming to be a definitive tome on the spiritual world that coexists with ours but is hidden from everyday sight.
That night as Presley was trying on all her new pieces of jewelry, Ashley, nose in her new book, tripped over Presley’s luggage and in flailing while falls broke the necklace Presley had just put around her neck and just made the whole ensemble she’d chosen for the evening come together and work. And since they were leaving New Orleans in the morning, they couldn’t take it back to get fixed or replaced and so Presley had to wait until after they got back to get it repaired, hopefully. She was so mad at Ashley that night.
But today she was even more upset because this was no accident. Ashley had taken her jewelry set and hadn’t even asked.
And when she found the set in Ashley’s room, Ashley didn’t even apologize and give it back right away but went into some long bogus explanation about how her book told her that my jewelry held the power to reveal the spirit world or something and that if she could just keep the set for a little while longer she could complete the ritual and see if anything happened. Presley thought the whole thing so stupid and rude and didn’t care about Ashley’s book experiment. She wanted to get dressed for her date later.
And so here they were, grappling with each other trying to get control of her earrings and bracelet. (Presley had already grabbed the necklace and thrown it around her neck before Ashley could react.) As they screamed, and grabbed, and pulled, and spun, the jewelry seemed to get warmer in their hands. Must be her imagination, Presley thought.
Suddenly out of nowhere, a rippling glare of whiteness accompanied a disorienting sensation. They fell apart as what felt to their stomachs like they were on a rollercoaster dipping and weaving dropped them both on their butts.
“What the hell was that?” Presley demanded.
“I’m… not sure,” Ashley said, taking off her glasses to clean the lenses on her shirt. A nervous habit that always drove Presley nuts.
As they had landed next to each other facing the door, they both simultaneously saw the translucent figure of a man stroll through Ashley’s door and into the room. As their mouths fell open to begin screaming, the man noticed their attention and he screamed before they could, turned and sprinted right back out into the hallway, again going straight through the door!
Presley turned to Ashley and growling said, “What did you do?”
