Here’s the prompt. What do you think goes on in this place. What may have gone on here? Is the story in the house or the land or water around it?
Come in and tell us a story! Make it 100 words, please, in the comments of this post or on your own web site with a link back here. We can’t wait to read what you have for us!
(Photo Credit: analogicus on Pixabay)
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Perhaps your eagle-eyes spotted a dearth of doors on the pond side of the old mill. You naturally assumed the entrance to be around front. Well, I tested that theory when I was a lad. Took the iron of Horatio Hornblower to manage it, but I made it all the way around before my courage ran out and I went haring off through the gooseberry bushes and into the fields beyond.
Nope, no doors on that side either.
No, to enter, you crawled into the corrugated-iron shed and through a trap-door in the kitchen wall.
Inexplicable.
Sunset cast a metallic glint across the flat pond. Another day and not a single ripple had disturbed the water’s quiet surface. She had been watching it for days, waiting for something, anything to happen. Zoé had given up on calling for help; the old man beat her for the slightest sound, and no one knew where she was. This was to be her final photography project before graduation: an abandoned house with fantastic textures for grayscale, only it wasn’t abandoned. Captain E. F. Docker – or his ghost, rather – had very strict rules for visitors: no noise, no departure.
It had once been an orphanage for the “unadoptable” – babies born with disabilities or deformities or (God forbid) babies who had the misfortune to be the result of an interracial union. It had been the perfect place to stash the children society forgot. It was isolated, and if a little one happened to wander into the mosquito-infested swamp one day and not come back…well, that was just easier for everyone now, wasn’t it? Now it stood empty, a graveyard crafted of stone, a monument to the tragedy of human indifference. Who could redeem such horrific beauty?