Creative Writing Prompts

The bunker's air scrubber had been broken for three days before I admitted I'd sabotaged it myself—and that's when the woman in the locked sub-level knocked back.

The salt-stung air turns metallic on her tongue the moment the stone edifice rises—impossible, gleaming—from the jungle floor where her morning survey had found only moss and rot.

The lighthouse keeper hung upside-down from the gallery railing, still warm, still bleeding onto the rocks below—and the only footprints in the fresh concrete were mine.

The desert swallowed sound like a hungry thing, but Iris kept humming anyway—the same lullaby her daughter had forgotten—until the gunshots shattered it and she realized they weren't looking for a killer, they were looking for her.

At 14,000 feet, Iris finally understood why she'd become a pilot—it wasn't the sky, it was the distance from her ex-wife, who was somehow already waiting at the summit.

The neon-soaked merchant Kess had kept her dead sister's voice on a chip for seven years, and she didn't notice it was gone until the silence felt like drowning.

The merchant had been pricing dead things in the abandoned Westfield for three years before she realized the mannequins in the locked storage unit were newer than the ones on the sales floor—and that someone was still dressing them.

The man she'd loved and betrayed was standing in the resort bar with a drink she'd taught him to make, and Iris realized that some people don't haunt you—they wait.

The salt-crusted iron railing burns cold against my palms as I climb, and underneath—underneath the brine and rust—I smell something wrong: accelerant and copper, fresh enough to still sing.

The man I poisoned in Nairobi fifteen years ago is standing in my kitchen at the Arctic research station, asking for seconds of my soup.