Replying to Boredom breeds creation; crit my short story.

I was bored today, so I decided to write. First time in a long time; I'm going to take it up more often, it was good. Tell me, NS, what do you think of it?



if a tree falls in the woods


When she had grown up, she had moved out and was living on her own.

When her parents died in a car crash, she went to the funeral. Not a tear was shed; it was their own stupid fault they drove drunk.

Her friends from school broke off contact; they all said she was too cynical. She figured she probably never liked them anyway.

She didn’t have a job; her parents’ house had sold for enough to hold her over for a few years.

She spent a lot of time alone. Soon enough she discovered a grocery delivery service; she ordered food online and her only human interactions were with the kid who brought it to her.

She hated people, she thought. In her solitude she wrote. Every day, she wrote the same words in her journal, at the top of a new page: People suck.

The rest of the page she would meticulously fill with words— Not one was out of place; each had been chosen with intense care and deep thought.

At the end of the day, she tore out the page and watched it burn, between her and the rest of the world, at her window. She didn’t like lighters; the smell of matches was comforting.

One day, she held the paper to the side as it burned, and looked out at the world without flames dancing in her line of sight. She noticed things she had never noticed before: the sun setting behind a church shone through a stained glass window; the throng of people unloading the bus was disbanding, all it’s members heading hurriedly home; the aging man watching her burn the paper, as he had every day for the last year.

She noticed a warm sensation come upon her; the first since her childhood. She also noticed a peculiar smell; at first she couldn’t place it. She remembered the accident that killed her parents; the smell of the vinyl seats burning. She had been there that night, the lone survivor of the crash.

Any thoughts she had that the world wasn’t out to get her were erased as she noticed the heavy fabric blinds burning; the vinyl tablecloth resting adjacent on the wooden table beginning to smolder.

The grocery boy did not miss her; she lived up four flights of stairs.