Writer’s Digest does these fun little writing prompts a few times a year. The challenge is to write a short story of 650 words or less inspired by the above picture. See my take below, thanks for looking.
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I had never seen a Box House before. Papa told me it was something not found in our home, a thing of distant pastures and alien worlds. I didn’t understand at first what he meant by a ‘Box House’—but I understood after I saw it.
It was like nothing I had ever seen before. Instead of growing tall and straight, reaching for the light, blooming every year, then dying in the winter, only to be reborn with the first hints of warmth-it sat, the same, all year round.
How could something living-something here, in our home, like us-possibly stay the same all year?
Then Papa explained it to me.
The Box House was not a home. It was not a creature. It was of us, but not of us. He explained to me how—when the Old One’s reached their time—tiny creatures came.
They cut the Old One’s up and carried them away. Papa said sometimes you could hear them scream, his eyes took on a faraway look when he talked about that, as if he was seeing something completely different than the Others around us.
The tiny creatures devoured the Old Ones, devoured them and made them into something new, something dead, something that would never change. They made them into Box Houses.