I purchased “Storymatic,” which is a writing prompt generator that claims it has “six trillion stories in one little box – which one will you tell?” It has a multitude of prompt cards and a brief instruction book that gives you suggestions for story creation. (Frankly, you could just draw a random card to get a character and a random card to get an object and then write a story about whatever that inspires.) But I like the promptbook, and so for my first story I chose the “XYZ” structure – that is, X is in a conflict with Y about Z.
For X, you were told to choose two character cards, and for Y you were to select one. I decided to pick three and see how they worked themselves out. So the three character cards I got were Runaway … Vampire … Employee in a Fast-Food Restaurant.
For Z, which is the source of their conflict, you were directed to choose one, and I got “a box of kittens.”
And what follows in a completely unpolished first draft. Even so, I would really appreciate any feedback you might choose to give after reading. I think I’m going to try to write daily using this prompt generator system. We will see how it goes.
Midnight Shift
This? Hell, this is the life!
Well, no, that’s not really true, is it? I mean, technically speaking, this is the afterlife, right? Or maybe the life after death? Or maybe it’s just a different life? It’s kinda hard to explain, to be honest.
So imagine this. There you are, just being a totally cool dude, doing nothing at all out of the ordinary, and then things just get flipped. Is that a good word, “flipped”? I don’t know. It sounds right, though. And this is my story, and I can tell it however I want, so yep, everything got flipped.
Maybe I should explain. First of all, I don’t expect anyone to believe this. I mean, we’ve got stories out the ying-yang about supernatural teenagers, right? Teenagers who inherit powers from their superhero parents. Teenagers who are bitten by radioactive insects. Teenagers who discover that they are the living recreation of an ancient god. Teenagers who are werewolves, and zombies, and vampires, I mean who believes any of that anymore, right?
Well, believe it. Need proof? Check out the canines, baby. Oh, well, you’re reading this, aren’t you? So you can’t really “check them out.” So I will tell you, they are poin-tee. Sharp enough to tear into living flesh, solid enough to tear chunks out of … well, you get it, right?
Need another clue? I used to work at a fast-food joint known for its diverse menu of fried meat substances and especially well known for its delectable French fries. No names need to be spoken, eh? Actually, it’s not right to say that I used to work there; it’s more accurate to say that I used to work there during the daytime. Fortunately, this particular fast food establishment decided several years ago that money could be made if they stayed open round the clock, and that was damn lucky for me because—remember I said I was gonna offer you another clue? Well, here it comes—I don’t do so good working when the sun is in the sky.
OK, OK, you get it now. And like I said, I don’t expect you to believe it. Six months ago I wouldn’t have believed it either, you know? And really, that’s how I found myself in this unusual situation.
Dracula at the Drive-Thru, baby; the tabloid newspapers would eat this story up!
Short story made endless, I transitioned from being a high school student flipping meat on the grill to being a dropout vampire cleaning out the grease traps.
Yeah, I can already hear what’s inside your head. No, not because I’m a vampire. Stupid. Because it’s what I thought to myself a dozen times: Why would I bother keeping a job paying barely above minimum wage when I have become in fact an immortal creature of the night who feeds on human blood, etc. and so on and so forth?
No, it’s not because there are so many potential victims all around me. Even though there are, obviously. And it’s not because I need the money. We vamps can sleep underground as well as in a darkened dungeon sequestered from the light, and I have access to all the food I want (if you understand what I mean by the word “food”) whenever I want it. And, for what it’s worth — and not that I’ve done this before — but it’s not like I can’t engage in some petty theft to get any material possessions I may want. I mean, let’s face it, they can’t exactly record my image on security cameras, right? You know the tropes.
Nope, the reason that I have this the midnight shift job is that I like it. That’s right, I said it. I like working at this place. I like preparing the foods and sweeping the floors and cleaning the parking lot and interacting with customers. I like all of this (except for cleaning the grease traps, to be honest: that’s just nasty).
You see, one night several weeks ago, right after my miraculous transformation, I was working the front counter when I saw someone that I had not seen since my freshman year of high school. She came in, hands in her pockets and with her hoodie up over her hair, and walked up to the counter.
“Welcome! How can I help you tonight?” I asked with my well-trained smile.
“Cheeseburger,” she said, and strange as it sounds that’s when I knew it was her. She hadn’t met my eyes yet, kept looking at the floor, but there was always something unusual about the way that she pronounced the letter S. And that’s odd, I know, because the S in cheeseburger really sounds like a Z, doesn’t it? CHEEZBURGER. But see, that was it. She said the letter like a soft S. CHEECEBURGER. It sounded almost foreign, back when we were in school together I always wondered if she had moved to America from a different country. To be honest, I spent a lot of time “wondering” about her.
Her name was Tracey, and she had been my first crush. Not puppy love, but a full-on “how can I get her to notice me?” devotion. I had two classes with her, English and 3D Art, and in both classes I made sure that I was sitting behind her and to the left. A knight’s move in chess, that’s what it was. Two rows over and one row back, and that way I could look at her while still seeming to pay attention to the teacher. And I liked looking at Tracy. She had black hair in little ringlets that I thought were adorable, and I had memorized the angles of her face from looking at her so often. She always had a green Trapper Keeper, two textbooks, and an ever-changing “novel-of-the-week,” usually urban fantasy. She chewed on her pencils. And I wish I had had the social skills to figure out how to engage her in conversation.
But now I didn’t need social skills; I needed polite professionalism. “A cheeseburger,” I acknowledged, and I considered saying at the same way she did, with the soft S, but decided that might be offputting to her. Time to suggestive sell: “Would you like fries with that?”
“No,” she mumbled, and she removed two crumpled singles from her jacket pocket and placed them on the counter.
I retrieved them from where she had laid them and flattened them out. Something was wrong, and I knew it. I mean, I know it was 11:15 at night and maybe she was tired or something, but sometimes you can just tell that something is wrong, you know? And maybe I shouldn’t have done what I did next, there’s no way of knowing. But, you know, being immortal undead kind of opens up your options or at least removes some of the fear of consequences for things. So I took a shot.
“Isn’t your name Tracey?”
Now he looked up at me, sharply and cautious. Her eyes were assessing me to register how dangerous a person I was. I mean, that’s kind of crazy. You know? People recognize people, and it’s not as if this restaurant is off the beaten path.
“How did you know that name?” she actually almost hissed at me.
“I … uh … if that is you, then I think we went to school together a few years ago. Remember me?” I pointed at the name on my badge. “Derek?”
“Derek?” She shook her head. “No, I didn’t know anyone named Derek.”
Well, of course not, I chided myself. You always sat behind her and never even talked to her before. But what she said next chilled me:
“Tracey … Tracey was my sister.”
And there was something in the pause between the repetition of names, something in the extra stress she put on the word “was.” Something in her tone. Something.
Something that was none of my business. But also, something that I could not let alone.
“Oh, we were friends. She never said she had a twin, though.” I finished her order on the register and the drawer opened. I laid the two singles in the correct slot and removed her change, placing it on the counter. “What ever happened to her?”
Ever have one of those moments when you wait for an answer but realize that no answer is coming? Yeah, this was one of those.
Ultimately, I turned around and pulled a cheeseburger from the warming bin, then turned around. She hadn’t moved other than to look back at the countertop. “I forgot to ask, did you want that for here or to go?”
“To go.”
I put her cheeseburger into a bag, added a few napkins, folded it twice as per company practice, and handed it to her. “Have a great night,” I said. She took her bag and turned around, headed toward the door. And on impulse, I called out, “Tell Tracey that Derek said ‘hi’ when you see her.”
And she disappeared into the night.
***
Or rather, she would have disappeared into the night, never to be seen again perhaps, except for one thing. And maybe you have forgotten after being captivated by my narrative so far, So let me remind you: I am a Creature of the Night. You cannot “disappear” from a Creature of the Night in the night. If it had been midafternoon, she could 100% have disappeared into the midafternoon from me. But I knew the night, and the night knew me, and there was just no way she was going to fly free. OK, “fly free” doesn’t really work there, but you trying becoming a Rock God lyricist overnight. It takes practice, I’m telling you that. But seriously, who doesn’t want to listen to a song called “I Know the Night”?
Anyhow, I just couldn’t help feeling that something was really suspicious about all this. And yeah, it might have been nothing. I mean, she did not know me and I was asking some questions that she obviously did not want to hear, but there was just something about the whole ninety-second interaction that felt wrong. And I think that I would rather look into something and find out that it’s nothing than to not look into something and find out that it’s something.
“Bernie?” I called out.
My assistant manager was in the storage room, helping Dontrice and Gretchen organize and clean. “Yeah,” he called back.
“Can I take a smoke break?”
He walked around the corner by the dish sink and looked at me dubiously. “You don’t smoke, Derek.”
“Yeah, I know, but I need a few minutes. Everybody else gets smoke breaks, what do you say?”
He flipped his hands in a “whatever” fashion. “Yeah, kid, you got it.” He leaned back around the corner. “Gretchen, watch the counter.” She must have said something to him, because he replied “Ten or fifteen minutes max. You’ll be fine.” Then he turned back to me. “Do me a favor and clean up by the curb, OK?”
I grabbed a broom and dustpan. “Thanks, Bern.”
***
I wish that I could describe for you what it feels like to be out in the night. As a vampire. I suppose there are vampires out there who have lived for hundreds of years and who just take this whole nighttime experience for granted, but I haven’t gotten there yet, trust me. And I want to say something like a simile or metaphor to help you truly experience it, but there is nothing I ever experienced in my real life — my life life, you understand — that compares to this. It’s like being completely integrated into something that is essentially yourself. No, see, that doesn’t make any sense at all. Look, when I was a kid, I really liked to dunk Oreo cookies into milk. You ever done that? There’s just something so right about Oreos dunked in milk. No, that’s not enough. That’s not even a small percentage of this experience of walking out into the evening and knowing that you are exactly where you belong. An integral part of everything. Able to exist independently and knowing that the entire universe really does revolve around you and you really do revolve around the entire universe. And at this point I am just saying words that I’m not even going to pretend make sense to anyone because they don’t even make sense to me. But that’s what it feels like to walk out into the evening. Every single evening.
And tonight, I had a mission. where was this girl? Tracey’s twin? I knew she had been walking when she came into the restaurant. How did I know this? Again, I have to attribute it to vampire instincts. She did not smell like someone who had just come out of a car. You ever smell cars? Some of them are nasty, but they’re all distinctive somehow. People talk about the “new car smell,” but an old car smell is just … I don’t know how to explain it to you. It’s just very unique.
Anyhow, I did not believe that she had driven up or been driven up here, and that meant that she had walked. And – Creature of the Night for-the-win! – that meant that I could track her.
**********
NOT DONE BUT FINISHED FOR TODAY … and now some reflection …
Well, that took some unexpected turns. I really liked this exercise, having been given these cards and tried to figure out a way to make them work. As you can tell, the box of kittens has not appeared yet and I’m not sure what to do with them. I’ll figure them in somehow and make them important.
So when I started out, I had decided that a person could not be a runaway and work at a fast-food restaurant because it would be pretty easy to find the runaway there. So then it was either going to be a fast-food employee with a runaway vampire or – as I chose – a vampire fast-food employee and a runaway.
So, Step One, get those two characters together. It seemed pretty natural to put them in the fast-food restaurant and for the runaway to come in for something cheap and fast. But what to do about the box of kittens? I toyed with some ideas. Maybe the runaway was getting food for the kittens? Maybe the runaway carried a box of kittens into the restaurant and was told that they could not have them there? I just didn’t know, and I’m still torn with the box of kittens.
But I did want to establish the characters. And I brought in my vampire fast-food employee and pretty much just let him run at the mouth. And to be honest, I like his Voice. I like the way he sounds when he’s telling the story, and I like the tangents his mind goes off on, and I like his overall attitude about everything. I mean, this is not a vicious killer – and I do realize that we’re going to need to get to the point where he does have to draw blood from a human being in order to survive – and he’s made a decision to work in a fast-food restaurant, which I tried to explain in a way that makes sense. So ultimately he’s a 17- or 18-year old newly-formed vampire Who totally digs his new existence but who has some hangups about the things he experienced in life. And I like him.
Originally, I thought the reason he was keeping this job was because of a girl. And it still might be the case, I haven’t figured it out yet. And I was going to have this girl – Tracy or whoever – come walking into the restaurant and the two of them were going to hit it off and then he was going to discover that she was a runaway and he was going to try to help. Still no idea what to do with a box of kittens, though. But then things just went in a different direction.
And what do I have now? Well, I have a mystery to be solved with some seemingly dark elements. I have this supernatural creature on the hunt for someone he once cared about (or at least imagined that he felt something for). Where is she now? Why hasn’t he seen her since 9th grade? She’s got to be in some sort of trouble, right? And her twin does not know where she is, so that’s another element to consider.
And there’s got to be a box of cats in there somewhere, dammit.
Any feedback would be appreciated, plot suggestions welcomed, etc. This was just the first draft, so there will be typos and such throughout. Feel free to offer feedback on those, but I am more interested in hearing about Derek’s character and if you would be interested more of this story as I write it. Please, honest feedback … I’m tough and can take it.
WriterRyk 