For those just tuning in, this challenge is about taking a story idea from bare bones idea into a fully fledged story by writing consistently every week day for fifteen minutes. The sentence I end with on one day, is the sentence I start with on the following. Part one was Bob’s story and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story below. Part Two follows a character named Penelope. I have a few basic sentences to act as road marks on her journey. I am loosely calling that an outline. We will see where she ends up by the time the story is done. For now, we start Part two of the 2025 Fifteen Minute Writing Challenge.
Day 61: She could see no flowers, trees or path, just a solid sheet of white as though the world behind her was a blank piece of white paper.
She could see no flowers, trees or path, just a solid sheet of white as though the world behind her was a blank piece of white paper. Penelope shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. Somehow the whiteness of the world seemed creepier than having her path chosen for her. She didn’t care for it and turned away. She faced the lake and while the lack was a deep blue mirrored glass sparkling under the sun, the rest of the shore had all been swallowed by the fog.
The fog wasn’t encroaching, just blotting out the rest of the world. It put the lake in a spotlight.
‘So I guess that is the important bit.’
Penelope looked at the lake, more than willing not to look at the blank whiteness around her. The lake seemed to be just a lake. There was nothing spectacular about it. The shore was sandy with no real rocky protrusions. If there was any kind of plant life in the water it was remaining under the water. The breeze blew and ripples danced across the surface just as she would expect. Nothing skimmed across the surface, nothing rose from the depths.
Penelope bent down and touched her fingers to the surface. She used a quick darting motion, only realizing she pulled her hand back and stepped away from the water by a few steps that she was thinking of horror movies. It was almost disappointing to not have something attempt to grab her and pull her beneath the surface.
‘Although I suppose not being in a horror movie is a good thing,’ she told herself.
The ripples her fingers made extended outwards and kept going long past where she thought they would dissipate. They rippled out and kept rippling even though she was no longer touching the water. A bell sounded causing her to nearly jump out of her skin with surprise. It sounded odd in this quiet natural place to hear a bell. It sounded like a big old fashioned brass bell ringing.
‘You need a tower for those,’ she thought. The ripples stopped when the bell rang and the lake was still. Penelope looked up to see if she could see a bell tower in the mist. She couldn’t but she could now see the outline of the trees. The mist was receding. She looked away from the lake and realized she could see the flower beds again. They changed. There was no color blocking anymore, each section of space beneath the trees was filled with an abundance of flowers so that they all looked like one flower bed the trees decided to sprout from rather than several patches of flowers in the wood. All open ground, save the pathway, was covered with flowers. All different sorts of flowers. The colors were varied and in addition to the solid primary colors there were multiple hues and shades of every variety, all jumbled up.
Penelope took a step away from the lake to look at the flowers and when she clanked back, the lake was gone. Only the path through the flower filled wood remained. She took a step onto the path and found herself abruptly waking up in bed.
Penelope blinked in bed, her eyes peering into the still night dark room. While she didn’t question where she was, she wasn’t used to the space yet, and lay there in the dark listening to the quiet of the room.
Ten til Midnight 