The mystery of the mountainside
A free writing exercise.
Note: A few days ago, I decided to free write for as long as I possibly could, with no prompt whatsoever, until I finished a story from beginning to end. This is the short story that resulted. I wanted to see what the first thing my brain would think of would be, and I don’t know why or how I came up with this story. The grammar mistakes can be attributed to the nature of free writing. At times, this may be hard to follow. Read on.
Some time ago, there was a man named Brad. Despite his shortcomings, Brad was a decent guy –– as decent as a guy can be, that is.
He was relatively unassuming and a minimalist. He lived in the mountains of upstate New York, sort of off the beaten path, with three wolves he trained and came to know as his companions.
Brad wasn’t concerned with the things thirty-three-year-old men were usually concerned with: sex, finding a wife, pleasing people. He didn’t care what anyone thought of him, and maybe that’s because he lived alone and didn’t feel the need to have friends.
Anyway, that’s as much of a detailed description of Brad that I can give before jumping into this story. Here goes it:
The alarm clock… alarmed… I suppose, at five-thirty in the morning. And what an unrelenting alarm it was. One that could wake up the mountain lions miles away.
Of course, at this very early hour, the wolves would howl anyway, so even if Brad didn’t have an alarm, he technically did anyway.
Brad kept hitting snooze, because that’s the type of guy he is. Plus, he hadn’t even the slightest obligations today. He could stay in bed all day and nobody would care –– except for three very famished wolves.
After a while, though, Brad decides it may be a good idea to satiate his grumbling stomach and his dogs’… er, wolves’.
He heads to the kitchen, tripping on an unknown small object as he heads there.
Something about the kitchen looks different than the way he left it last night.
This couldn’t be from a drunken stupor Brad had last night, since he didn’t drink then and doesn’t drink much anyway.
So if it wasn’t Brad that shifted things around in the kitchen, who or what the hell was it?
After having trouble pinpointing exactly what it was that was different about the kitchen, Brad finally realizes what moved: a knife has been removed, a banana is missing, and the home improvement magazine he’d left on the counter is out of sight.
Brad engaged in dialogue with himself: If someone broke in last night, their choice of items to steal was quite interesting. If this person entered Brad’s home with the intention of murdering him, why haven’t they done so already? And how were they going to kill him: slitting his throat, then shoving a banana down it while forcing him to look at sub-par design in a shitty home improvement magazine?
If Brad were an interior designer, this probably is the worst death he could ever ask for — but he isn’t one. And judging by this burglar’s choice of items, it is highly improbable, Brad thinks, that anyone wants to kill him.
If someone had entered his home, wouldn’t his wolves have reacted? Because if they didn’t, they’re pretty useless as protectors.
So, how did this breaker and enterer come into Brad’s mountaintop home without anyone hearing –– unless he didn’t come in at all?
In the strangeness of the moment, Brad hears shrieks –– inhuman and chilling. One moment they sound like cries, and the next, like somebody is laughing at a bad joke.
The noise is coming from the office, which is right above the kitchen.
Brad decides he has no choice but to investigate.
He tiptoes over to the kitchen drawer, grabbing his shotgun and slipping it into his back pocket.
Quietly scaling the staircase, he’s followed by his three wolves, who surprisingly make no noise and are just as curious as Brad.
Brad reaches the top step and knows he has to enter the office to find out what the fuck broke in last night. An alien? The spirit of his angry stepmother? Or nothing at all?
He nears the office door. If anyone were next to him, his fear would be palpable. He looks at his wolves, recognizing has three layers of protection from whatever he’s about to meet. The noise in the office, which had stopped, resumes and amplifies. Someone in the room is screaming.
Taking the deepest of breaths, Brad cocks his gun and opens the door abruptly, pointing his gun straight ahead.
In front of him was something that he’d never even imagined would be possible. It was horrifying.
In the middle of the office, sitting and spinning on Brad’s swiveling desk chair, was a cackling chimpanzee. It was eating a banana, reading Brad’s home improvement magazine and cracking up, poking holes in the magazine with a knife…
And just when Brad thought matters couldn’t become weirder, he saw the one thing he could not have wanted to see less: The office window was wide open. But Brad was sure he locked everything last night.
Sara Barry doesn’t know where the road will take her but she hopes to be a writer of some kind. When she’s not on Medium, Sara likes making music playlists, writing songs, and trying to (almost always unsuccessfully) put her dog on a diet.
Follow her musical endeavors here.
