Some time ago, I was taking a creative writing course in one form or another. The instructor offered a challenge (assignment even) of writing a short story. A very short story. The story could be no longer than fifty-five words. Nor could it be any shorter than fifty-five words. Additionally, we couldn’t create a clever title that actually served as a way to add to the story without encroaching upon that fifty-five-word limit.
My house isn’t an old house in the typical sense of the word. But it is old enough that it sometimes squeaks, moans, and groans all by itself. Anytime something like this happens and any of us are around to hear it, we just blame it on Mortimer. He is the ghost who “haunts” this place and the unexplainable gets blamed on him. Poor ghost. I figured that he’d make the ideal subject for my (incredibly) short story.
Since I published it on The Drabble, I won’t reproduce the whole thing here. That could be bad for their results in search engines if they’re trying to optimize their SEO and I want to respect that. But I will offer a teaser by way of the first couple of sentences:
Name’s Mortimer Brontide. My family’s been on this land for generations.
—Patrick Higingbotham, “I’ll Be Staying, Thanks”
You can read the other forty-four words over on The Drabble. If you like it, I wouldn’t hate it if you’d give it a like on their site.
While Mortimer is a common enough character in my home, he’s not a completely fleshed-out concept. I imagine he’s a dapper man from the Victorian era. He is not unlike the character art below by Georgios Sideras. He based this “Victorian Gentleman” on the actor Gabriel Byrne. I see the resemblance! But beyond that, there isn’t much to him yet. He remains mostly a mystery. All we know is that he is kind.
For a guy who can be overly verbose, a few things help me with learning to be more succinct. One of those is writing micro-fiction like “I’ll Be Staying, Thanks” and another is writing haikus. I don’t claim to be good at either of those things. Nevertheless, I enjoy them both.
