#RDPDAILYPROMPT2026

The Pond

/ animar64 / Leave a comment

RDP Thursday: MEANDER

Cleo Manning likes to hike and stroll in the park down the road from her house.

The park is full of lovely flowers, and along the trails to the ponds are maple trees and willow trees and even a few aged maple trees that may have been in the park before the city of Marsten decided that this was the place it’s residents would want to rest their weary bones.

Cleo doesn’t care much for the flowers( they make her sneeze) , she does like the trees and the shade that they cast along the trails but what she really loves is the pond in the middle of the park with a secret hidden right in the middle of it.

The Pond in the park is  deep and it’s floor is dark because sunlight can’t reach the bottom of it, most people would call it a lake but Cleo knows that a in the middle of the Pond, dead center at it’s deepest point is a tree and it’s rooted to the bottom of the pond in heavy chains made of human hair.

Vines with white flowers carpet the Pond’s floor and any light down there is radiating from the leathery blooms.

Sometimes Cleo sits on  the single granite bench and she as still as a statue as she looks out upon the Pond.

After awhile, she stands up. She smooths her dress, her hair and she looks from furtively from side to side and if no one is around she says ( to the tree at the bottom of the pond )

” Dunk me in a pond in my best dress, will  you Judge Gedney? I sold my soul for that dress. My soul.”

 

 

Waffles Sees Something In The Woods

/ animar64 / Leave a comment

RDP Tuesday: WILDERNESS

Summerween Writing Challenge: OWL

In another life, before he found his home in the forest, the barred owl who did most of his hunting in the cemetery with  nine unmarked graves and a smattering of bones scattered along the ground was had been named Waffles by the humans who had found him with an arrow in his wing and nursed him back to health.

Waffles didn’t exactly dislike humans, but he knew to stay away from them and he knew some of them were good and some of them were bad and that there were things in the forest that looked human and those human  smelled like death and their eyes burned red in the darkness.

Waffles and creatures who shared his appetite for an easy meal that this scent carried, knew these particular humans  would be good  to eat but that they took great exception to anything that tried to make a meal of them. So when Waffles saw these gray shadow people drifting through the forest, he pulled his wings tight to his body and he was as quiet and still as one of the corpses buried in his graveyard.

Waffles rested during the day, but on this particular morning, it was cold and foggy and still  a little dark he opened his eyes and was surprised to see a man under his tree, with two small bundles placed on the ground in front of him.

The man was kneeling. He opened one bundle up, shook it and a small human tumbled out onto the ground. The second bundle he opened was larger. Waffles knew what dogs were and that was what the man dumped on the ground with a grunt.

The man looked up and saw Waffles looking down at him and then he said, right to Waffles ” Tell your friends breakfast is on me. ”

The man stood up, he kicked the body of the child and out of his way and then he stopped and turned around. ” I hope you enjoyed that bite you got out of me you bastard ” he stomped on the dogs head and ground his heel as hard on the poor animals face as hard as he could, which wasn’t easy because the forest floor was very soft.

Then the man picked up the trash bags, he kicked around the leaves and dirt and then he started to walk and he disappeared into the trees.

But the man wasn’t alone, something gray, something that didn’t notice  or care how many eyes tracked it from the bushes and tree tops and from behind rocks was following him and it was hungry. Waffles sat still, very, still and through the darkness in the distance he saw the hungry gray human catch up with the man.

He saw the man turn around, he saw the Gray Human- whose family name was Wendigo reach out grab the man by his neck,  he saws the Wendigo shake the man and when he was done,Waffles watched the Wendigo  feast in peace and in private  and in a little while the Sun came up and Waffles fell asleep.

 

 

The Plan

/ animar64 / Leave a comment

RDP Thursday: DEVISE

Midjourney creations and styles by Irina Shamaeva

If you knew there was a monster living under your bed and it kept you from sleeping and feeling safe at night, what would you do to get rid of it?

Would you call a Priest? A Ghost Buster? Would you burn sage, or would you deny it was there at all?

” I’m afraid of ghosts, I’m not brave, I don’t know what I would do to get rid of it. ” You might say.

But say, just say one night you had enough.

You snap.

So you go with a germ of an idea that you’ve had on your mind.

You jump down from your bed and you drop to your belly and you pull yourself under your monster infested bed and you take grab hold of that monster by it’s horn or it’s eye lid or maybe you sink your teeth into it’s cold gray flesh and  you start to tear at it, maybe even chew and swallow bits of Monster- do you know what you would hear?

Maybe you would hear, above the sounds of you attacking and killing- bit by bite the thing under your bed that has been tormenting you night after night, for weeks and weeks, you would hear someone screaming.

” The monster is here, the monster is here, I TOLD  you the monster was going to get me one night- ”

That cry, that plea that warning wouldn’t be coming from the thing under your bed.

But  it  would be coming from a monster. A vicicious evil monster that’s so unhinged it devours it’s victims while they’re still alive.

You know that for a fact, don’t you?

 

Mercury Wants To Kill Your Phone

/ animar64 / Leave a comment

Color Image of Mercury from NASA’s MESSENGER Satellite

I’ve told this story a few times, but I am going to tell it again because stupid never dies.

I was friends with a person who was probably only hanging out with me because I was such an emotional wreck and suffering from depression and she had known me before and at that time  ( in the before ) she was far more interested in being friends with my husband then me.

She was doing a little grave dancing and I probably made her feel better about herself, you know?

Well, we were out one evening meeting up with the rest of our ‘group’ when she says to me, all very superior like, ‘ Make sure  you unplug your computer and update your phone because Mercury is in retrograde. ”

I was not exactly the sharpest tack in the box at the time, so I thought I had missed something. What exactly did Mercury have to do with my phone? Did she mean the planet was going to crash into a satellite  and kill our phones or the chemical and if she meant the chemical how the Hell was it going to get into my electronics?

I asked her what she meant and she said that when Mercury was in retrograde it stopped orbiting the Sun and then it started to move backwards.” When that happens” she said as if I was suffering from brain damage, but she was there to help me out of the forest of stupidity I had been lost in until she showed up, ” electronics freak out until it stops again and moves forward.

It only happens for a few minutes, I was informed. Then everything goes back to normal.

All I could think to say was, ” There’s ice on Mercury. Chunks of it inside of it’s craters at it’s poles. ”

She laughed so hard tears came out of her eyes, ” Oh Anita, oh wow…Ice on the planet closest to th Sun. SCIENCE lady! You need to get some! ”

The yellow spots in this image show the areas of Mercury that scientists think have water ice.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

This is the Sun. Can you find Mercury?

Mercury in true color (by MESSENGER in 2008)
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Arizona State University/Carnegie Institution of Washington

For RDP Friday: CHUNK