Short Stories by Me

The Girl in the Jar

In a large cave in a seemingly other dimension, there dwells giants. These monsters are over a hundred feet tall, with terrifying teeth and sickly green skin. Their tick dreadlocks hang to their knees when they take them down, and all of them have terrible, red eyes.

The only thing in this cave that is not terrifying and ugly is a girl of a regular size who lays in a jar all day, emitting a soft glow. This glow is the only thing keeping the giants from eating her. That and her entertaining rants for them to let her go.

The girl in the jar has been there for years, or even decades, but no one really knows. She may look young, but she is wise beyond her hundreds of years. Little do the giants know, she has amazing powers that no one else in existence from any realm has. Her favorite is the ability to watch other dimensions and the going-ons inside them.

The dimension that the girl in the jar watches the most may or may not be just as terrible as the giant's world, but in many different ways.

Here, regular humans run amok, and pirates roam the seas. Kings rule the land.

The girl in the jar tends to watch certain people until they become uninteresting, and at the moment, her subject of interest is a girl in her late teenage years named Sylvie.

Sylvie was as fierce as the red flower, and her hair was just as fiery. She often slept by an open window just to let the angels bless her in her sleep. She longed for the sea, for the salty waves to spash her face and turn her smooth hair stringy. Sylvie wished for a ship to sail away from her problems. She wished to leave to a new world, a new page that was fresh and free of rips and wrinkles.

And yet, a girl would never own her own ship, would she?

Sylvie lives in a town on a shoreline, and she couldn't be in a worse state. She had always had anger issues, that was no question. Sylvie's mother was a small woman, who didn't talk much, and let herself be pushed around by her husband. Sylvie's father was a proud man who valued money more than his only daughter. He barely paid any attention to his wife and daughter, but he cherished and pampered his oldest son. The city hated him for taxing them, but he paid as much attention to their dislike as he did to the women in his family.

This was Sylvie's life. She stayed out of her father's way, cleaning the house all day. Running errands and trying to avoid anyone her age, who would scoff and scorn her for being her father's daughter. Sometimes she wished that she could steal onto a pirate's ship and sail the seas where she would be feared, rather than scorned.

One morning, Sylvie was getting dressed with her many skirts and frills to show her status when a shatter came from downstairs. It was probably her mother, dropping a plate of china as she cleaned. Her mother, who was once young, beautiful, and sharp in all of her senses, was now slow, small, and had wrinkles and gray hair. She seemed to have aged centuries in less than a decade.

Sylvie shook her head slowly, hoping that her mother would escape her father's yells, and took out a large wad of cash from a dresser. She looked at it, smiling softly to herself. Sylvie earned money any way she could, whether it was selling items that were personal to her, or doing a gypsy dance for simple coins. She stuffed it back where it belonged and hurried out the door to do the errands. Today she had to get bread from the bakery. She should probably grab a new plate of china, too.

She rushed down the stairs, picking up the basket and the few bills her father provided for things such as this. She wrapped a scar over her head to hide her face (she didn't want anyone to recognise her) and walked out the door.

The town was bustling with activity, even in the early hour. Sylvie had to keep her eyes trained on the ground in front of her, occasionally looking up to see where she was going.