10 Short Stories to Pass the Time (Part II): 10 Short Stories to Pass the Time, #2

By Anna Smith

Dive into these ten short stories, featuring: 

-A mechanic deciding whether or not to follow her mother's legacy of music 

-A fashion designer racing to leave her mark before her clock runs out

-An android contemplating art 

And more

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ananda Foerch
• Release date: Jul 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201560973

Book preview

To my best friend

Index

1. Piano Keys         5

2. Steffy           8

3. From First to Third*       10

4. Immortality*        13

5. The Ruler         16

6. Green*         17

7. The Lecture         19

8. Repeat*         21

9. Diary of a Grieving Teen       23

10. Downtown*        37

*Stories marked with an asterisk were inspired by a Reedsy prompt, found at www.blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts.

Piano Keys

She turned her keychain over and over, looking at the key she was holding up her keychain with.

For a moment, she pictured the shop that it went to. It was a music shop, one that her mom had poured her heart and soul into. She'd grown up running through the aisles, playing the various instruments when the store was empty, just after school had been let out. She could play four decently, and two if she really stretched the definition of play.

Her favorite had always been the piano.

The notes were laid out, an easy road map to follow. Putting chords together and making something worthwhile was easy for her, like it was secondary to walking or breathing. Her mom, of course, had enrolled her in lessons, and she'd only gotten better from there.

One day, when she was fifteen years old, she just stopped.

There was no rhyme or reason to it. One day, she simply stopped attending lessons, stopped playing the piano, stopped visiting the shop altogether. She got an afterschool job at a prominent fast food company, and saved up so she could go to trade school to become a mechanic. By the time she graduated, it had been three years since she'd stepped into the shop, and no part of her missed it.

She'd never really figured out why, but there was one thing that she knew: she hadn't regretted the decision. Being a mechanic was like being a musician: there was an easy road map to follow, and finding the solution to the problem was even easier than walking or breathing. She just... understood cars in a way that she'd never understood anything else.

It was at the small shop where she'd worked that she got the news: her mom had been in a car accident and she needed to get down to the hospital right away.

She never even got to say goodbye.

Things had been a blur after that, of paperwork and cremation and memorial services, where the faces of the people blurred by just as quickly. Her and her mom weren't exactly close, but they did have dinner every Sunday night to fill each other in on their lives, swapping stories about clients that frequented their respective shops. Already