#Twittering Tales: Visitor

This little story (216 characters) is for Kat Myrman’s Twittering Tales;

Photo by Min An at Pexels.com

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The little girl watched the funny light on the stairs. It was back again. She’d told her parents but they just smiled at her imagination. Now it was gliding all the way to the top and she didn’t think it was pleased.

Published by

Jane Dougherty

I used to do lots of things I didn't much enjoy. Now I am officially a writer. It's what I always wanted to be.

55 thoughts on “#Twittering Tales: Visitor”

      1. I think you’re right. Very young children don’t understand magic or the supernatural in the same way as adults because they don’t know the rules of the world yet – everything is new to them so in a way everything is normal, even when it’s not. Makes writing them into supernatural stories very interesting

      3. But that’s the thing, isn’t? They believe in everything – it’s only adults and life experience that knock that belief out of them

      4. When I think about the books I read as a pre-adolescent, they were almost all what would be called fantasy nowadays. Then, they were just books for children. Fantasy was the standard diet for children, but only for children. Apart from sci-fi which had a minor cult following, adult literature was rigorously non-fantasy. It was all part of what you describe—we recognise that children dream, but they are expected to snap out of it when they grow up.

      5. Very true Jane, though perhaps that’s changing with Grimdark authors such as George RR Martin and Jo Abercrombie. Nothing child like about their fantasy!

      6. I still think fantasy (for adults) is regarded as the dumb option by the literary establishment, except when it’s written by a successful author like Neil Gaiman and then all of sudden it isn’t called fantasy.

      7. True, it’s not considered intellectual I suppose, despite Game of Thrones being one of the largest franchises in the world at the moment, even if that is partly due to the TV adaptation. Funny how there can be one stand out success but it doesn’t change how the genre as whole is seen

      10. They’ll be sneering on the other side of their faces when readers vote with their wallets and stop buying high-brow, ‘literary’ novels altogether.

      11. Well, it’s a good point. I’m not sure how the market for ‘literature’ is faring, but I would guess not brilliantly. I don’t know anyone who reads it – not even me! 🙂

      13. I used to read a lot of Dickens, Austen, Hardy, Elliott etc, but I’ve been drawn by lighter, easier reads of recent years. Might just be my attention span waning as I age! 🙂

      14. I think we go through phases. I read a lot of lighter stuff and ended up getting irritated by some aspects and have gone back to the classics. Reading Mrs Gaskell at the moment. She would be on the index in some American states for being a dangerous subversive.

      15. I’ve watched some adaptations of her work, but never read Mrs Gaskell – is she good? I perhaps read too much Hardy at one point – my as he’s a great writer, I think he may have depressed me too much after Jude the Obscure. Saying that, I’m reading The Kite Runner at the moment, so not exactly a cheerful read either

      16. I love Hardy too, but he is much more a skilful portrayer of character rather than a social commentator. The settings are rural and the people are either uneducated rustics or educated countryfolk. Mrs Gaskell is someone I admire because she was a clergyman’s daughter, used to Hardy-like rurality and dropped into industrial Lancashire. She was a keen and very sympathetic observer of the early trades union movement, the life of factory workers and the women in particular. Her characters spout pure Karl Marx on occasion. I enjoy her writing a lot.

  4. Hohoho!!! Chills down my shoulder blades! I wonder what the wicked lamp is up to?! (Or if it is wicked at all!) I like this tale, very imaginative :))

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  5. Terrifying tale. Sometimes I think children are more in tune with the supernatural because their souls are fresh from the beyond themselves. It does not sound like this is going to end well though. 😦

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  10. Pingback: Twittering Tales #78 – 3 April 2018 | like mercury colliding...

    1. Thank you. I was marked as a child reading a story in the local paper about a child who said she played with ‘dollies’ that floated in through the window of her bedroom.

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