At the Masquerade

Today’s post is based on a writing prompt I shared in a previous Daily Drafts & Dialogues post. Keep reading to see what I wrote, and to access more writing prompts.

What I wrote below is based on the following writing prompt: Write a scene that takes place during a masquerade party. 

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I had been adjusting my sequined mask for the hundredth time when the lights went out and the baritone echoes of an organ flooded the aging ballroom. 

Everyone stopped dancing. 

A few partygoers gasped, and a few nervously laughed. 

No one moved as they stood in the looming dark, waiting. 

Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. The reprises of music faded to the tally of a clock. 

Then every body turned, in unison, with a stomp toward the middle of the room where a bright glow had appeared in the center of the floor. 

A few seconds later, a column of light appeared, reaching up to the crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling, illuminating everything surrounding it. 

The oval space became incandescent, and everyone’s masks glimmered, revealing curled lips and shut eyes and expressions of fright as ever so slowly … two bodies covered in bloodied gauzy shrouds emerged from the floor on a cylindrical pedestal, lit up like an offering. It was a couple, curled toward each other as if they were sleeping, as if they were caught in the eternal embrace of Pompeii. 

A person in a white beaked mask gasped, making their partner shudder, who then made a woman in a mask with a peacock feather, full of anticipation, grasp for her phone so that she could record the show. 

I was stunned, unsure what was real and what was not, as the figures before me still weren’t moving. 

Then smoke filled the room, filling every crevice, veiling everything before me.  

An electric guitar struck a few chords, startling me, and I dropped my mask, which I suddenly realized I had been holding. But I couldn’t reach down to get it because just then the energy in the air shifted and I heard feet begin to shuffle again, together, as if they were trying to beat the music into some type of new-age indie hippie rhythm. 

Nothing but limbs and sparkling masks flailing in and out of the blurry miasma of faces and characters that I could make out but not distinguish.  

My eyes were transfixed on the nothingness of the hazy scene engulfing me, my chest tightening, when I felt a warm hand reach for mine, then relinquish my mask back to me. I looked up and saw his eyes. But he saw my face, bare. A bad omen for things to come at such a time, in such a place. 

[Write what happens next and share what you come up with in a comment or subscriber chat thread below.] 

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© All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC. The above work is a piece of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Today’s Writing Prompt