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CONTEST ENDED – Thank you for submitting your stories!

Write about someone who returns as an adult to a place they last visited as a child.

Posted in Adults on Oct 26, 2022

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✍️ 83 stories

“Granny Rosie's Garden” by Laura Todd

Submitted to Contest #11

The colours were all gone but the smells were still the same, even after all of these years. I hadn’t visited Granny Rosie and Grandpa Pym since I was 10, and yet I remembered everything in the garden. I stood on the back steps, taking it all in and picturing it in my mind. Granny Rosie loved her garden. Always out in the sunshine. A sunhat on her head and a trowel in her gloved hand, that's how I remember her. Grandpa Pym much preferred to be inside, reading the newspaper or watching the horse racing. As a child, I loved staying at their ho...

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“Blue's Park” by Matthew Weber

Submitted to Contest #11

It had been fifteen years since Blue had been in Sander’s Park. Back then she thought it was just a playground and a parking lot, but she now knew the trees surrounding the playground, the hills on the other side of the parking lot, and the creek at the bottom of the hills were a part of it too. As a child she thought the trees were a thick forest where children would get lost and wolves would prowl at night. But now she realized she could see through them, and on the other side, barely thirty yards from the edge, was the back of a Walmart. ...

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“Rory's Here” by Annie Couch

Submitted to Contest #11

Eileen was waiting outside in the dark and the snow when headlights flashed in her eyes. A car pulled into the apartment complex parking lot and she watched as it slowly made a loop and pulled up by the curb where she was standing. Rory got out of the car. He was tall, stooped, but not in an embarrassed way, more like in a way that conveyed his ability to listen to people who were a lot shorter than him. As he carried Eileen’s bags carefully to the trunk of their dad’s Volkswagen, Eileen watched, willing time to slow itself down and trying f...

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“The Boy” by Steven Pittaro

Submitted to Contest #11

A boy sits inside his home watching a cartoon on television. He is eleven. His father comes in the front door, having picked up barbeque food. To the boy and his two brothers, the father says,“Help yourself guys. I’ve got the runs.”The father goes upstairs into the bathroom while the boys eat dinner together. Afterwards, they each go on their separate paths. The oldest, Jimmy, invites his girlfriend over and they go to the basement to “watch TV”. The middle child, Danny, goes upstairs onto the computer and plays some game. The youngest, the ...

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“The Acorn and the Owl, A Short Short Story” by Michael Lacey

Submitted to Contest #11

A man sits at the base of a mighty tree. He stares down at a smattering of acorns, some whole and others broken, some harvested and some wasted. He remembers being a child, when he was unsure and, frankly, apathetic to what kind of tree this was, yet it still stands, taller, wiser, and well worn in every way. Disease has tried over and over again to take it down, but each has failed. This tree that will have to be taken down from the inside, by a rot that eats away until the tree must give up. So far, the tree has stayed strong. As a boy, he...

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“Enchanted ” by Lizzy Wilson

Submitted to Contest #11

Most of my memories of my childhood were dark and painful. Lorelai recalled in her own mind. She remembered the beatings and the inappropriate acts her family had done to her. Poor lorelai was just an object of her families pleasures at the ripe age of 13. Before that it was mild. The worst part was her mother was just as involved. Family members and other strange men would pay her mother and lorelai would be locked in a room always tied up or strapped to the furniture. The stuff that was done to her was unspeakable. Lorelai never forgot. Bu...

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“The Possibility of the Playground” by Rebecca Peller

Submitted to Contest #11

Last time I was here, I was dressed in corduroy pants and a lightly stained t-shirt, my long hair up in high pigtails. Last time I was here, I was with my mother because last time I was here, my mother was still alive.  I wasn’t allowed to go on the monkey bars due to my mother’s anxiety that I would fall and cut up my limbs on the woodchips covering the ground below, but sometimes, when she turned away for just one moment, I would reach out and hang on the first bar for a second before returning to the platform and pretending that I ha...

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“Childhood Woods” by Lauren Halliday

Submitted to Contest #11

The soft crunch of leaves under my boots gave a familiar warmth inside of my chest. I hadn’t walked this trail for a few years now, more than a few years honestly. It was 11 years ago when I was last anywhere near this trail. The thought of coming to visit the old scent of pine had never crossed my mind until now. To my left, far past the trees, peaked my old house. Strangely, it still looked the same, however, the feeling of seeing it was different. I didn’t feel youthful joy or anything that you often read within stories of remembering pas...

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“The Beginning of Freedom” by Steve Krieshok

Submitted to Contest #11

I parked the car across the street from the elementary school and sat, staring. I could feel my friend/mentor/life coach, Zack, glancing at me and then at the school.“How many books or stories or movies has the main character who goes back to somewhere like this said, ‘it looks a lot smaller than it did’ or something like that?”Zack laughed, “Every single one.”“It’s not always true,” I said softly, “sometimes it looks bigger.”“Do you want to talk about that before we go across?”“No, I’d be stalling. There will be enough to talk abo...

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“The Same Mistakes Make The Story” by Nigel Stone

Submitted to Contest #11

The man steps off the bus and kicks himself for missing his stop. For God’s sake, it’s only been ten years since he was last here. How much could have changed in a decade? He hitches the rucksack he carries on his back into a more comfortable position, takes a hold of his suitcase, figures out the quickest route to his destination, and then sets off walking towards the housing estate. He feels the damp seeping through the hole in the sole of one boot, and almost immediately trips over the untied lace of the other. He stops and tugs at the la...

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“The Parking Lot” by Kaitlyn Selvasingh

Submitted to Contest #11

Returning to that parking lot gave Amber Rose a lot of flashbacks. Flashbacks to when her father would take her to that exact parking lot and beat her till she bled. Flashbacks to when her mother left her and her dad in that exact parking lot and running away with some rich guy who could actually afford his house. Her father struggled to pay rent until his last breath until he was too weak to beat her, so he cried. Every day until he died for 13 years because his wife left him and his daughter in that very parking lot.

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“La Lune, Por Siempre” by Cleo Valentino

Submitted to Contest #11

OCTOBER 14, 2019 A room --- a makeshift home to invite in the most wondrous imagined lives. Daydreams galore, complete with wistful glances at the white ceiling, even in these, you, as a child, had found faces, stories.  Slightly mournful, you packed your books. One by one off the bookshelf. All your knick knacks, withstood the test of time. Of heartbreak. Countless betrayals in the form of rapd heartbeats against a pillow, with wine purple covers --- suggesting opulence.  Opulence, you could spell words like that. As a child, winn...

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“The Waft Of The Wind” by Ella W. Darie

Submitted to Contest #11

The car started to slow down. I gently turned the wheel and drove the vehicle under a tall oak, right by the end of the forest. The area around me was treaded down, and it was obvious more cars often park here. All of my memories started to come back. If I came here in a car, about twenty years ago, I would be buried in bushes, tall grass, and weed. It was impossible to get here otherwise than on foot or with a bike. Nowadays, I haven't sat on a bike for good ten years, and I'm not much of a walker either. Ever since I got my driving license...

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“Umma” by Hannah So

Submitted to Contest #11

It was hard to see. My wiry black bangs had grossly overgrown and were now uncomfortably poking at my eyes with all the obstinacy of a spoiled child and the wiriness of untamed pubic hair. I peered through this unyielding curtain at the face across from me, just inches away. The summer morning was quiet. Soft shadows of honeyed sunlight spilled through the window and danced across my mom and I, who sat face to face in our small bathtub. I sat on a yellow plastic stepstool while she kneeled, scrutinizing my face. Her forehead was furrowed ...

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“Beneath bruised hills” by Matthew B

Submitted to Contest #11

 The grey clouds darkened the dead landscape beneath. Chartreuse hills, a husk of their former lush selves, rolled into the country side and beyond; their gashed and bruised fields evident as far as the eye could see. Secluded in the tall grass and ruins of homes, hid a frail park.  Breaking the unchanging sky above, a soldier hobbled over the horizon into the fields below. He ran as fast as he could despite his limp, never stopping to look back. Never stopping to look back at the sky which was now lighting up with distant gunfire...

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🌟 Similar prompts

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Contest #11

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Ended on 23:59 - Oct 18, 2019 EST

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Title: The Tree

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