Kate Bitters's Blog: The Bitter Blog, page 3

Sparrow's Feathers [Story #15]

I'm writing 52 stories in 52 weeks. This is Story #15.

Sparrow woke up one morning and didn’t like his feathers.

“Just look at them,” he moaned, eyeing the brown and tan hues. “They’re flat and dull. What I wouldn’t give to have bright plumage like Cardinal or Blue Bird.”

Sparrow sighed and stretched a wing. He was alone in his nest and wished he had someone to complain to. Feeling low, Sparrow rested his head on the edge of his nest and watched the morning pass.

Squirrels scampered up nearby tre...

The Flood and the Demon [Story #14]

This short story is a little cryptic. See if you can figure it out...


I stare with plastic eyes at the demon on the other side of the world. It is yellow, smooth. It wears a tilted smirk across its orange mouth.
It’s been here for over a month now. Silent. Twin eyes pasted on me as I peer at it from the bow of my ship.
The mocking, the stares. I can hardly stand it.
When the twice-weekly deluge floods our world, the monster comes to life. Rollicking against the waves with drunken fury, it bashes...

Eliza [Story #13]

I've made it 13 weeks in my 52 stories/52 weeks challenge. It's getting a little difficult, but somehow this story flew out of my head and onto my laptop. 
Eliza was a starer. She scrutinized the world from under a home-hewn haircut, spending minutes at a time taking in a feature on someone’s face or looking at a crushed insect on the sidewalk or examining the mud-splattered shell of an empty cigarette pack.
“Stop staring,” her mother would scold. “It isn’t polite.”
Eliza sometimes nodded,...

Tree Talker [Story #12]

I'm over a fifth of the way done with the 52 stories in 52 weeks challenge. For story #12, I was giving the following prompt from one of my writing groups: 

Which is the oldest tree in your neighborhood and what has it seen?

If you want to play along, try writing your own story before reading mine...



The moss-covered oaks arched over the road with typical South Carolinian hospitality. They extended their welcoming branches, blocked the beating sun, guided the way down the dusty gravel road....

Magic Plastic Land [Story #11]

Image courtesy of quotesvil.comI stroll along plastic brick streets lined with cotton candy bushes, tasting the filtered air. Magic Plastic Land. Birds dip down and snatch gumdrops out of outstretched hands, their cashew beaks holding the prize until they return to their spun sugar nests with candied plum chicks. I watch the mother birds and keep walking, with a singular mission: to become deliriously, mind-numbingly happy.
But that's everyone's goal in Magic Plastic Land. Stuff yourself to th...

Chain Links [Story #10]

Story #10 (in my 52 stories series) is really more of a poem than a story...but there's a story inside it. See if you can find it.

This one was written after winning the short course in the 2015 Babes in Bikeland alleycat bike race. 


Chain Links
Powered by candied ginger and ten thousand smiles, I ride.Fly. Soar.On the back of an aqua-colored steed.Summer air tickling my legs; sweat dripping down my chest.My body rides solo, my heart gallops alongside my community:Arms that hug and lift up,...

Shapeshifter [Story #9]

Story #9 of my 52-week series: a creepy little tale.
Spectacularly creepy image courtesy of The British Library photo archive

I’ve walked this earth in many different forms, but today I am a little girl. Not a precocious one, either. I’m the kind that wraps her arms around her mother’s leg and buries her face in the folds of fabric. The world is large now, threatening. My understanding of the people, parks, skyscrapers, buses around me blurs and I blink at them a few times to try to recapture w...

Humanity Woke Up [Story #8]

This is a short one, so let me give you a little background...

The structure of the story itself is inspired by the six-word story written (purportedly) by Ernest Hemingway. The story goes like this:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn. 

Powerful, right?

I don't pretend to put myself on the same playing field as Hemingway (or whoever actually wrote that story--the authorship is uncertain), but I did give the abbreviated story thing a shot. Here's what I came up with:

Humanity woke up and draped...

The Blue Potato Alien Incident: A Christmas Tale [Story #7]

This is week 7 of my 52 stories in 52 weeks series. Let's get weird...

The Johnsons were having a perfectly normal Christmas dinner when the tiny flying saucer showed up. It streamed down the chimney and through the crackling fire; it swerved around the carefully decorated Christmas tree, over the nativity set, and around several ceramic reindeer that Patricia Johnson kept on display (a new deer every year—she was up to about 45 of the jumping, kicking, frolicking, kissing statues).
The four me...

Witch Hunter [Story #6]

A sequel to week #5. For maximum enjoyment, I recommend reading last week's story before diving into this one. But hey, it's your life.

Story #6: Witch Hunter www.katebitters.comWe are still five kilometers out, but I swear I can smell her. Cloves, mixed with barley wine and something sharp, like raw onions. Sour, pungent aromas that make my stomach curl like a water-starved leaf. I swallow and remind myself that catching someone's scent five kilometers out is preposterous, that these are just...