I have always wanted to meet an alien. The books and movies make them sound awesome, travelling around space in their rocket ships and cool space suits.

Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a spaceship that had crashed into one of the mountains near my home. At least, I assumed it was a spaceship as it was like nothing I had seen before.

It was white and silver. Bits had fallen off and it had crumpled into the ground. Sitting inside was the strangest thing I had ever seen.

There was a round ball, half white, half gold, on top of a squishy looking thing. Maybe a body? It wasn’t moving. I felt that something was wrong.

I made my way into the spaceship and towards what I hoped was my first alien contact. I was trying not to get too excited.

Once inside, I could see the alien was stuck. Thankfully, the alien spaceship was easy to pull apart. I lifted the alien and took it home with me. Maybe it could be fixed?

As I made my way down the mountain, I felt the alien move against my shoulder. I took it as a good sign. The alien wasn’t dead.

I entered my home and put the alien gently on the bed before removing my outer coat and returning to the alien.

Now, I wasn’t sure what to do. Could the alien breath our air? That wasn’t in any books or movies. If I removed even part of its suit, would that do irreparable damage? Should I get some help, or would that make the situation worse?

Would someone come and take the alien away? I quite liked the thought of having an alien as a pet, or even a friend.

I paced for a while, not knowing what to do. After all, the books and movies featuring aliens were fiction. To the best of my knowledge, no one had actually seen an alien – until now.

I turned around, only to find the bed was empty. The alien was gone. I rushed around before finding it clawing and banging on a wall. It was saying something, but I couldn’t quite understand. I tried to get its attention and communicate that I wanted to help. Instead of calming down, I only seemed to make things worse. It started clawing at the wall with even more determination.

I watched it for a few minutes, then shrugged. It was obviously trying to get out. I pushed a button to open the door. The alien saw the hole and bolted. What else was I to do but watch it go?

Silently, I wished it luck. I know that, even if it did find its way back to the spaceship, it was beyond repair. I was also quite sure that our land would be different to wherever it had come from.

I went back inside, kicking myself for not capturing an image, or some other proof that I had encountered an alien.

POV: a Martian when a human crash landed on Mars!

I hope you enjoyed this silly story. If you want to, have a go at the writing activity and let me know how you go. If you want to read more of my stories, my books are available here.

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In 2020, I gave the participants the prompt to turn something normal into something scary, or something scary into something normal. This was my story:

The corridor was long and windy. It smelled musty as if no one had visited in a long time. Jamie thought it was the perfect corridor for a haunted maze.

Cobwebs hit Jamie’s face and she wiped them away.

‘Whoever designed this place really went all out,’ she thought as she went around another corner and spotted a skeleton further up the corridor. She shivered as a cool breeze blew down, telling Jamie she was nearing the end.

She pushed through some rubber streamers, her excitement at the thought of the scary rides that would greet her at the other end.

Instead of a gloomy room, her eyes were almost assaulted by bright lights. Instead of a ghost village, the haunted maze opened up onto a fairly normal looking fair ground.

‘This isn’t scary,’ said Jamie, disappointed. She always looked forward to the scary rides of the Halloween carnival. She vaguely recalled hearing something about changes to the carnival, but she hadn’t expected this. It was way too normal.

She turned around to go back into the haunted maze.

I hope you enjoyed the story. If you want to get creative, give this prompt a try, turn something normal into something scary, or something scary into something normal.

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Miss Behave looked at the pile of papers on her desk and let out a mighty roar.

‘What is it mistress?’ Treznor, Miss Behave’s loyal minion, asked as he came running into the room. He ducked as a stapler flew through the air, narrowly missing his head.

‘What is this?’ She roared, ‘Apart from the fact this office is mean to be paperless, this pile is huge!’

Treznor peered over the desk and looked at the pile. It took a few minutes for him to remember what it was.

‘Those? Oh, they are the applications to be your assistant. You need to…’

‘No, I don’t need to do anything!’ Miss Behave roared. ‘My assistant can deal with it!’

‘Actually,’ Treznor said, trying hard to keep the tremor out of his voice. ‘You don’t have an assistant. The last one was killed assisting with your latest scheme for world domination.’

Miss Behave stopped in her tracks to process this. She turned her back to Treznor and looked out the window. Treznor started to back towards the door to make his escape and get back to the potions room where he was trying to come up with something to rival the poison apple. Just as he reached the door, his mistress turned around. Treznor froze.

‘You,’ she pointed at Treznor, ‘You can find my next assistant.’

Treznor shook his head.

‘Oh, no, your most evil highness,’ he said. ‘I am committed to complete my mission with the poison fruit.’

‘That can wait,’ the mistress said. ‘THIS,’ she pointed at the papers on the desk, ‘Is now priority 1A Gold. I must have an assistant.’

She then left the room in the most dramatic fashion with skirts and capes flying, creating a draft that made all the applications fly around the room, only coming to land when the door closed behind her.

Treznor sighed. The mistress didn’t have the best track record with assistants. Even this lot of applications was from two assistants ago. They had stopped putting up ads every time they needed a new assistant as it was getting way too expensive and time consuming to put up a new one every few weeks.

He picked up the application closest to him. Mia Dixon, age 23, recently graduated university with a degree in fine arts.

‘That will do,’ he said and put the application to one side, and started gathering up the others. He put them in the filing cabinet with a suspicion they wouldn’t be there long.

He went to the mistresses laptop and began to type an email: ‘Dear Miss Dixon, we are pleased to offer you the job as assistant to Miss Behave, our local diabolical villain…’

I hope you enjoyed the story. The group participants created a variety of pieces, including job applications, plans for evil lairs, designs for evil gadgets, and so much more.

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