Photo Prompt, Short Story, Writing Challenge, Writing Prompts

Light In The Window

Nancy's Notes 🖊️♬

Written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge.
Our challenge is to write a poem or story
as inspired by the image shown below.

© Ville Alto @ Pexels



 

Old Muriel had lived at the bottom of the valley for sixty years, listening to her neighbors argue over fences and borrow things they never returned. When her husband died, she decided she was done with all of it …. the noise, the borrowing, the fences.

So she built her house at the top of the rock.

It took eleven months and four mules and a great deal of rope. The masons thought her mad. The priest thought her mad. Her children, who visited twice a year by a ladder they hated, were fairly certain she was mad, too.

But Muriel had never felt more sane. Up there, the wind came first and told her everything before it reached the village. The clouds passed close enough to touch. And beside her door, against all reason, an apple tree had rooted itself in a crack in the stone and decided to thrive out of pure stubbornness …. much like her.

She never did get lonely. She got quiet, which is a different thing entirely, and one she’d been chasing her whole life.

Sometimes, on clear evenings, the villagers below would look up and see a small light in her green-shuttered window, and they’d tell their children a witch lived up there. Muriel didn’t mind. Witches, after all, are only women who found a way to live exactly as they please.

She picked an apple, and went inside.

NAR©2026

This is “Long As I Can See the Light” by Creedence Clearwater Revival

Reena’s Xploration Challenge #439

Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.

26 thoughts on “Light In The Window”

  8. This is the Muriel we all secretly want to be, Nancy. The way you built her, sixty years of listening to neighbors, then one day deciding that’s enough, feels inevitable but also brave. And that distinction you draw between loneliness and quiet is everything. Most people confuse them. But the real gift is that apple tree stubbornly rooting itself in stone, mirroring her. That’s the whole story right there. And your last line about witches, “women” who found a way to live exactly as they please” is the kind of thing people will remember. The light in that green-shuttered window is hope for everyone who’s ever felt trapped by other people’s noise.

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  10. Witches, after all, are only women who found a way to live exactly as they please.

    Love this sentence.

    Also that part of her being closer to nature with winds whispering secrets. More power to her…

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