In response to Fandango’s Story Starter #233 #FSS
It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.
This week’s Story Starter teaser is:
Why shouldn’t they help themselves, after the way they’d been treated?
It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.
This week’s Story Starter teaser is:
Why shouldn’t they help themselves, after the way they’d been treated?
In the town of Larkspur, feelings did not stay where they were put.
Joy drifted like dandelion fluff. Regret pooled in doorways. Gratitude, when it appeared at all, evaporated quickly in the sun. People had grown used to this. They swept their steps, locked their doors, and blamed the rest on the weather.
No one noticed the Borrowlings.
They lived in the seams of things, in the pause between one thought and the next, beneath loose floorboards, inside the hush that follows a sigh. They were small, silver-soft beings with ink-dark eyes, born from all that was given and never acknowledged. Every night, while Larkspur slept, the Borrowlings worked.
They nudged lost keys into sight. They steadied teacups before they shattered. They stitched courage into hems of coats worn by people who did not believe they were brave. When a child cried without knowing why, a Borrowling would hum the sadness down to sleep.
And when something went missing – an hour, a spark, a sense of wonder, the town blamed them.
“Those Borrowlings again,” people muttered, though no one had ever seen one. “Always taking.”
The Borrowlings heard this. They always did.
At first, they forgave. They understood humans were busy, fragile, loud. But forgiveness, when never replenished, grows thin.
One evening, under a moon shaped like a chipped coin, the eldest Borrowling gathered the others.
“We will borrow,” she said softly, “but only what we have already been giving.”
So they did.
They borrowed a little color from the sky, leaving sunsets pale and undecided. They borrowed warmth from fireplaces, so flames flickered without comfort. They lifted half-finished songs from radios and tucked them away, unfinished but safe. Laughter still existed, but it arrived late, as if unsure it was welcome.
When a child asked why the world felt quieter, her grandmother shook her head. “That’s what happens,” she said, “when Borrowlings take too much.”
A young Borrowling, no older than a blink, finally spoke aloud what the rest were thinking.
“Why shouldn’t they help themselves,” he asked, voice trembling like a bell in fog, “after the way they’d been treated?”
The question hovered. It did not accuse. It invited.
Days passed. Larkspur dimmed, not into darkness, but into awareness. People began to notice the near-misses that now became accidents. The quiet where comfort used to live. The strange heaviness of being entirely responsible for their own lives.
Some began to say thank you, to the air, to the moment, to no one in particular.
And the Borrowlings noticed that too.
One by one, they returned what they had borrowed. Color crept back into the sky. Warmth remembered its way home. Songs finished themselves. But this time, something else stayed.
A pause and a recognition.
The Borrowlings did not disappear. They simply became lighter.
And somewhere between noticing and gratitude, Larkspur learned a dangerous, gentle truth…
That what sustains us is often invisible, until it decides it deserves to be seen.
So now the question is not whether the Borrowlings were right.
It is this…
Who in your life has been quietly holding the world together for you, and what part of yourself have you been borrowing from without ever saying thank you?
© Rohini 2009–2025.
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Pieces Of My Heart 