Ghostwriting & Literary Storytelling Sample

⚠ Content Warning: Mature Themes & Explicit Language
This story contains strong language, dark themes, and mature subject matter. Reader discretion is advised. ⚠

Prologue:

Thea sat curled beneath the overhang of the upper deck, knees to her chest like she could fold herself into nonexistence.

A cigarette smoldered between her fingers, its ember flaring—a tiny, dying sun.

She didn’t even smoke. Hated it, actually. Made her lungs feel like they were filled with damp newspaper and regret. But it gave her something to do.

Something to hold.

A controlled burn.

Unlike the rest of her life, which had gone up in flames completely against her will.

She exhaled slow, watching the smoke curl into the air, disappearing almost instantly. Just like everything else.

The rain dripped from the railing, pooling into the wood, thick with the scent of wet pine and stale failure.

From the trees, the crows and ravens shrieked.

The black-winged things had been circling all morning—mocking her.

Or warning her.

Hard to say.

She wished she could understand them.

Maybe they carried some great cosmic truth, some ancient, bone-deep knowledge she was too human—too catastrophically broken—to decipher.

Maybe they were telling her to run.

Or maybe they were telling her that she was already dead and just too stubborn to notice.

She took another drag, the acrid taste settling in her throat.

Why was she here?

Not physically—that part was easy.

She had nowhere else to go.

She had burned through every place, every person that could have been a landing pad. Or maybe they had burned through her.

She wasn't sure anymore.

But this? Sitting in the rain, on the edge of something she couldn’t name?

This felt like a moment she had been circling for a long time.

A slow, inevitable spiral.

The same patterns. The same men. The same empty rooms.

It wasn’t rock bottom. She had hit that years ago.

This was something else.

This was the moment she stopped trying to crawl back out.

Lightning flickered in the distance.

She flicked the cigarette, watching the ember collapse in on itself, crumbling into nothing.

Her fingers were trembling.

She hadn’t noticed until now.

She clenched a fist, pressing her palm against the cold wood beneath her, grounding herself, forcing herself to feel something solid.

But even that felt fragile.

The cold had settled into her bones, deep and aching, the kind that didn’t go away with warmth.

The kind that had been living inside her for years.

She was lightheaded. Distant. Like she was watching herself from the outside, some ghost of a girl who used to have a future.

The rain blurred the landscape into shifting shadows, the trees stretching and swaying like something half-alive.

The deck felt like the last solid place in a world she had been slipping through for years.

She pulled her knees tighter against her chest.

Maybe she’d just stay.

Let the cold seep in deep enough to hollow her out completely.

Let it exorcise whatever haunted her from the inside.

For a brief moment, she let herself wonder—

Had she ever really been trying to get better?

Or had she just been trying to make the fall hurt less?

The wind cut through her like a blade, making her shiver.

And for the first time, she thought—

Maybe she’d let it happen.