Writing Prompt: Describing a Room (and Making a Story Out Of It)

For more detailed instructions on how to describe a room, click here.

Last Friday, the latest writing prompt I toyed around with was…

Describing a room.  Write a description of your bedroom or another room in your house.  You can write about it as it was when you first saw it, as it is now, or as you’d like it to be.  Find a story there.

This exercise would not only help flex your muscles in using descriptive language, but it’s also quite a challenge to invent a story using a mere location.

For this exercise, I wrote the following, using my kitchen as the setting.  I decided to turn it into a kind of ghost story, albeit a silly one.

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     Flicking the light switch on the wall, the spotlights high above in the sloped ceiling bathed the kitchen in bright light.  Even though there  were two windows in the roof that provided some natural light, the customary gray haze of England blocked out the sun, and I needed to see more of the kitchen before I got started.  There was a long wooden beam, brown with a jagged texture, extending across the room over my head; a remnant of the old structure when this house used to be a barn.  I had a small table set up in the corner of the room, with four skinny leather chairs around it.  Next to that was a wooden set of cubby holes, where I haphazardly piled in an assortment of glasses, spices, teas, and coffees.  Across from that, the kitchen counter wrapped around two of the walls, with the sink and stove interspersed around the big L-shaped counter.  At the end of the counter was a large wooden compartment that housed the fridge.
Walking to the fridge, I started to contemplate what I should eat tonight.  As soon as I opened the doors, all the lights went out, enveloping me in shadows.  I was more than disconcerted; individual lights have gone out before, but never all at once.
    I moved to check the breakers in the tiny laundry room, but as soon as I moved, the lights came back on.  I muttered, “What a stupid thing…”
    Regarding the fridge, I froze in fright.  There was blood streaming down the door.  I was quite certain that it wasn’t there before, and I didn’t have anything in there that would produce that much blood.
    Creeping toward the fridge, I slowly opened it.  I knew its contents well enough:  a pile of drinks on the bottom shelf, cheese and meat on the second, butter and eggs on the third…
    I suddenly back-stepped in fright and disgust, as I beheld a cow’s severed head lying on the middle shelf.  Its glazed black eye stared at me; its matted fur was covered in maggots and there was blood oozing from its torn neck.
    I couldn’t explain this phenomenon.  Where did all my food go?
    Grabbing a wad of paper towels from the counter, I moved to start cleaning the mess off of the bridge.  I stopped short, when I saw that there was no blood on the doors, and no cow head inside.  My provisions had returned like magic.
    I wanted to resume my preparations for my meal, but all these events freaked me out too much.  As I stood frozen in the middle of the cold tiled floor, I suddenly heard an eerie, low-pitched moan filling the house.  It was far too loud and otherworldly to be my growling stomach.  I think.
    I recognized the sound, and remembered one distinct detail.  This house was once a barn, and it was built on a bovine burial ground.  All this phenomenon was merely the vestiges of a long-dead resident of the old barn.
    As the ghost cow mooed, I felt better knowing that was causing all the weird phenomenon, and continued making my dinner.