My progression in writing

Hey y'all. So, the other night I went through my creative writing folder on google docs so I could move everything to my personal email before we lost access to our STM email accounts. I was reading through some stuff that I haven't opened since like 2019, and... yeah. wow. I guess I realized for the first time how far I've actually come in terms of writing, both in style and just skill in general. I read a short story that I wrote in 2019, one I wrote in 2020  in like the first quarter, and one I wrote a couple months ago. The first one isn't necessarily bad, it's just different to how I write now. I've never really considered how my writing has evolved since even a year or two ago, so I thought I'd share examples from 2019, 2020, and 2021. All of the stories are fairly short, so I figured they're okay to put here. PSA, the second one's kinda messed up, not gonna lie. I also wrote it in like an hour and a half for a daily creative writing assignment, so if there's any issues, it's cause I never went back and reread it until now. Oh well.
Looking back after pasting all of these, this is highkey spam lol I apologize for this mess

2019 story:

I slowly made my way down the sidewalk, taking care to avoid the shattered glass littered across my path. It came from what was once the window of a drugstore, but had been shut down and abandoned when information was leaked that the owner provided illegal drugs to a very special list of customers. I had never been able to worm my way into that group of very special customers, no matter who I talked to or how hard I tried. That was probably for the best, though, since all those pompous assholes had been arrested once that list of very special customers was given to the police, and they were discovered sitting alone in the living rooms of their mansions, faces covered in enough white stuff to make it look like someone had rubbed their noses all over a Little Debbie’s powdered donut.

I kept my eyes on the broken glass as I walked. The shards glittered in the starlight like a dark cave filled to the brim with crystals, and I was reminded of the painting Anna had created just months ago of a similar scene. She loved fantasy, and having the ability to bring it to life through her art, and I recalled her genuine smile as she gifted me a spectacular painting of shining, glittering crystals of all different colors, sitting among a sea of black. I kept that painting in a box under my bed, along with everything else that made me think of Anna. I couldn’t bear to look at any of it, not since the day she downed a bottle of prescription pills, and foamed at the mouth and seized until she lay still.

Her death was the reason I shambled down the sidewalk, the pistol strapped haphazardly to my hip, a cold and uncomfortable weight. I had never shot a gun, never even held one before that night, when I traded my life savings for a pistol I had no permit to carry. The bullets in that pistol were reserved for Dave Simons, and I was on my way to kill him as he had driven Anna to kill herself.

Anna had always confided in me about her depression. She would explain to me her bone deep exhaustion, how some days she could find no motivation to pursue a career in art, and while I never fully understood, I hurt for her. Only a month before the day I purchased the pistol, I could tell that she was closer than she had ever been to actually doing something to harm herself, though at the time, I didn’t know what. Then, Dave Simons cornered her as she walked home from work, as she couldn’t afford a car, and took advantage of her. He had longed for her since we were all just dumb kids in high school, but neither of us believed someone as socially awkward as Dave would ever gain enough courage to actually act on his impulses. But, he did, and he drove Anna over the edge.

I fished the paper with his address from my pocket as I stood in front of a shabby brick house, the cracked walls coated in moss and ivy. I noticed cheap, dollar store toys on the porch and scattered across the small front yard; yellow dump trucks, plastic ponies. He had kids. I didn’t care.

I took the gun from my hip, turned off the safety, and knocked on Dave Simons’ door.

2020 story:

My neighbor killed herself three weeks ago, but her body was only found yesterday. She was discovered solely because the stench of her rotting corpse was slowly consuming the floor of our apartment complex, and the homely, overweight single mom of two in apartment 3C finally put in a complaint to our very irritable and undermedicated landlord. I watched through the peephole on my door as they carried Mrs. Hitchins out in a stretcher in a slick, black body bag.

I hadn’t known Mrs. Hitchins well, but I was well aware that she had possessed a very deep hatred for me. If I had to hazard a guess as to why, it would likely be because I started a friendly conversation with her daughter once in the hall outside of our apartments, a few days before she went missing. Her name was Sarah, as everyone in our apartment complex told outsiders. Not is, was. It had been almost a year since her disappearance, and even though no body had been found, none of the occupants of our floor seemed to have held out any hope for the girl that was Sarah Hitchins.

Mrs. Hitchins blamed me for Sarah’s disappearance. The day after it happened, she screamed at me in the lobby, accusing me of performing unforgivable deeds such as murdering her baby girl and throwing her body in a lake. “I know you were obsessed with her!” she cried as the anorexic gay barista from apartment 3G and the white drug dealer with dreadlocks from apartment 3A held her back from charging at me, each taking one arm.

“C’mon Mrs. H!” The drug dealer tried to placate her as I decided it was best to leave the lobby and began to walk towards the elevators. “Thomas is a real nice dude, I bet Sarah just got lost on her way home from school or something! They’ll find her soon, promise!”

As I stepped inside the elevator, the anorexic gay barista had jogged after me as quickly as he could, leaving a distraught Mrs. Hitchins with the drug dealer. He stepped inside the elevator right before the doors closed, panting from his ten seconds of physical exertion. “Hey, Thomas,” he gave me what would have been a sweet smile, but was ruined by his sunken cheekbones and thin, colorless lips. “Don’t be upset with Mrs. Hitchins, she’s going through a really hard time.” I assured him I held no animosity towards her, and he blinked dazedly at me, still smiling. “Good. I hope you know that I know you wouldn’t do anything like that to Sarah. You’re too nice for that.” I smiled and thanked him, and he offered me a coupon to the coffee shop he worked at. I threw it away as soon as I was back inside of my apartment.

Mrs. Hitchins rarely left her apartment after that day in the lobby, but when she did, I could hear her pacing in front of my door for minutes at a time, but then leave without knocking. I never opened it, and did my best to avoid her if we were ever out of our apartments at the same time. There was no reason to aggravate a grieving mother, even though I had not murdered Sarah like she was so determined to believe I had. So, as the days went on and on, she paced outside of my door less and less until she stopped completely, and became somewhat of a ghost among the people on our floor. She would never even step outside of her apartment, always having her groceries delivered to the outside of her door where they would sit, sometimes for days, before she took them inside to last the month. There came a point where I forgot Mrs. Hitchins existed at all, but I was soon reminded of her torment when I saw the body bag through my peephole.

Poor woman. She really believed her daughter had been murdered. Of course she hadn’t. How could anyone kill a sweet girl like Sarah?

The day that Mrs. Hitchins was found, I stepped away from my post at my peephole as soon as everyone was gone from the hallway. I walked into my bathroom and lathered my face in shaving cream. As I was getting my razor out of my drawer, I turned to the girl in the bathtub, the whites of her eyes red and her lips cracked and bleeding. Her golden hair was greasy, lying limp on her shoulders, and she had become so skinny that her ribs were protruding and her fingers were bony enough to be a skeleton rather than a living, breathing girl. She used to stare at me with a hatred I had only seen once before, but now looked at me with defeat and anguish. I began to shave my face.

“Good morning,” I greeted her. “I’m afraid I have some sad news for you.” Her expression didn’t change. Her mouth twitched a bit around the gag, but she made no sound or moved otherwise. “Your mother killed herself. You’re an orphan now.”

Her entire mood shifted at that. I continued shaving as she cried through the cloth in her mouth, trying her best to scream in distress but not able to find the energy. When I was finished cleaning off my face and razor and putting away my shaving supplies, I knelt by the bathtub. She wasn’t even looking at me, her head pressed into the wall on the other side of the bathtub while she sobbed. I reached out and took her chin in my hands, turning her head to face me as she cried. I clucked my tongue softly at the sight of her so distraught.

“I know, I know you’re sad, Sarah. But don’t worry, you still have me.”

2021 story:

This story, though it may be called a ballad, will not be written as such. The typical structure of ballads are not favorable for long, intricate stories, and while I would love for this to be a long, intricate story, that would be rather difficult, as not many details are known about the Phoenix Man. I, myself, do not know a single thing about the Phoenix Man other than his name, and what little my grandmother could tell me from when she saw him that day when she was nothing but a young girl walking to the grocery store at night to buy her mother cigarettes. What a strange era, where a girl no older than seven could walk unattended down an unlit street and buy nicotine.

My grandmother told me that the Phoenix Man was standing in the dark and narrow alleyway between Mike’s Candy Shop and Hal’s Convenience Store. There was nothing in that alleyway besides dumpsters and a stray black cat living under the pieces of a rain ruined cardboard box, but my grandmother would swear up and down until the day she died that she saw him there. Him, the Phoenix Man. She walked by the alleyway and caught sight of him standing in between the buildings, swaying side to side like he was drunk. He was not drunk, though, because just as my grandmother was about to ask if he needed help, the Phoenix Man burst into flames, blindingly bright and so scorching that my grandmother could feel their heat on her face all the way from the entrance to the alleyway.

My grandmother told me that she went into shock. She couldn’t believe what had just occurred, and it stunned her so badly that she found herself unable to move, unable to run for help and alert someone of what she had seen in the alleyway between the candy shop and convenience store. She was glad for this shock, though, because had she not stayed, had she run away in fear of what she did not understand, she would not have been able to watch as the man rose up from the ashes of his own body. She remembers the pile as too large, more dark ashes scattered in the alleyway than there should have been. It was as though his entire being, all eight feet of him (I used to believe that her recollection of such extreme height was simply the imagination of a short, scared little girl) had simply converted into ashes, the fire acting as a gateway for every inch of him to transform into the little gray grains. And from that pile he emerged, fully human once more.

My grandmother told me that nobody believed her. Not one person in her small hometown took any worth in the word of a young girl known to have a wild imagination. Nobody thought for even a second that she was telling the truth about how after the man rose from his own ashes, he simply dusted himself off and walked out of the alleyway, giving my grandmother a wink as he passed by. When she recovered from her shock, she ran back into the street to catch sight of where he was headed, but the Phoenix Man was nowhere to be seen; not by my grandmother, not by the other citizens in her hometown, not by any one living person since that night in the alleyway. I believed her, though.

My grandmother told me that I would be lucky to ever lay eyes on the Phoenix Man. It took thirty years before I did, although my experience was slightly different than hers. I did not see the Phoenix Man in an alleyway, nor anywhere near a candy shop or a convenience store. I saw him at my grandmother’s funeral. As we gathered around the hole her casket was being lowered into, I saw the man my grandmother had described to me so many times standing behind the crowd. He did, as she had told me and I had not fully believed, stand around eight feet tall, his head towering over those of the grieving funeral goers. As the others around me focused their eyes on the casket, I watched as a woman who looked just like the body in that very casket stepped forward and stood next to the Phoenix Man. They looked at each other, then at me, before smiling softly and bursting into flames. I paid no attention as the people around me began to shovel dirt into the hole where my grandmother was to lay to rest, but rather stood fixed as I watched the piles of ashes. It took only a moment or two before the forms of my grandmother and the Phoenix Man rose from the piles and stood together again, my grandmother looking younger and happier than I had ever seen her be in life. They walked away toward the trees lining the other graves, and that was the last time I saw my grandmother.