The Substitute

In the summer of 2025, I participated in the NYC Midnight 500-word Fiction Challenge. If you haven’t heard of them before, I highly recommend checking them out. They have a lot of really cool writing challenges throughout the year.

This challenge in particular followed the format that each writer is assigned a genre, an action, and an object that must be included in the story, with 48 hours to complete and submit. Here was mine:

Genre: Action and/or Adventure

Action: Seizing

Object: Margarine

The Substitute

Silence echoes through the carpeted hallways around me. It is a physical weight pressing down upon my heart’s desperate rhythm, seeking to smother the intruder among it. I am still here, my breath says. This place is not yet abandoned, my footsteps agree.

My mind says otherwise. It is at home in this empty place, eager to join the stillness.

Instead, I form a shield of mental noise, a buffer against the onslaught of peace that whispers in my ears. Songs, facts, anything to hold the hush at bay. Soon I may join it, but not yet.

Doors pass by on my journey, some shut, some cracked open, all longing to tell the story of the family they once sheltered, if only I would ask. I don’t. That’s not why I’m here.

Yet I can’t help but glance into one wide open entrance and see a table laid out with ingredients, a tub of margarine knocked to the floor in the family’s haste to leave when the evacuation began. That is enough of a story for me. I move on, ignoring the half-forgotten memory of my mother teaching me to cook that the sight brings up – “Butter is best. Margarine is fine, but only as a substitute when needed,” and then my older brother’s voice “Ha! You’re the margarine and I’m the butter!”

I move on, steps quickening to gain distance from that door.

The exit sign leading to the stairs appears ahead of me as I turn a corner and I give a sigh of relief. Almost there.

I should have known better than to tempt fate, even in my head.

The door slams open, a shattering eruption amid the quietude, and screaming bodies follow. A man and a woman are first, barreling towards me with fear etched on their faces and despair hollering from their throats. There is a moment where there is only me and them, three humans facing death in their own ways, and I see slight confusion intrude on their fear as we make eye contact. That’s okay. I don’t quite understand myself either.

Then the thing that they’re running from, a monstrosity of flesh and teeth, demolishes the door they just raced through and a chunk of the surrounding wall besides. I brace myself, breathing deep from the last, lingering traces of silence as the creature looms larger and larger in my vision.

I seize my weapon, grip firm. The couple passes me. I smile.

Margarine, my brother had called me. A substitute to be used only when needed. Well, I am here now. And I am needed.