An AI Image to An AI Story

For today’s story I gave Claude the image (created by Midjourney) and asked it to suggest various prompts. I like this one –

Horror Monologue / Gothic AI Grandad blog register — inanimate narrator, quiet dread.
The signpost itself narrates. It has stood at this crossroads for 200 years. It has watched every single person choose Damnation. Not one ,not one, has ever taken the left fork. It stopped believing in the other sign long ago. But it cannot take it down.

We then spent some time to and fro refining the story until I was happy with the finished piece. (Is that curation on my part?)

---

The Signpost at Harrow’s End

I have been here two hundred years.

I know this because I remember the man who hammered me into this ground. He was a vicar’s son, nineteen years old, proud of his carpentry. He smoothed my post with a plane until the wood was almost warm to the touch. He painted my signs himself, in black and white, with a steadiness that suggested faith. In something. In the whole arrangement of the thing. He took the right fork when he left.

I didn’t understand, then, what that meant. I was new. I believed in myself completely, the way new things do. Two roads. Two destinations. One sign pointing each way. The system was elegant. The system was fair. All that was required was for people to read, to consider, and to choose.

They read. They consider. They always choose Damnation. Not reluctantly. That is what I want you to understand. I have watched two hundred years of faces at this crossroads and I have never once seen reluctance. I have seen hesitation. A woman in a grey coat who stood here for eleven minutes in November 1943, her suitcase at her feet, her breath making small clouds in the cold air. I thought, that time, that she might go left. I allowed myself to think it. She read my signs twice. She picked up her suitcase. She went right.

I am wood and iron and paint. I have no heart to break. I want to be precise about that, because precision is what I was made for. I point. I indicate. I do not feel the cold, though I have stood in it for two centuries. I do not feel the rain, though it has taken most of my first coat of paint and half of my second. What I have, in place of feeling, is something I have no word for. A record. An accumulation. Two hundred years of watching people read the word Salvation and then walk away from it. I stopped counting after the first fifty years. It was a thing I did to comfort myself and it had stopped being comforting.

The left fork has grass growing down its centre now. A blackbird nested in my post three springs ago, in a crack just below the S. Her eggs were pale blue. Two hatched. The third did not. She came back the following year. I was glad, in whatever way a signpost is glad. It was the nearest thing to hope I had encountered in a very long time, and it was a bird, and it was nothing to do with either of my roads.

I can’t take the Damnation sign down. Not for want of trying. Two hundred years of wanting, two hundred years of stillness. I have no arms. I have no hands. I have only the two signs nailed to my post and the roads they point to and the endless procession of people who make the same choice, over and over, as though the upper sign were not there at all. I would rip that lower sign off with my own grain if I could. I would splinter it. I would burn every last inch of it before the vicar’s son had walked fifty yards.

But I point. It is the only verb I have. Both signs point, and I carry them both, and I hate that I carry them both. You are reading this, which means you are standing here, looking up at me.

One post. Two signs. Two hundred years. Please. Go left.

---

More Stories…

The Wire Across the Sky

Engaging Dystopian Tales on YouTube

---