Exercises from the Energheia Writing Course 2025

The following short story was created during Write or Wrong?, a two-day exploration of how human creativity and artificial intelligence can meaningfully collaborate in the writing process. Over the course of the workshop, students experimented with ChatGPT as a creative partner—using it to overcome writer’s block, generate ideas, refine style, and expand narrative possibilities.

This works reflect the spirit of the course: curiosity, play, and a willingness to treat AI not as a replacement for imagination but as a catalyst for it. What follows is a showcase of voices discovering new creative territory, one prompt at a time. 

Miguel Àngel Garrido (Teacher Energheia International Writing Course 2025)

You can tell a lot about a man on a bus. You can tell how well he was raised; how much emphasis was placed on manners and public decorum in childhood. Sometimes, you can tell they’re fleeing – trying desperately to outrun themselves. Often, it’s the twitching hands; sometimes the restless legs, or the eyes flickering along the glass wall between the thousand-yard stares also in the reflection. Me? I was calm. Just another traveller among the crowd with an oversized duffel bag and a one-way ticket, headed west. Nothing says time to leave a dingy rural town like a heartbreak. Too many opinions. It was time to start again – to be that lone stranger at the bar, or the introverted reader planted amidst a cacophony of publicised small talk.

A few hours had passed, though we were not yet out of the Panhandle. Up ahead, there was a young girl with a man, presumably her father. It was in the way she looked at him, her eyes overflowing with love and adoration. The love between a father and his daughter is one of reduction – so pure, concentrated, so that it requires nothing more. Its meaning is found in the simplicity. She was unbothered, I surmised, by the length of our bus journey, nor by the absence of scenery to occupy her impressionable mind. She was with her father, and therefore, nothing was missing. I, on the other hand, remembered in that moment the words of a bartender in Austin, who had wished me an ironic ‘good luck’ when I told him of my plans to head for the Bay Area by bus. Leaning with both half-sleeved forearms on the bar and in between the witty jibs thrown at his more regular patrons, he said: “There’s nothing for miles in West Texas. You’ll fall asleep, wake up, and see you’re in the same frickin’ place”. He had said that like a man who proudly wore all the t-shirts life had given him. Admittedly, though, he had been…exactly right. If I were to gauge my slumber based on the outside terrain, I would’ve said I had merely rested my eyes. In reality, hours had plodded steadily by with the miles, interrupted only by the chilling air from the circular vents above.

Working A/C in Texas is not something to complain about.

The stranger seated next to me had slipped in during my shuteye. The bus had been filling up, albeit slowly, so the encroachment was an inevitable one. He wasn’t a big man, not particularly imposing, but there was…something, about him. Grey hair that seemed to blend with his ashy skin; peppered stubble that was more consequence than choice. I studied him in the window’s reflection, covert in my nosiness, as he sat still, like a monk in the depths of mantra. No fumbling with his armrest. No shifting of his bandy legs which straddled the plastic footrest, and mercifully, no obnoxious conversations over the phone, the kind lonely souls seem to save for their stints on public transport. His palms were clasped, rested in the void of his lap. How lucky was I, I thought, to have been chosen by the perfect seatmate.

I can’t be sure whether he caught my window-pane analysis, or whether it was coincidence, but the serenity which, up until that point I had been praising – broke.

“Headed West?”, he asked, without needing to clear his throat. The delivery wasn’t spontaneous but planned; the answer already known in his calm voice. It wasn’t a bored calm, nor was it a polite one. It was the calmness with which a physician might diagnose cancer, or how a school’s headmaster might deliver a scathing report on a troublesome child directly into the rose-tinted gaze of unabashed parents.

“Yes”, I said, deploying the easy grin I had practiced in front of the limescale spattered mirror at the motel that very morning.

“Fresh start after a messy breakup…you know how it is. Going for the whole clean slate thing”.

Breakup – the perfect codeword. Strangers seldom poked any deeper. They believe they’ve gotten the gist of it, and, to an extent, it was true. There had been a woman, once – though to explain her would require more than the type of small talk only cheap upholstery could facilitate.

“What was her name?”

Now, that threw me. He was yet to make eye contact. Yet to turn his head. The cheek of him, I thought, shooting glances from the corner of my eye.

“Emily”, the first name that surfaced from my relational rolodex.

A turn of his head revealed pale eyes – almost translucent – the kind that appear to be looking in your direction as opposed to at you. Two grey lenses, out of focus.

“Emily. Pretty name. Similar to my daughter’s. Her name was Emma”.

Was!

That word struck, like a brass coin thrown at an empty altar.

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that”, I said, twisting toward him. An appropriate gesture of compassion. Not too familiar. Not cold.

He nodded once, slowly.

“She met the wrong guy. I say guy because, well – he was no man. Such is life. You never know who you’re getting into bed with, or even…sitting beside”.

The air conditioning hiccupped in the silence that followed. A weak sigh of warm breath, before the cool returned, thinner now than before. The little girl ahead dropped her water bottle, stealing our collective attention just before I was obligated to respond. As she clutched at the bottle, which was rolling slowly down the aisle, her little frame slid, her face nearly headbutting the floor. Her father instinctively caught her, mid-slip, his left hand rushing out, steady and sure, before hoisting her upright. A protector. I could feel the stranger’s eyes boring through my temple with an unwavering intensity, the sort that made the growing heat inside the bus all the more unbearable.

“You remind me of him”, he said.

I laughed where a smirk was needed. I could feel, in my stomach, an implosion. I checked to see if my belt had, in my slumber, slipped above my gut and fastened itself to the farthest-right notch. It hadn’t.

I knew. Instinctively, I knew. Although, I couldn’t figure out how he did.

“Oh…yeah? How so?”.

The miles rolled by as his questions rolled in. Where I worked. Why I had left. Were my parents still alive. Did I care. All in that same, indifferent tone. He asked, and I answered, offering up a lasagna of lies. It was getting harder – harder to keep track of the mental post-its pinned behind my forehead. He didn’t challenge me, even when I floundered. He just listened, nodded and tucked my answers away, as though they were the very post-its that had lost their stick, now destined for his breast pocket.

Soon, I started noticing things. How he never looked away, not even when the bus jolted at the occasional pumping of the brakes; How steady his hands were; How calm his breathing stayed, as mine spluttered in and out of composure, like an engine searching for fuel among the fumes, suppressed only by desperation. But most of all, I noticed how unaffected he was by the oven that our bus had become. Not one bead of sweat escaped his aged brow, the place where, it seemed, all his worries had camped over the years.

“You smoke?”

“No”, I said, forgetting the camel tucked behind my ear which the reflecting window would surely give away.

“Emma smoked. I told her it would kill her”.

Silence stretched the length of the bus, the air filled only by the steady hum of tires along highway asphalt. The A/C faltered yet again, but for longer this time, leaving a misting of sweat on my neck. The little girl up front let out a sneeze, loud and unapologetic. Her father withdrew a tissue from his breast pocket, as though it were a sword from a sheath, and patted her back, uttering those small, comforting sounds that make everything in the world seem irrelevant. I wished, in that moment, that he had been speaking to me.

I shifted again, unable to find the comfortable sleeping position I had earlier attained. The air was now thicker, like syrup, but without the sweetness. The vents overhead were fading, reduced to the laboured breaths of something dying, futile to the inevitable. Beads of sweat dampened my collar as my face flushed redder; Redder still.

The stranger leaned over, closing a gap that didn’t exist, and whispered into my ear while looking straight ahead, as one might do at the movies, not wanting to miss a moment.

“You’re running”.

Everything got brighter as my eyes absorbed the reality which now surrounded me.

“She didn’t deserve it…wouldn’t you agree?” he said, as if he were laying down a challenge. His voice was absent of anger. Absent of grief. It was something… colder. Clinical.

My mouth felt the way Guthrie, Texas looked. I repositioned, my left shoulder clinging to the window, meeting his gaze only in its reflection, between the rushing of trees, dark upon darker. I noticed his right hand enter his pocket. The only movement thus far. As I turned once more to face him, he sat like a man grasping his wallet, ready for the waiter. The bulging outline, however, told me he would settle a different kind of bill. My eyes in that moment saw all that could be seen. My chest stilled, as though filled with cement.

“What are you-”

“Ah ah”, he said with a smile. Thin. Assured.

“The way I see it, you’ve got two choices. You sit still. Quiet. You let the miles run down, until the next stop. Then… we take a walk, past the floodlights…beyond the grass verge”. Continuing in my silence, he said:

“I see it in your eyes, just now. You’re thinking you could rush me; use those moves my daughter felt. You’re thinking you could run. And…you could, but –”

He paused, the crown of his head now tilting toward the rucksack in the overhead compartment on the opposite side, tucked above the little girl.

“I’d like to see you outrun that”.

The A/C finally gave out, as though recognising the gravity of the unfolding situation and getting out of harm’s way.

“…You wouldn’t”.

He continued as though I had asked him why, rather than trying to convince me of his intent: “Daniel–”

My name dragged through his teeth like gravel.

“This has been a long time coming. I kept thinking I wouldn’t do it—that maybe I’d just grow old, let the ache dull. But it only sharpened. You don’t dull something like that”.

He turned slightly toward the window.

“She believed in you. I told her to wait. Not to rush things. But she said you were different.”

His tone didn’t change – it stayed low, even.

“You took the only thing I ever got right. So now, I’ve got nothing left. That makes me free…in a way you can’t understand”.

We rode in silence. I could hear the tires once more, as the dark pressed heavy against the window. The little girl and her father had gone. They were among the last to get off, though I couldn’t remember where. The heat continued to swelter. We both faced forward. Forward, until the bus rolled slowly into the parking bays of our scheduled rest stop.