Six words:

Buried body. Midnight, I heard scratching.

Twenty-five words:

“Orphan”

I overslept and missed the ship. My parents were aboard. It never returned. A ghost ship, a cruel harbinger, carried them to eternal abyss.

One hundred fifty words:

“The Bizarre Painting”

She checked in at the front desk and entered the room. A massive, bizarre painting caught
her eye. It depicted a pale, strangely distorted face, its unnaturally large, dark eyeballs fixed in an unsettling gaze that seemed to follow her every move. Behind the face, a towering tree stood against the dark backdrop, its thick branches and leaves seamlessly blending into the obscurity. Feeling exhausted from the late hour, she gave the peculiar painting little more than a glance and drifted asleep.

Hours later, she woke up to the morning sunlight seeping through the window and flooding the room. To her bewilderment, the painting had vanished. How did I not notice there was a window in the room yesterday? As she gazed outside the window at a towering tree against the blue sky and wondered, a chill ran down her spine. The window had always been there.