Horror Stories of 1,000 Words or Less
For the month of July, 2025, these are the stories that entertain us most.
* The Ouija Board by Derek McMillian
* The Woodshop by Kelleigh Cram
* The Silken Shall by Sara Das Gupta
* Marie Rose Blossoms by Maximilliano Guzman
* Juan Pedro by LaVern McCarthy
* All the Dead Beasts by JS Apsley
* A Total Romantic by Michael Horton
The Ouija Board by Derek McMillian
You could buy Ouija Boards in toy shops. Nobody took them seriously, of course, until they did.
Chris bought it. How he managed that, given that he never had the money for his rent, was the first mystery, but it was not the last.
We all sat down, Chris, Pete, Nick, and I. Chris had some funny cigarettes, which we all shared. The main effect was that everybody found everything hilariously amusing. Even my jokes were funny.
That was how it started anyway. It didn't stay that way.
We started with rather silly questions.
"Is there anybody there?"
"No."
"Oh, come on, is there anybody there?"
"What do yo think?"
"Don't they teach spelling in the spirit world?"
"Only the black magik kind."
And then it spelled out, "I am Tiberius."
We all took our hands off the planchette.
This was a useless gesture because one by one, we all put them back.
"Who are you?" Just got us the reply, "I am Tiberius."
Then the Ouija Board started telling us about ourselves.
"Chris is still stealing from shops. The police will get him one day but he just doesnt care." Tiberius did not use punctuation.
"Pete walked out on his pregnant girlfriend."
He also said something so embarrassing about Nick that I can't repeat it, and never you mind what he said about me.
"One of you will die."
By this time, we had had enough and went to bed. Not to sleep, well, not immediately anyhow. I was disturbed by a dream.
Chris, Pete, and I all went to work by tube, and we were all on the Balham station platform that morning. Nick usually went to work later. That day, I was very nervous.
I met Pete for coffee.
"I had a dream last night. I was on the platform at Balham, and I pushed Chris under the train. I made it look like an accident. I still can't understand why I did it."
"I can," Pete responded.
I looked at him.
"You see, I had the same kind of dream. I know exactly what went through my mind. One of us would die, and I was making sure it was not me."
"You were a friend of Chris."
"We both were, but obviously not as much as we thought. Your subconscious speaks to you in dreams."
The three of us met up at the end of the day. The train to Balham was cancelled. We had to take the overground.
We purchased several cans of beer for the journey. When we got home, the police were there.
"I am afraid I have some bad news."
That got our attention.
"Did you know Nicholas Fairbairns well?"
We nodded.
"I am sorry to tell you he had a fatal accident. He fell under the train at Balham."
"So that's why the trains were cancelled," said Pete.
We burnt the Ouija Board on a bonfire. Tiberius can talk to somebody else.
Derek McMillan is a writer in Durrington in the UK. His editor is his wife, Angela. He has written for print and online publications in the UK, USA, Australia and Canada. His latest book is the audio-book "Murder from Beyond the Grave" which is available on eBay.
The Woodshop by Kelleigh Cram
If I built the horses as gifts for my children, how can they surround me like this? Hundreds of them, made over the years, lining the shelves of my shop.
I carved them by hand, each one unique from the others. Manes made of yarn, flat backs to sit on, wooden wheels designed to move slowly enough to allow for adult intervention.
Today, I will put the final touches on my latest creation, a female, discernible by the lashes painted above her eyes. Hannah would have loved her when she was little.
“Hows, hows,” she would call to me, Rs still elusive to her growing vocabulary. She’d ride for hours, circling the garage floor with all the authority of a ranch hand surveying his cattle.
Using a fine-tipped brush, I add the finishing touches to the horse’s face, making the lines on its snout a little thicker to imitate lipstick. Sexist, Hannah would say, but it gives them an animated quality.
Or not. When I look at the finished product, she stares back with a stern expression. Her mouth is too rigid, missing the smile that has become the trademark of my work. I look at the others to compare, but they are also frowning.
No, that can’t be right. That’s not how I made them.
“That’s not how I made you,” I say.
Some look angry, some sad, but they are all staring, googly eyes that pierce into my soul.
God, no wonder Hannah told me to quit making them for her own children. They’re terrifying.
I hear a pop, like an over-pressurized soda bottle losing its cap. One of the eyes lies on the floor at my feet. The glue must not have dried properly. I go to reattach it to her face when I hear the sound again—pop. I scan the room, trying to find the source. It happens again and again.
Pop. Pop, pop, pop.
Eyes rain down from the shelves above my head. Plastic flies through the air, filling the room like an infestation of insects. When it stops, everything goes quiet, just me and the now blind horses.
“Hello?” I call out, hoping someone is in here with me, playing some kind of joke. There is movement behind me, and I jump, turning to face the intruder.
One of the horses has come down from the shelf. I reach forward to put him back in his rightful place, but the wheels start to turn, sliding him away from me. I walk faster, needing to catch him, needing to prove to myself that toys don’t move on their own, and I am the one in control.
“I made you,” I say as the horse gets farther away. He backs right up against the wall, and I grab the handle sticking out of his cheek. Something taps my ankle.
His sister, ramming her head into my calf. They are all on the floor now, making their way towards me, not hindered by lack of sight. It dawns on me that they never needed the eyes; those were just decorations for our benefit. Shedding them was their way of mocking my short-sighted personification.
They are so close now, a mob, building in numbers to force me against the wall. I step back, tripping over the one behind me as he drives under my foot.
A crack reverberates around my skull as the back of my head hits concrete. I feel them, crawling, wheels pressing into my body. As they pile on, I grow weak, struggling to breathe under the weight on my chest.
Black spots dance on the ceiling over my head. I want to accept this, let go, but then I think of Hannah. She will find my corpse, crushed by the things that brought her so much joy as a child. Something like that would traumatize a person. No, I cannot let that happen. I must fight back.
Reaching my arm over my head, I yank the rope of one of their manes and swing. There is a crack, and the others scatter in surprise. It gives me just enough space to stand and kick at them before they start rushing me with as much speed as those old, creaky wheels can muster.
My bat. Yes, my abandoned Rawling propped against the corner wall. I tip the worktable on its side, crouching down to push it forward, shoving the horses out of my way. The rubber feels soothing against my palm, a comforting nostalgia that feels out of place as I swing at the demon toys, my ungrateful bastard creations.
The wood cracks like bone, splinters flying around my face like blood splatter. I smash them one by one, flailing my arms like a madman until all that remains is a pile of discarded lumber.
The dryness in the air makes me cough, and I have to use the bat as a cane to get to the door. Just as I am about to be freed, I hear a rustling behind me.
When I turn, nothing has changed. No movement that I can see. They must be waiting, wanting me to leave so they can rebuild themselves and come back to finish the job. Hannah could be next, and her babies. I know what I must do.
I stand in the center of the room, dangling a lit match in my hand. Just as I am about to let go, the door flies open.
“Grandpa?” a voice calls out.
The fear on her face pricks at the corners of my eyes, prying the tears out. My body collapses, wooden shards slicing into my skin. The match lands mere inches from my face. Its flame zigzags across the floor, dancing closer in playful little winks.
Kelleigh Cram lives in Georgia. Her work has been featured in Ponder Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, and 365tomorrows.
The Silken Shawl by Sara Das Gupta
The view from the brig Fedora was bleak, with a chill wind blowing across the Channel. As far as the eye could see, the waves were flecked with white horses. The sea was a sullen grey, reflecting the clouds scudding eastwards. On the deck, a small group huddled together for shelter and comfort by the focsle. Even the most casual of observers would have noticed that their number was slowly, but apparently, inevitably, diminishing in number. A glance at the port side would have provided the shocking reason for this grim observation. A long spar of wood, roped securely to the ship’s timbers, jutted out over the sea like an angry finger, pointing north. A sailor, blindfolded, his arms and legs bound with rope, his face bleeding and bludgeoned, struggled desperately with a tall, burly figure in a dark coat and three-cornered hat. This man half pulled, half carried him up the plank, before pushing the hapless figure into the sea. A forlorn splash broke the silence on deck, followed by a woman’s scream from among the prisoners.
The woman was the final victim. It seemed the pirate crew hung back. The woman’s screams and sobbing might well bring bad luck, a curse on the Fedora.
The frightened woman was the wife of the captain of the captured schooner, the ill-fated Hunter. As she was dragged and carried across the deck, a tall, bearded man stepped forward to retrieve her beautiful silk shawl. Even in the misty air, the iridescent colours shone bright and alluring. Her face, white with terror, turned back to her killers. She struggled desperately with the two members of the pirate crew who hauled her across the
wet deck by her long, dark hair. Screaming and sobbing, she sank beneath the cold, grey waves.
The pirate captain, on his return, had presented the delicate silk shawl to his own wife, without revealing how it had fallen into his hands. In fact, if the truth were known, this pretty, dark-haired woman knew little about her husband’s seafaring ventures. Many rumours were swirling about in the Cornish village of Hawlyn. “Where do all those gold guineas come from?” or “His wife’s the best dressed woman in the village, so she is!” and “How the hell did that French brandy get into the ‘The King’s Head ’?” But then rumours and gossip were common in that small community.
That Sunday, Marietta threw the silk shawl over her shoulders. As she admired it in the bedroom mirror, the shawl gleamed and shone in the candlelight.
On the way to church, she received so many compliments on the shawl’s beauty. In the winter sun, it fluttered and shimmered, now bright blue, now gold as the sun itself, then silver inside as she sat in the ancient, wooden pew. Heads turned, and even the vicar stumbled in his sermon!
On her return, Marietta combed her long, dark hair and glanced in the hall mirror near the front door of the pretty, thatched cottage. A terrible, heart-rending scream echoed and re-echoed as if trapped by the low, white-washed ceiling. In the mirror, another face looked back at Marietta, a woman with bedraggled, wet hair, with a blindfold over her eyes. The cheeks were bloated, discoloured, a ghastly mixture of now blue, now green, now a sickly yellow. Her eyes were bulging, staring out of the hideous face. The woman’s finger pointed at the silken shawl, which seemed to shine with a malicious gleam.
Marietta’s face was suddenly drained of colour; she collapsed, falling unconscious to the floor.
Over the winter, she slowly declined. By Christmas, she was a mere shadow of the pretty woman who had been the centre of village gossip and admiration. On New Year’s Eve, as the church bell tolled midnight, now no more than a ghost of her former self, Marietta died. She was buried in a snow-covered churchyard. The gravedigger struggled to dig her grave in the frozen soil. Only her husband and the vicar stood in the freezing east wind as the earth rattled over the coffin. Suddenly, a ragged figure appeared at the graveside. The blizzard blew and lifted the shawl, pulling it over its head. A hideous skull was revealed, green strips of moldering flesh clung to the cheekbones, empty eye sockets “looked” down into the grave. Long strands of black hair clung to the bony scalp.
With a jagged flash of lightning and a crash of thunder, a great wave crashed over the graveyard wall. Pebbles and sand covered the coffin. Seawater and foam flooded the half- filled grave. The retreating wave had dragged away the ghastly, skeletal woman and the Fedora’s Captain.
Only a wet, silken shawl lay across the coffin.
SARAH DAS GUPTA is a writer from Cambridge, UK who has also lived and worked in India and Tanzania. Her work has been published in over twenty countries from Australia to Kazakhstan.She has recently been nominated for the Best of the Net and a Dwarf Star. She began writing in 2022, aged eighty, after an accident which has severely limited her mobility.
Marie Rose Blossoms by Maximilliano Guzman
Renan changed his work schedule to care for Lucy. He shaved his head and began taking Reiki classes.
Renan didn’t know how to react to the loss. Since childhood, he had always been a soft, defeated, and fragile boy. Adrift without Marie, his world was collapsing and filling with everyday leaks. Renan thought as the lid of his wife’s coffin closed that perhaps… perhaps it was time for a radical change in his family.
Meanwhile, Lucy dyed her hair orange, got a nose piercing, and furtively joined a sect that honored ferrets. On the horizon… a future they could neither see nor escape from. Marie Rose had gone, leaving a void in their souls, crushing them with depression, arguments, and nightly tears.
Renan dreamed of Marie Rose.
And in one of his dreams, he saw Marie Rose planting a seed in his body.
“What are you doing?” Renan asked her. Marie Rose smiled.
Lucy heard her mother's voice in her ears every night.
“Water your father,” Marie Rose told her.
The next morning, Lucy, holding a watering can, said to her father: “I have a message from Mom. I know it’s a bit weird… and silly, but…” And she poured water over her father’s body as he read the Times.
“What are you doing?” Renan asked angrily.
“Mom asked me to,” she replied.
Renan fell silent. He sighed, remembering his recurring dreams of Marie Rose. “Are you serious?” Renan asked.
Lucy gestured. We could say it was madness to see Lucy watering her father every day. “Now you need to go out into the sun.”
Renan followed Lucy’s instructions. Instructions that came from Marie Rose during sleepless nights. For him, these significant changes in his body were a painful, stinging novelty filled with pus.
Struggling with sleep, Renan isolated himself by watching television, thinking that Marie Rose would reincarnate as a gift emanating from his skin. It might have seemed crazy, indeed, but Renan had always been a hopeless dreamer, a poor soul waiting for miracles. Marie Rose was the masculine half of the couple. Even so, his dreams involving Marie Rose were a reflection of his childlike, fragmented mind, unable to come to terms with the loss that had represented a true manifestation of his wife within him.
“I feel itchy,” Renan said one winter morning.
“It’s happening,” Lucy said happily.
Renan looked at his daughter with joyful eyes.
“It will emerge in you… Dad,” Lucy said, hugging her father.
But fate would play its cards.
Yes, Renan never left the house again. He hadn’t left since the beginning of spring. He quit his job. Lucy took care of him. She provided water, a small artificial sun she bought on eBay, cooked for him, and…
Marie Rose.
Marie Rose never emerged from Renan's chest in the summer.
How do I know?
I’m Lucy’s boyfriend, a punk guy with nothing to lose. Lucy asked me to keep the secret. But I won’t, folks. Not today. In a few moments, I will extract from Renan's monstrous chest a small, agonizing body. A duplicate of horror that Renan and Lucy believe to be Marie Rose.. I know it is not. And Renan and Lucy know their dreams have deceived them, their hopes, and their shared illusions of seeing Marie Rose again. Renan is afraid. Oh yes, he’s scared out of his mind.
“Hurry up,” Lucy says to me. “Dad mustn’t suffer,” she adds while I sharpen the butcher’s knife.
Renan, with tears in his eyes, naked in the bathtub, watching as a monstrous head emerges from his chest, an inhuman torso. “Oh, Marie Rose,” he thinks.
“Now!” Lucy says to me, eagerly.
And I begin to cut.
Maximiliano Guzmán (1991), an Argentinian writer and editor, was born in a town called Recreo, in Catamarca. He is the Editor of the magazine La Tuerca Andante. He has published the novella Hamacas by Zona Borde Editorial. His stories have been published in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Ecuador, Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. His latest publications were Flash Digest by Hiraeth Publishing, In The Veins, Necksnap, and the anthologies THIS HOUSE NOT IS OURS by The Voice From The Mausoleum and TEEN SCREAMS Vol. 1 by Dark Moon Rising, and others coming soon.
Juan Pedro by LaVern McCarthy
A friend who knew Horatio had warned Juan Pedro about him. Juan Pedro was employed as a landscaper on Horatio's estate.
"I would be very careful working around that man," Maria told him. "I have heard stories that he is involved with gangsters."
"Gangsters?" Juan Pedro looked skeptical.
"I wouldn't want to be on his bad side, so I'll be careful," he assured her. She probably was repeating gossip, he thought.
A few days later, Juan Pedro was pruning hedges in Horatio's backyard. The hedges were planted almost completely around the swimming pool. There was a high fence and a gate that could be opened with a key, through which the pool area could be entered. It was very difficult to see the pool. However, Juan Pedro was able to see a small portion of it through a gap in the fence.
A party seemed to be going on. As he watched, he saw men wearing dark sunglasses milling around with drinks in their hands. They looked rough, as though they had come straight from the mean streets. If it were a pool party, they were not dressed in swimwear for the occasion. The ones he could see were dressed casually in slacks and polo shirts.
Suddenly, two men were tossed into the pool. There was a lot of shrieking, splashing, and laughing. They must be pulling a prank, Juan Pedro thought. Then someone moved into his line of vision, and he could no longer see the pool or those in the water.
Summer continued, and Juan Pedro swam in every pool he could, which was not too many since most of them were guarded by suspicious owners. He longed to swim in Horatio's pool most of all. It looked huge, at least what he could see of it. One night in late August, he decided to try his luck at getting into the pool.
The lights were out in Horatio's home when Juan Pedro climbed over the fence and entered the pool area. He looked around cautiously. The pool was even larger than he had thought. Moonlight glittered across the water. He smiled to himself. He would swim until dawn and leave just as the sun came up.
He dipped one toe in the water. Perfect. It would soothe his sweating body. He silently slipped into the pool.
Come daylight, not much was left of Juan Pedro except a sickening trail of blood and the gnawed bones of his skeleton. The piranhas saw to that.
LaVern Spencer McCarthy has published twelve books of short stories and poetry and two journals. She has won over five hundred state awards for her poetry and thirty-four national awards. She is a life member of Poetry Society of Texas She resides in Blair, Oklahoma.
All the Dead Beasts by JS Apsley
“What a space this’ll make for a VIP room,” my boss slurred at me. He’d been given access to a basement of an old meat-packing factory, closed for decades, through the wall of his club.
“We’ll need to brand it; appease the insta crowd. It’s got-to-be the place-to-be, know what I mean? Get yourself down there … and think edgy, Lenny – but not animal-sacrifice-edgy.”
With that, he’d lobbed the keys at me.
So that’s why I'm down here now: to tour this grotty basement and see beyond the filth. To create his exclusive brand, his high-end concept.
I guess they butchered the animals down here and prepped the meat for service. Jesus. The thought of it made my teeth creak inside my mouth, and my tongue dried up like a piece of biltong. I spot something horrid on the white-tiled wall.
What the hell is that? A spurt of long-congealed blood? Am I seeing things?
I rub at my eyes; closer inspections suggest the spatter was just crud. I remind myself this place was closed back in the sixties, and inspiration starts to boil like a pot of ribs. I get a sense of what the space could be … those white tiles could work, man, they really could.
Sure, it was gnarly, but the boss’d get the deep cleaners in, chrome the place right up. I understood why he’d been so buzzed. It was a speakeasy-in-waiting.
My thoughts are interrupted by a strange sound.
What the Christ is that scratching noise? Rabid claws, tearing into metal. Wait! Now it’s a beak, pecking at the stainless-steel counter in wretched convulsions.
With a shake of my head, I get back to business. I need to focus. My boss needs a concept, and he needs it today. Hospitality is a fast-paced business, kid. Bars were popping up in all kinds of freaky places. The more bizarre, the better. These days, the customers are all dead inside and don’t care to communicate unless on a screen. These days, what counts isn’t the one you’re with, it’s the instant experience of it all, the snapshot - that’s the only show in town.
As I tiptoe round, I discover an industrial drain in the floor below the counter, set slightly below floor level. The corrugated cover has around thirty holes, crusted and rotted. I gag, imagining the utter filth which has encircled it. The plumbing underneath must be pipe after pipe of decrepit flesh, bony parcels, and long streaks of copper-coloured blood.
A braying scream pierces the dank air. Jesus!
Where the hell is that coming from? Is it behind the walls, the tiles? Is it … in the necrotic pipes below? Has this place trapped the cries of all the poor animals that were slaughtered down here?
I burl around, regaining my senses. I need to get back to the task. I take my photos, I measure. I think of where the downlighters might go.
As the minutes pass, the stench becomes overpowering. At one time, there must have been slop buckets against this back wall, filled with gizzards and cracked bones.
This city enjoys a bit of avant-garde. We’re no stranger to an illicit bar … but a high-class VIP where butchers used to slice and dice, where they’d carve the carcasses?
A new sound strangles what air is left. In the name of the Good Lord! What am I hearing now?! My ears are filled with a distinctly non-human gurgle … like an animal trying to clear its throat of its own blood.
A flash of white light, and a sudden image invades my mind. I see a bloated, snarling man; his dirty grey apron covered in bloody prints. He’s holding a cleaver, and a cigarette hangs from his fat, purple lips. The cleaver rises and falls repeatedly. A piece of … something … falls from his killing table, and he kicks it somewhere down below. The cadaver underneath the counter seems to writhe; to seek escape, and he kicks at it again. And then, the vision clears, as suddenly as it came.
My hands are shaking, and there is sweat on my upper lip. I flip my torch on and tilt my head underneath the counter and… dear God … I see that drain … that crusted drain … and it is undulating.
And then …
A splurge of rancid blood and guts bursts out like a geyser, covering me in decades-old filth, swilling and spewing. I fall backwards, screaming, and all around me drips the excreta from the pipes below.
Help me! Dear God, help me!
I flee; I slip on the puddles of blood forming on the floor. I’m on my hands and knees. As I scramble, the cries of all the dead beasts fill the air.
I grab at the floor to steady myself, and I feel the decrepit grime under my fingernails and the stinking blood soak through my jeans. I put my hands to my ears to stop the death wails and stagger into the fire door.
I fall out into the backcourt, into the blessed night-rain, frantic.
Gasping, I wash the blood and entrails from my hands and hair. I find my breath. I peer down at myself. There is no blood, no gore. It has, all of it, been a figment.
And then, my phone goes. It’s the boss.
“Well now, Lenny,” he says, pronouncing his words like he’s chewing a bloated piece of gristly beef. “What do you make of the new space, then? It’s going to be super exclusive—the real deal. Think we’ll call it … ‘The Abattoir’. What d’ye reckon, Lenny?”
“Lenny? You there? What d’ye reckon?”
I look up. I let the droplets wash over my face.
“You’ll make a killing, boss, a killing.”
JS Apsley is an aspiring author from Glasgow, Scotland. He won the Ringwood Publishing short story prize 2024 for his debut fiction submission, "Immersion". He has since placed various stories including with: Bewildering Stories, Bright Flash Literary, Brussels Literary Review, The Colored Lens, Loft Books, Lowlife Lit Press, Lovecraftiana, and Underside Stories. See www.jsapsley.com."
A Total Romantic by Michael Horton
There was a girl. And a boy. They loved each other very much. Except the boy hated the expression, "loved very much." He felt it quantified his love and hers, and he believed their love was boundless. He didn't want quantified love, something one could weigh or measure. He wanted to commit to and receive endless, boundless, total love. That was the kind of boy he was. It made loving him a full-time job. And, as the girl found out, being loved by him was exhausting. Wonderful at first, heady, marvelous—but after a time, when the onslaught of his total love didn't diminish, when it just kept crashing down upon her, it grew burdensome. This was unexpected. What girl doesn't want to be loved boundlessly, totally, endlessly?
Yet even when one moons about all day totally in love, it really is only for intervals, extended moments, between wondering about lunch, scratching itches, brushing one’s teeth and hair, and thinking about shopping. The notion is a warm breeze, a bright thought-in-passing. Yet with this particular boy, it just went on and on, hours at a time, and the girl found herself wanting to escape the intensity of it.
The boy, for his part, thought he was doing everything right and was confused by the girl’s increasingly distant response—she continued to smile at him, but she was always backing away. She explained she had places to go, things to do, people to see—girl things, and girl-things (it was understood at least by one of them) were not something he could be part of.
Finally, after much misunderstanding, dramatic unhappiness, and great sorrow, the boy cut the girl’s legs off. He kept her in a steamer trunk, one exactly the right size to store her in, which he had purchased at a garage sale after haggling the seller down on the price. It was quite a beautiful trunk. Even the girl was impressed for a split-second before she was overcome (justly) with the horror of her situation, the patent unfairness.
The boy did his utmost to explain his justification—she had made him do it (though she couldn't remember asking for any of this).
If she’d just give it a chance, he gently pointed out, it would all turn out perfect. In no time, she would adjust to it and see that it was aces. And together they would settle into their boundless love. Their infinite love. The girl, whatever her original feelings, had fallen out of boundless love with the boy quite a bit earlier. In fact, she found him monstrous and would have cursed him, clawed out his eyes, and bit his tongue in two, if she weren't concerned with the sharp implements kept close at hand—and his unflinching willingness to use them, which left her in a state of abject terror.
The boy, being less sensitive and empathetic than he believed himself to be, thought the girl’s glimmering tears, her quaking demeanor, her completely quivering response to him when he opened her steamer trunk to chat after his day at the office were instead indicative of total, boundless love. That he had had to make certain modifications to the girl, and that he had to keep her locked in a steamer trunk, deterred him not a whit from conceiving this. He was blessed from birth with the ability to believe whatever he chose to believe, regardless of situations to the contrary.
Needless to say, this particular love story didn’t have a happy ending. The girl succumbed to an infection and blood poisoning despite the boy's best nursing and antiseptic swabbing.
The boy was left in the uncomfortable position of having to start his search for that perfect match all over again. But disappointed as he was, not for a single moment did the boy doubt the possibility or the existence of boundless, total, and complete love. It was a matter of faith, not to mention fate. And he had long since admitted to himself that, when it came to love, he was a total romantic.