Horror Stories of 1,000 Words or Less
For the month of September 2026, these are the stories that entertain us most.
* Defenestration by Timothy Ziegenhagen
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* A Mother's Worst Fear by Helena Grey
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* The Latest Collection by Sculpture Deidre Dauber by Morgan Kostelnik
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* Sunday Spills by Mary Magdalen-Smihula
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* Pig & His Gal by Aza Smith
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* Ginorma by Ron Dionne
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* The Vessel by Jacquie Wilson
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* Of the Woods by Dale Scherfling
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* A Small Degree of Mercy by Leo C. Drake
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* Incubation by Beau Wilks
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* Making New Friends by Jay Herre
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​* River Bride by Melissa Gish
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* Just Getting Good by Chris Yates
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* The Denim Man by Anna Girhart
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* Man-Karen by Koren Cowgill
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* Dark Change by Tom Kropp
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* Ghosting by Ginny Drake
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* The Boatshed by Paul Sheldon
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* Feed the Soil by Maxine Alexandre-Strong
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* Cold by Matt Gossman
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* It Has Always Been Like This by Michael Snow
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* Scared of the Dark by Natalie Bartleson
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* The Night Janitor by Rebecca Kamps
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* The Chosen Ones by P.S. Traum
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Defenestration by Timothy Ziegenhagen
I’m being eaten alive. I don’t remember being swallowed up, but I’ve been here awhile, pushed down, smothered by fat, muscle, and bone. My hands and feet buzz like they’re charged with static electricity, my head aches, and the darkness is total. I hear voices coming from the next room, above the grave, down the street. The darkness flickers and hums with flashes of light, and then I’m lying in a bed, thinking someone else’s thoughts. A man in a cassock stands in front of me, sprinkling my body with water. My arms and legs are restrained. “No,” I yell, but it’s not my voice, someone else’s. “I hope your cock falls off.”
The man in front of me is a priest, speaking in Latin, which I don’t understand (yet somehow, I do), “sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas!” (“What you offer me is evil. Drink your own poison!”)
I am thirsty. No hope, someone whispers in my head, the rattle of dry leaves in the fall. You are being punished. You have poisoned yourself with your own hands. Rhizomes of pain lick your body, a taste of the fire where you’ll dwell forever. My head clears, and I see there is a woman in the room, my mother. But who am I? The world has no color—I am looking through a black and white filter.
You are no one. Back to the shadows. Feel me taste your liver, so bitter!
“Mom,” I say, my voice thin. My lips are chapped, cracked and scabbed.
She’s holding my hand, her long hair falling over her eyes, tears running down her cheeks. “It sure feels good going in,” she says, “but you can’t imagine the pain going out.”
My mother is dead, I remember now. My name is Tony and she died the summer before of breast cancer. Since then, my dad disappears for hours every night, stumbling home drunk in the dark. I’ve started failing school, yelling obscenities at my teachers, humping wrestling mats in gym class. I don’t remember why I’m in this bedroom, shackled down, my skull splitting in half. I want to throw the priest to the ground, beat him with the baseball bat leaning against the desk. He’s short, fat, with the round face of a pig, thick glasses that shine like disks of light. “I earnestly commend the soul of this servant,” he says, reciting words that fall on me like moths.
My mother is gone now, but my hands still tingle from her touch. Someone else controls my legs and they kick against the restraints. I feel stirring, a tightening and warmth, the one part of my body is still free to move on its own. Oh, God yes, I love this part! Take it in your hands holy man! I’ll give you the whole world if you bow down and worship me!
“Take it in your hands,” I croak, “or I will throw you out of the window like the priest in the movie!” I don’t mean these words, but I say them anyway. I want to do things I’ve never done, join limbs with women, touch lips with my best friend Jeff, become intoxicated with bodies. I want to hurt the priest, who shakes the bottle of water in my face, then wipes my brow with a handkerchief, brushing me with his fingertips, a cool touch, quarters and dimes bursting from his hands, blood money, raised by children in school, old women mourning for lost daughters. I am suddenly able to leap into the priest’s mind, watch him steal a nun’s money from a coffee tin, stand in the rain near a train station as he stores away memories of the curve of hips and knees, lean into a woman with gin on her breath as his fingers move under her skirt.
“Get out of my head,” the priest tells me. No, I’m talking to myself, to the mind inside my mind, trying to push those memories away from me. I don’t want to see these things. My vision is fading, the end of a dream, an endless series of rooms.
I’m rising. The restraints slip from my arms and legs. The priest steps from the bed, backing away from me. I hover five feet above the bed, watching the doubt on his face, the joy—his faith rewarded with a real vision of the devil, which means that there must also be a god who listens to the words he recites every morning, every night. My hands are on fire now, loaded with thunderbolts. It feels exhilarating, and the priest takes another step back, ass on glass. He is afraid of me now.
Throw him through the glass! Toss him down like that girl on the bike. She was barely hurt, only a little blood. Didn’t you like that? You can feel the poison in your blood, and you know it feels so good.
I want to pound my feet on the ground again, leave the room and go down into the street and to feel the skimming electricity of my skin against someone else’s.
I clench my fists, not to fight or punch but to ground myself in my own limbs, to fight off the mind whispering poison into my own. My sight flickers, and I am now sinking, my weight pushed down a throat as I am swallowed into a pouch of darkness, walled-in, my light spent. Push the priest and you will be free of my thoughts, and of his, and you will walk in the light again.
I throw out my hands and push someone away, feel the crunch of glass breaking, feel the priest’s body go out the window, then collapse to the floor.
When I wake up, it’s early morning. A breeze blows through the broken windowpane. The air feels cool on my face, and the fever has broken. The room is bright with color and the blood sings through my body.
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Tim's stories have been published in a number of small magazines, including Whiskey Island, Natural Bridge, and Bellevue LiteraryReview. He has lived in half a dozen upper Midwestern states and loves living near Lake Superior. His short "Explorer" won the fiction aware in the summer 2024 issue of The Ghost Magazine.
A Mother's Worst Fear by Helena Grey
The bodies of two girls were discovered on a trail. I didn’t know the victims or the place, but I felt connected to it anyway—they were my age in my state, and my mother mentioned it every time I dared to leave the house. Every mother’s worst fear is for some tragedy to befall their children; mine was no different. But I went out despite her fretting, and I did things that every teenage girl did, like meet up with boys or drink in a friend’s basement.
One night, after the latter, I was stumbling home in the dark, and a truck rolled up beside me. Its passenger window was down. A man sat in the front. His jaw was covered in a thick brush of unmaintained hair. “Where’re you going so late?”
I ignored the stranger as I’d been taught to do and kept walking. The ground was uneven beneath my feet; I wasn’t sure if that was the terrain or my intoxication.
The truck inched along beside me. “Why aren’t you talking, honey?”
My silence, this time, was met with a string of curses. I didn’t know how rejection could lead to a woman being called a whore, but men aren’t smart creatures, especially not ones like that. Still, my heartbeat was thundering in my ears, and my palms were drenched with sweat.
He gave up. The man finally spat out his window. The droplet hit my arm, and I shrieked. His laughter was all I heard as he drove away. I wiped my bicep on a nearby tree; my face twisted with disgust.
Mom was waiting for me on the couch. Worry lines were etched into her forehead. “It’s one.”
“I know,” I replied. My curfew was midnight. “I’m sorry.”
“I thought you were dead,” she said.
“I’m not.” I started up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” she demanded, pushing off the couch, but I was already mounting the middle step.
“To bed.”
I heard a huff before she yelled, “You’ll understand when you have kids!”
I never intended to have kids.
My bedroom door closed behind me with a click. I got ready for bed and opened the window in my room—the air conditioner was always broken that summer. I covered myself with my thinnest sheet so the anonymous monster in the dark I should’ve outgrown fearing wouldn’t get me, and I welcomed sleep.
I woke with dry lips a handful of hours later. I didn’t know what had awoken me; I assumed it was dehydration. So, I got up and went to the bathroom. When I returned, my hands were antsy. I had to turn on the overhead light—I just had to. I flicked the switch beside the door and went temporarily blind.
One blink. Two.
I could see again.
I didn’t like what I saw. I could hardly process the image.
The man from earlier, grimy and thick, stood in front of my window. His fist clutched a blade.
My first instinct was to scream, but the air in my lungs wouldn’t cooperate. I stood there dumbly, unable to move.
He took a step forward, and that was the action that cleared the fog from my mind. I staggered backward. My back collided with my bedroom door. I fumbled for the handle. The man was in front of me before I found it. His free hand gripped my throat. I gasped, but no oxygen got past his compression.
"No words now, honey, right?” he mumbled.
My eyes begged for release as they welled up with tears. His mass was a blur, an image past a clouded shower door, and I was helpless.
He tilted his head. What would he do to me first? That was what he was considering.
He decided, his chapped lips parted into a toothy grin. A smear of yellow across that featureless face. His grip around my throat tightened until my brain swirled.
“A smile, I think,” he whispered.
His other hand raised. I couldn’t see it clearly. I couldn’t see anything, really. The lack of oxygen was blinding me. I saw stars and darkness and a shrinking silhouette.
But I could feel the weight of his palm against my neck. The tip of his blade slid into my mouth and found the right corner of my lips. I felt the metal edge slice me. I whimpered—I didn’t have the energy to scream. The warmth of my blood, that iron taste, coated my tongue and poured down my chin. When he’d destroyed that side, he moved to the left and repeated the movements. Jagged, excruciating. I was sobbing but still not loud enough to alert my family.
In my mind, I could think of one thing: make it stop.
The man tugged the knife from my cheek. “There. Prettier when you smile.”
I was fading. The world was fading. Pallid and clammy, I faltered against the door. My heart’s beating was softening like butter in the sun.
The silver weapon went to my throat. It burned me.
My body gave up as it sliced me. Back, forth, back, forth. Was I dead or dying? I didn’t know. Could I be dead and feeling?
But I felt every second, every inch of flesh and muscle shredded with the harsh sawing of the blade. I didn’t know when the man’s hand switched from my neck to my hair, but he held it tightly. My scalp stung if it could sting.
I waited. It was all I could do.
When he was done, he stepped back. My body fell to the floor. A thud as it hit the ground, knees first, shoulders next.
He held my head like a prize. His eyes glistened with satisfaction.
He left through the window he’d come through.
My mother found me in the morning when I was late for breakfast, encircled in a fawn carpet-stained crimson. Her wails—I could hear them, even in death.
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Helena Grey grew up in the Midwest and graduated from a prestigious boarding school where she studied creative writing. She later became a teaching assistant for the course. At present, Helena is attending college in Indiana while pursuing her aspiration of becoming an author.
The Latest Collection from Sculptor Deidre Dauber by Morgan Kostelnik
"Your work took a dark turn, Deidre," Susan said. Her critical eyes picked apart my latest sculptures.
I hovered around her, pulling at a hangnail.
"These are realistic and detailed, but the frightened poses? Isn't that a little on the nose?" she asked, motioning to the sign "Medusa Mudworks".
I laughed uncomfortably. "Yeah. I've been struggling. The clay stopped speaking to me. My models won't sit still."
Susan spun sharply to face me. "Interest is already waning. I'm not confident you can turn this around. Unfortunately, I cannot continue representing you."
My body twitched, a cold spike plunging through my belly. "Please." I shrieked then reigned myself in. "I'll get the magic back."
Susan laughed, cruel and short. "I'll believe that when I see it."
A buzzing rattled in my chest. I shouldn't.
Do it.
"I can show you. I'm working on my masterpiece."
"Fine. If it doesn't measure up, we're done." She sighed, following me to the back room.
I opened the door and ushered her into the shadowy space. Slamming it, I encased us in darkness. "Few have seen my process."
"Deidre, turn on the light," she ordered. A hint of fear beneath her aggravation.
I flipped the switch, illuminating a workroom covered in a layer of clay dust.
"The theatrics are not helping your case," she snapped.
I moved fast, pricking her with my stinger and grabbing her arms, moving them into a pleasing position as her body froze.
"Dei... dre..."
I grinned wide, revealing spindly, wasp-like features I kept hidden. Grabbing handfuls of clay, I encased her, immortalized her.
​​Before the light left her eyes, I whispered, "Welcome to the collection."
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Morgan Kostelnik learned the art of storytelling through her BFA in Film, background in local television, and lifelong passion for movies and books. Her story “Utterly Unattainable” is a winner of the Dreambridge Short Story Anthology Contest. She was a runner-up in the Verdant Raven Writing Battle. Her fiction appears in Elegant Magazine and Twisted Tournament Magazine.
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Sunday Spills by Mary Magdalen-Smihula
Jackie smiled into the early morning sun and gripped her coffee. She loved Sundays. Julian, her son, was still asleep. She had slipped out of the house to enjoy a quiet, lazy morning.
Nothing to do. Nowhere to be.
As she approached her front door, she lifted her coffee cup to her nose and inhaled the sweet roast. She stepped inside and locked the deadbolt behind her.
Just as the deadbolt clicked, the doorknob rattled violently.
Jackie froze.
The shaking turned to pounding, hard enough to tremble the windows.
“No! No! Someone help!” a woman screamed from the other side.
Jackie didn’t move. She tried to place the voice. She couldn’t decide what to do.
Her hand lifted toward the lock.
“Mom, is everything okay?” Julian called from the top of the stairs. His voice thick with sleep.
“Go back to your room,” she said, low but with urgency.
Silence.
Still gripping her coffee, she crossed to the kitchen table and set down her purse. She slipped out of her sandals as possibilities flickered.
A package?
That wouldn’t explain the pounding.
A neighbor?
That thought landed heavy, with a tinge of guilt at maybe not helping a neighbor in need.
Another round of pounding and screaming brought her hand to her chest. She reached down and fished for her phone in her purse.
If it happens again, I’m calling the police, she thought.
She looked up toward her backyard. The sliding door stood wide open.
“You should have opened the door for my wife,” a gritty voice said behind her.
Warm coffee swirled with crimson around her bare toes.
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Mary Magdalen Smihula is a Southern California writer of flash fiction and short prose. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Across the Margin, BULL Magazine, WALL Literary Journal, LEON Literary Review, Blood + Honey, and others.
Pig & His Gal by Aza Smith
PigMaleLeon69, or Pig, learned how to use Adobe Illustrator but lacked the patience to create anything more substantial than concept art for the webcomic he said he would make eventually. He left the actual webcomic publishing to the tryhards for Pig to feel superior to, confident that their work was hot garbage by comparison; you know, when he got around to it.
Crowdfunding made his character design talent more lucrative. Not lucrative enough to qualify as a taxpayer, but just enough to afford the next volume of his new magical girl manga, the kind that came with free fluorescent stickers to add to the back of his desktop when you preordered.
People would send Pig requests for fursona pictures for a nominal fee. Some would send pictures of themselves or their pets as a reference. Most of his creations wore swimsuits that defined the curvature of their hips, tits, ass, or pectorals. Top-tier patrons got to see them naked.
One day, Pig was asked to create a lioness, using swimsuit pinups from the latest issue of American Spankbanker Magazine for the design. Pig loved it when he was asked to make lions. Nala from The Lion King was his first and only girlfriend, and even as a child thirty-two years young, he liked to draw bipedal versions of her for his own private collection. Pig prided himself on his Pride of Lionesses, hung on the walls of his office/bedroom for his own viewing and tactile pleasures.
Pig finished the drawing and emailed it to WeedZeus402 as requested, what little shame he had scolding him for sending it a day after the deadline. He caught himself staring at the finished product, sweet-pickle Doritos falling from his gaping mouth onto the crumb-clogged keys of his keyboard, before saving and sending it. He printed a copy of it with the good, expensive printer his mother got him for Christmas, and hung it on the wall, front and center.
“Good morning, My Queen,” he said to the picture, air whistling through the fat in his cheeks.
Commissions came and went week after week, Pig only ever leaving the darkness of his den to restock his mini-fridge and pound noobs in Warhammer 40K, but he would always return for his Queen.
“Oh, mighty Sekhmet,” said Pig between the fat of his cheeks and a fistful of Cool Ranch Cheetos stuffed into his mouth, “hear my prayer. I would give anything for my beloved sex-kitten to be real.” He caressed the negative space of the picture, making sure not to smear the artificial powder flavorings that permanently stained his greasy hand-sausages across her hips.
Perhaps it was a wishing star falling somewhere out there in the universe, a sentient, cosmic higher power of mysterious intent, or the power of love, but his wish was granted. The eyes on the poster blinked, and the arms in her pinup pose dropped. She looked around, confused at her surroundings, and then she saw him.
Pig oinked in delight at the lion-woman, his developmentally stunted mind too drunk with elation to ponder how or why his wish had come true. He reached with bated breath, open arms, and pitched tent, ready to embrace his new miracle bride in every way his enlarged heart could muster.
“Come to me, my love!”
She bore her fangs and hissed. She crouched on all fours and leapt out from the confines of her two-dimensional prison onto her unwitting creator. Her bare thighs bulged with both a bodybuilder’s glamour muscles and the contour of a beast designed for catching swift prey, and while Pig was not swift, he was definitely prey. Her hands were soft and delicate, but her claws weren’t, and a clean swipe opened his love handles like a cheap suitcase.
“Buh, love, hrrg,” was all Pig could choke out as his flabby arms tried to scoop his spilled entrails back into his belly. The lioness grabbed both of his shoulders, claws grazing both sides of his collarbone, and she bit into his neck. While she got more fat than flesh with the mouthful of Pig, she considered it serviceable for her protein needs. The beast woman’s tail bobbed and weaved over her bikini bottom as she tried to drag him away, struggling between the weight of her prey and the anatomical dysphoria of walking like a quadruped in a biped’s body.
She pounced into the window of her poster of origin, Pig’s massive hips getting caught in the edges before she yanked him through.
It was one hour later, when Pig’s mother came to pick up her son’s mountain of used socks for laundry day, that she walked into the bloodbath that was his room. She called the cops, who had confirmed that past the stale crumbs, pubic hair, and roach feces also soaked into the carpet, the blood belonged to her son. The “who” and “how” of his murder, including the location of his corpse, will forever remain a cold case.
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Aza Smith is too good for this shit and he doesn't have to be here. He's just biding his time until someone desperate comes along and makes him their trophy-wife. Hhe's had stories published by Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Phantoms, The Molotov Cocktail, Jokes Literary Review, Last Girls Club: The Witch's Cosmo, Curious Curls Publishing, Nat 1 Publishing, and the zombie anthology book "Living Adjacent: That wasn't in the Movies!" by S.M. Sykes Books. His hobbies include painting, drawing, sewing, tarot readings, freelance information-brokering for the Department of Darkness, Hierophant duties for the Star-God Cult, erotic graphic novels, experimental taco recipes, traditional pizza recipes, commercial lattes, and trashy isekai. (https://azawsmith.wixsite.com/mysite)
Ginorma by Ron Dionne
Ginorma encompassed the entire mattress and threatened to spread further.
“Bring me more,” she said.
And the man, Bindle, who had attached himself to her, was compelled.
He went out into the streets of the city. He walked and searched. He knew what he was looking for. He had a large sack that he slung over his shoulder and in the sack, a club. The situation would have to be just right but the city bustled and writhed in its intricacies and the man knew it was merely an effort that was required, an effort to withstand his own hunger and thirst, the pain in his own feet, the fatigue that bent his spine and pierced his temples with star-bright pain. For until then his life had been empty and now it was not. Ginorma filled it. As he filled her.
In a playground at dusk, alone amidst cacophony, glowed a bright jewel. Bindle stood and watched from within the shadows of a horse chestnut. Mothers and fathers and older siblings and babysitters hovered about the youngsters on the climbing apparatus. Or not: some mostly ignored them, focused on their phones, or on conversations with other adults. Yet their connections to one or another of the playing treasures were easy to discern. Noisy youngsters, they were. Garrulous, gregarious, healthy. Some tepid would-be bullies and vying cliques. But mostly natural youngsters like Bindle remembered, dimly, himself once upon a time being. He bit his lip in anticipation. The potential target so far had been ignored by the other little ones, utterly ignored, and for its part seemed to pay no attention at all to any of the treasure-minders.
It grew dark.
The population of the playground dwindled almost to naught then bloomed again to a smaller degree, with sex-driven teenagers in small groups.
The treasure sat on a plastic turtle, staring.
Bindle approached. “Gets cold in the dark,” he said.
The response: a blank stare.
“Do you like being cold in the dark?”
The treasure’s mouth was set. Bindle watched as the mind behind the young, young eyes decided. Stranger training in effect, clearly.
Bindle looked left. Bindle looked right. Yards away two teenage girls giggled, two accompanying and urgent teenage boys ogled, encouraged, hands in pockets now but not for long. No-never-mind paid to an old man and a small treasure on a turtle.
The dark became more embracing. It was hard now to see much detail across the park. Vague shapes, and the somewhat shiny top that one of the teenage girls wore, silver-blue, innocent allure glinting. In the surrounding buildings, he could see no one watching from windows. All souls turned inward, unaware, unwitnessing.
A step closer. “Not going home?” Bindle said.
The treasure opened its mouth and for a moment Bindle expected a scream and prepared to hurry away, but only a yawn it was, a wide yawn, a yawn so wide it foreshadowed the filling.
​
Quite quick with his club he had become. Even quicker with stuffing into his bag.
Bindle stood looking around at no one watching, mock-casual. Amazing what goes on that the world just does not see. Or overlooks.
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Back with Ginorma he proffered the prize.
“Another, yes,” she said. “I am ready and ready.”
A single standing lamp in the corner lit her room, its yellow incandescent bulb casting wan light diffusing wide, mock-crystal-glinted shadows through the plastic tassels of its shade.
The treasure whimpered, waking. Bindle’s skill was to subdue, non-lethally.
On the groaning bed, Ginorma spread vast, fatty thighs. The destiny between yawned wide and florid. Wisps of steam caught the light and Bindle’s heart, and from within her depths came the voices.
“Come and join us,” the voices said. “Do not be alone. There is room for you, and more. Begin again.”
Bindle helped the groggy treasure through its inevitable struggle, with only a few encouraging blows from the back of his hand required, until the welcoming faces deep within the widening gulf of mother Ginorma convinced it that friends in a wet and quivering hole of motherness perhaps might be better than the dark and unpredictable world it took so much endless, grueling, defeating effort to run away from.
One last helpful shove was needed. Then Bindle knelt in his usual state of awe, breathing deep the rankness, and marveling at the closing door of flesh that was Ginorma and her vault, his Ginorma, reclaimant mother to an ambition of multitudes. He wet his lips. Soon there would be milk.
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​Ron Dionne's most recent stories have appeared in Wallstrait, Baltimore Review, Die Laughing, BULL, The Muleskinner Journal and other places. He is am American currently living in London, England, with the Blue Sky handle @rondionne.bsky.social.
The Vessel by Jacquie Wilson
No one remembers her name.
Her real name anyway.
She was a girl once, a regular girl, a good girl, who worked as a harlequin for her family's tiny traveling show. She had a white painted face, with a happy painted red smile. Jolly jinglin' shoes, and bright, purple-dyed pigtails that bobbed comically as she capered about on the stage of some, now long-fallen kingdom.
She made nobles and peasants alike laugh.
She made the children clap and sing along to her often silly, but ultimately sweet, songs.
But one day, she vanished.
Taken.
Dragged off into the deep dark night by robed men, zealots of some ancient, twisted and unholy “God”.
They called her a perfect vessel.
They brought her to a place that smelled like syrup and rot. Some forgotten, long-discarded place, a ruin beneath a ruin, lit by black twisted candles that never seemed to burn down.
While there, they fed her things. Sweet things--sugar root, infused honey, and constantly a strange pink and purple nectar that fizzed pleasantly on her tongue at first, then burned
like acid all the way down her chest.
She ate and drank it all, because she was starving, and because when she did, the robed men would smile and say she was a “Good girl”, and because when she didn't, they beat her.
It wasn't until the crawling sensations within her body began that she truly began to fear for her life.
And then, days later, when it was no longer a sensation but something visible to the naked eye, the real nightmare began.
They started putting things in her.
Fat little grubs, half-alive and fetid, still wriggling.
The robed men stitched them into her sides, into her sex, and whispered to her as she screamed.
They told her she would be Beautiful. Strong. Eternal.
She changed, over months. Slowly, and horribly. Her face--still painted white, false red smile--smiling even as her skin grew soft and sticky, like taffy left out in the sun.
Her breath, which smelled of rancid sugar, on exhale turned to a noxious gas that made others see visions, weep, grow violent, or go simply mad.
Her legs stretched, cracked, and twitched unnaturally.
She heard terrible, terrifying things in the dark. A constant chittering. Clicking. Sometimes, screams mixed with syrupy giggles. A sweet-sounding lullaby, then horrible sounds of tearing flesh, bones crunching, followed by wet, gurgling gulps.
Only sometimes did she realize that she was the terrifying thing in the dark.
Eventually, the robed men stopped coming.
Maybe they were caught.
Maybe she ate them all.
She can't remember.
With her captors all long gone, or dead, she eventually crawled down, deeper into the ruins beneath the ruins, driven by her new and relentless hunger, she traversed through many tunnels, slithering through broken stone, all the while singing bits of old lines and songs she remembered from her childhood on the stage.
Eventually, her tongue grew long and furred.
Her limbs grew many, and she further evolved.
She can't remember her name now.
Or that she was a regular girl.
A good girl, even.
They call her a demon now.
An ancient, disgusting thing.
They say the sewers are cursed.
They say the sweet scent of sugar means certain death.
They say that if you hear singing in the dark, it's already too late.
But she's not a demon. Not really...but she is hungry.
​
Jacquie is just a weird canadian lady who likes to write.
Of the Woods by Dale Scherfling
They called him Amos, though by the end, the name no longer seemed to fit him.
He had gone into the woods with four others, after the thing that took the Hollis boy’s arm at the elbow and left him bleeding beneath the mill wheel. Four came back. Amos did not—not for three days. And when he returned, he came back wrong. Not hurt, not marked, only quiet in a way that made the dogs lie flat and the children stop their play.
He still ate at the long table. He still nodded at the right names on the right days. But he took to sitting with his back to the room, facing the window, facing the tree line, and men noticed his knife work had gone strange. He cut his meat the way a thing cuts, not the way a man does—quick, low, and without looking down.
Someone asked him what he’d seen there.
He said nothing for a long while.
Then he said, “It isn’t seeing.”
That was all he ever gave them.
By the second winter he’d stopped coming to the table altogether. He kept to the edge houses nearest the trees, and folk left food on the sill the way you’d leave it for something that used to be a dog and might still remember it was one. His wife never spoke of him. His children were told he’d gone off soldiering, and being young, they believed it. Being young, they stopped asking.
Then one hard January the wolves came down closer than they had any right to, bold beyond reason, and a shepherd swore one of them moved wrong—too deliberate, too human—and watched him a long moment before it turned back into the dark.
Nobody hunted that one.
There is a kindness in that—or a fear so old it wears kindness for a coat. We never said which.
We only said, when the children asked why old Amos’s chair still stood empty at the long table:
“He went to the woods, and the woods kept him.”
And we told it to our children after, in the same words, with the same quiet, because some things you carry only by passing them on.
​
Dale Scherfling is a full-time writer/poet and creative writing and photography instructor. He is a former newspaper sportswriter, editor, and photographer, and a retired U.S. Navy photojournalist. His work has been accepted by The Monterey Poetry Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, Chiron Review, Mangrove Review, Letters Journal, The Blotter Magazine, 25:05 Magazine, Discretionary Love, Writing Teacher, Third Act Magazine, Yellow Mama, Close to the Bone, Flash Phantom, Dispatches Magazine, Five on the Fifth, and Oddball Magazine.
A Small Degree of Mercy by Leo C. Drake
After all the running through the snow, we stumble and fall down. I stretch out my hands to blunt my fall but instead get a face full of sleet. I roll over, and Lydia lies behind me. I crawl over to her, and she responds weakly. She doesn’t even try to get up. I hold her head in my hands and rest it on my lap. Softly I whisper her name as I stroke her hair, but the biting cold makes it more and more difficult to move my fingers. She looks up at me. I can feel her slim body trembling in my arms.
“It’s cold,” she whispers, and I brush snow from her jacket. I want to get up, but lack the strength to do so. Instead, it’s like I have mentally hit a wall and there’s nothing beyond it. “Are we safe yet?” She asks me.
“I think we are,” I answer. “We will be safe soon.” I continue to stroke her hair, and I hate myself because I dragged her into this situation.
She looks at me, and I know she’s seen through my lie. “We’re not anywhere safe.”
I want to open my mouth to speak, but I feel so tired. I glance up at the snowy wasteland around us. Everything is covered with a white blanket, and I don’t see anything approaching us. I let out a sigh and look up the mountain, where the asylum is.
Looking at it, high above us, I hate it. I feared what we had seen, what stalked us, and how they followed us relentlessly through the cold.
I look at the pale sky, and the sun has almost the same color as the snow all around us. Somewhere in the distance, something stirs the snow, and I see one of them approaching. Their long limbs bend in the wrong places. I want to whimper, but nothing comes out. I only hope that the cold gets us before one of those approaching horrors does.
We’ve been walking ever since the expedition failed, and now we’re the last remaining. We found that haunted asylum and lost half of our team there.
The survivors started heading back. The agreement had been that we would wait at the asylum for our evacuation, but none of us dared to stay another minute in that cursed building.
And as soon as we started walking, the problems started. That Canadian, I couldn’t remember his name, fell from a glacier. He broke his leg, and we left him while he continued to beg and scream. I wished I had been the one who said we’d send help, but it had been Lydia who tried to encourage him.
“Don’t leave me with them!” the Canadian screamed, his voice bouncing between the ice walls, even after we turned away. I don’t know how long he lasted.
Magdalena, who walked behind me, just disappeared. We have no idea what happened. When I looked back, Magdalena was gone. No tracks, no discarded backpack, just a patch of snow churned up as if something had dragged her straight into the ground. It must have happened mere seconds before I looked.
Now only Lydia and I are left. When we ran from the asylum, all of us had grabbed what we could carry. However, it hadn’t been enough. I knew this was where we would die. I saw a rough outline of one of those horrors coming closer, but couldn’t make out any details.
“Volker,” she whispers, holding on to my hand, “I’m happy I’ve met you.” My hands had gone numb. I saw she was holding them, but lost all feeling in them. I should be alarmed, but my mind was blank.
“Don’t worry, Lydia,” I said, my breath misting.
She took off her gloves. “I feel warm now,” and held on to my bare hands. I used to love how soft her hands were.
“You think Magdalena will be safe?” She asks quietly, almost afraid that if she spoke too loudly, the horrors would grab us. For a second I want to correct her. Then I realize she doesn’t remember Magdalena disappeared, and I can’t bear to say it. I had hoped to leave all of this behind when we ran from that asylum.
“Volker,” she calls me, her head still on my lap, and with difficulty I unzip my jacket. I put it around her to keep her warm. It doesn’t help much.
My toes have gone numb. I can’t feel anything. The shivering has stopped.
I want to pull my jacket further over her, but the fingers of one hand fail to grasp it properly. I don’t want to use the other hand, which is holding on to her, because I fear that I won’t be able to grasp her again.
We’ve been together for so long, and I don’t want to lose her now. Not when we are so close to the end.
“Lydia,” I say, “it will be alright. There’s nothing to worry about.”
She has a faint smile on her face, but doesn’t answer. I think she’s dead. I try to remember what I was saying, but I don’t recall the exact words. Was it about the asylum? Did I help Magdalena?
It gets harder for me to focus. I try to form coherent thoughts, but it’s like there is a wall in my head that stops them. Asylum. Door. Snow. Death. I put my head down on her shoulder. At least she will be safe. At least we will be together. I hear something crunching the snow nearby. I hope I’m dead before the horrors reach us. It’s a small degree of mercy. It’s so cold…
​
Leo C. Drake lives in the Netherlands and writes dark science fiction and horror about ordinary people in difficult situations.
Incubation by Beau Wilks
As Claire hides in her closet’s shadows, she squeezes her legs, searching for an inkling of feeling in their shock-induced paralysis. Moonlight slivers beneath the door. A neighbor's car alarm blares while distant screams rise and die. The blood on her thighs trickles onto her hands and drips into the puddle between her legs.
Her husband Travis's jackets cover her. Another woman's perfume still breathes on his sleeves.
Beyond the closet door, an emergency alert from Claire's phone screams a muffled, continuous ring. A newsreel loops on Travis's. The stream's audio jabs into the closet.
"Cybersecurity vulnerability exposed-"
In the bedroom, she hears the sound of small metal slivers gurgling flesh, like a severed stomach sifting through streams of syringes.
"-nanobot infertility treatments."
The sound crawls along the walls, screeching into the vents. A soft, wet smacking follows.
"- premature births."
Police sirens near.
"- malicious, self-replicating agents."
There's a crash. The sirens silence.
"- contact authorities."
The noise encircles her. Claire's left hand covers her mouth while her right pinches her thighs, breaking skin.
"Hide."
The grazing stops. Chiseling starts.
Dust sprinkles onto Claire as something drills through the drywall. A moist glob splashes onto the carpet blood puddle. The moisture of Claire's placenta glistens in the moonlight's trace. Metallic, dust-sized specs sparkle in the afterbirth chunk, squirming like maggots.
There’s a loud pop outside that startles Claire. Glass shards fall onto the street. The light underneath the closet disappears.
More sludge drips from the ceiling, landing in her hair.
She bursts to life, her legs drag. She grabs the nearest object--the shoes Travis had worn when he kicked her stomach, and hurls them towards the accumulating mass of nano-flesh.
Her beating had occurred after her infertility diagnosis, which she had been quietly grateful for. All of Travis’s friends had mistresses, kids, more money. She couldn't deliver a child. And, unlike hers, Travis's career had stalled. But he looked down on her, straight-faced and bored-eyed, as she heaved, clenching her stomach.
"Not like you need it," he said.
Now, the shoes do nothing to slow the growing muck trickling from the ceiling.
Claire reaches for the doorknob, stretching her arm. Her fingertips nearly shed her skin searching for a grip.
The animated afterbirth crawls her lifeless calves.
The door opens.
Travis's phone lies on the bed, still playing the newsreel.
"-federally backed... NanoLife... stimulate birth rates... preserve traditional pregnancies..."
Claire moves, pulling her body with her arms. There’s a light patter across her low spine like scurrying cockroaches.
"-lobbied for bans on non-traditional births... rising dumpster baby rates."
She reaches her phone and turns, glimpsing what looks like a gluttonous, shapeshifting blister towering her body. It flips her onto her back, constricting her within a straitjacket of placenta flesh. Nanobots slither into her tear ducts. The fetus's head falls loose from the mass and into her mouth. She screams, failing to push it out with her tongue.
And as slime oozes down her throat, she can only think how everyone, except her, wanted this baby.
Her teeth clamp on the fetus's head. As it cries, more nanobots spew from its eyes and mouth, seeping into Claire's throat. Its skull's soft spot gives. There's a small crack, like the one her ribs had made after Travis's kick.
Claire's eyes bulge as she chokes on a cocktail of nanobots, placenta, and her own vomit.
She bites harder. Another crunch. The fetus wails, and wails, and wails. But Claire remembers groveling.
Its head bursts.
Blood splatters. Brain matter clumps onto her uvula. Flesh nestles between her teeth as skull shards stab her gums.
The swarm collapses.
Nothing moves.
Claire shoves the umbilical cord that wraps her neck like a scarf as she vomits to her side. Small chuckles and smaller tears bleed through her ejections. When she's emptied, Claire lies still, breathing slowly as she stares at the ceiling.
On the walls, there's a trail from the placenta crawling into the vents. A separate path branches, disappearing into a corner crack. Its sludge stains the bedroom window’s outer glass. She checks the emergency alert on her phone.
"If you are a host and experiencing issues with your NanoLife incubation experience, please contact support immediately."
She giggles, throws the device to the side. No one was ever going to save her.
Claire exhales, resuming her escape.
Her toes wiggle a bit.
Her husband's corpse lies in the bedroom doorway. Red stains the front of his tattered boxers. Foreskin, pubic hair, and what looks like semen swims in the blood pool between his legs. His stretch-marked stomach bulges as though he were nine-months pregnant.
Multiple sets of small hands press from inside his gut.
Claire passes his body.
Not caring to see the look on his face.
Reaching the front door, her thighs throb. Their numbness subsides. She presses her hand onto the entryway table, using all of her strength to rise to her knees. She pauses, finds a bit more, then raises to a stand. Her chest heaves. Claire exhales, calms herself, then opens the door.
The night sits low. Thick, humid air slogs her skin. A police officer lies in her yard. His stomach inflates as nano-placenta slivers into his urethra. Only a few streetlights remain with their bulbs unbroken. Bloodstains and shattered windows decorate the neighborhood homes.
A piece of flesh falls from the sky. Claire looks above.
The moon shines behind a neighborhood-sprawling dome of afterbirth. Veins streak the barrier like lightning; blood clots congest into clouds.
Hundreds of fetuses hang from umbilical cords like wind chimes in the sky.
​
Beau Wilks, son of a used-car salesman and consumer of trash horror, spent his childhood ambling through graveyards, comic shops, and antique stores. Published in StarLine, Flash Phantoms, The Genre Society, and Sneaky Ottoman Review, Beau now writes horror from his Austin-based couch with assistance from his cat Ripley and dog Zelda.
Making New Friends by Jay Herre
I woke up with itchy eyes; the scent of smoke and charcoal embedded in my nostrils. I jumped out of bed, ready to climb the mountain and find the source of what I hoped was a campfire at the top, drenched in permethrin with my pants tucked into my socks and an extra layer of defense - duct tape, sticky side out, wrapped around my shins.
I used to find it difficult just to get out of bed. Depression was like hanging on a pull up bar, a hair above sea level. The sea as black as octopi’s ink. If I let go, I knew I’d be lost in that ink anywhere between a day or decades, suspended in a watery black box of brain fog and procrastination with no definitive timeline. Battling a pull up bar required excellent upper body strength, but that was relatively easy - depression was more about mental stamina, holding on for eternity to avoid being dipped in the inky darkness.
After The Collapse, though, something switched. It was a cure - better than any Prozac or therapy. The survival instinct and daily physical exertion became a giant vacuum that suctioned all the darkness out, making my chest feel lighter even in a shittier, heavier world. Maybe two negatives equal a positive?
When I reached the campsite, the shirtless firestarter chuckled at my appearance. I was more taken aback by his - he wasn’t even trying to defend himself, wearing stained khaki shorts that were a few sizes too small, coupled with pink flip-flops.
Despite the feral look in his eye, I was too hungry and too tired to worry about his fashion choices.
“Hey friend. Care for a meal?”
It was getting dark, and the smell of meat filled my nostrils, my stomach grumbling.
I didn’t question what it was but assumed it was deer given the gamy taste. Maybe it was his old cat. I didn’t care at that point; I just wanted protein.
“I’m Dalton” he reached out to shake my hand after a few minutes of silence, occasionally interrupted by the sounds of chewing or the occasional burp. Night had fallen.
“Will.”
After our bellies were full, he threw another log onto the fire.
“Staying here tonight?” he said, staring at the fire. It sounded more like a statement than a question.
“If that’s fine with you. Rather not be stomping around in the forest at night.” I replied, the hairs on my neck raised, despite the warmth of camp.
“It’s funny, I was always a fan of those zombie movies. You know, the ones where they infect everyone with their bites. Running full speed at innocent victims, faster than Olympic athletes. Never thought I’d actually have to meet one, or that they’d just end up being slow and stupid, bumping around looking for trash to eat…”
“I guess” I replied, secretly grateful they weren’t fast and starved for human flesh.
“My wife was terrified of ticks. You know, catching the Lyme or the Alpha Gal… although that last one she probably wanted me to catch,” he chuckled, with a hint of nostalgia.
“She was a vegetarian, so a meat allergy for me would’ve been a win for her… makes sense she never fussed when I found a tick or two attached. I’d always pry ‘em out and call it a day. Back then, they had to be attached for a few days to spread something like Lyme, so I wasn’t bothered much.”
I nodded, thinking about my own family. Maybe he wanted to join his wife, which would explain his nonchalant attitude regarding preventive measures. Or maybe he assumed the fire would keep the ticks away.
“She’d only go out into the woods dressed like you, smelling like bug spray… but I’m the one stuck here. All that worrying for nothing. Ironic.”
As a lifelong and dedicated introvert, I’d always feared small talk, but given his hospitality, I figured I’d try.
“You’re not scared of getting bit… turning into one of them?” I asked, pointing to one of the Braindead, rustling behind us, munching on an old candy wrapper on the ground.
“Must be immune, like the deer and all the other critters. Trust me, I’d rather would’ve joined her, instead of having to take her out.”
“Take her out?” I asked.
“Like this!” he said as he pulled out a high caliber revolver and popped the Braindead in its melon, exploding its empty head.
“Jesus!” I jump shouted.
“He’s got nothing to do with this. Quick… move over there.”
He marched me towards a well-concealed wooden crate behind his tent, forcing me in at gunpoint. I heard a nail gun spitting out nails only microseconds before they were impaled into the wooden lid above my head. I collapsed with exhaustion.
***
I woke up to his muffled voice the next morning.
“That was opossum you ate last night, found him dead by the side of the old road. And guess what Mr. opossum eats? Ticks - even infected ones. When food got low, I feasted on opossums when I couldn’t find any deer. My wife refused, being a vegetarian and all. It’s the only explanation I got that I’m immune and not her.”
“Let me the fuck out of here,” I screamed. Nightmare fuel. There must have been hundreds of ticks crawling all over me.
“Maybe I will… although I been eating them Braindead when times get tough. They move way slower than deer and they’re way easier to find than opossums nowadays. Guess we’ll find out if you’re dinner in a few days, or a new friend. Though to be honest, it’s been a while since I got to eat fresh meat. And I don’t really have a need for any new friends.”
​
Jay’s favorite holiday is Halloween. He’s a mass consumer of horror across all media forms - from old William Hope Hodgson novels to cheesy found footage films. He lives in California with his wife, kids, and dogs and spends most of his free time in the backcountry and wilderness areas of the Sierra Nevada mountains, attempting to escape the monsters of modern society.​
River Bride by Melissa Gish
The old women in Hollow Creek still tell it the way their grandmothers told them: when a girl with a limp comes of age and no boy will have her, the river sends a groom.
Ilsa was twenty-one, bent-legged and unmarried, and so on the night of the harvest moon, her mother packed her a bag of salt and told her not to answer if something knocked using her father’s voice.
Something knocked using her father’s voice.
Ilsa had grown up on the story enough to keep the door shut, but she hadn’t grown up enough to keep the window shut too, and by the time she understood her mistake, the thing was already sitting in the chair across from her bed, wearing her father’s face like a coat two sizes too small.
“You’re not him,” she said.
“No,” it agreed, pleasantly. Its voice came from somewhere behind yellow teeth. “But I can be. I can be anyone you ask.”
It began, then, to show her.
The face rippled, not like water, but like dough being kneaded from the inside, some unseen fist working beneath the skin, reshaping the cheekbones, drawing the jaw longer, then shorter, then longer again. Her father’s mouth stretched sideways until it split at the corner with a sound like a green branch tearing, and underneath, another mouth waited, already smiling. It kept doing this. Trying on faces. She recognized her uncle, dead eleven years. She recognized the preacher. She recognized, for one unbearable second, herself, her own face pulled taut over its skull, her own eyes looking back at her from sockets too wide, as if her skin had been peeled free and worn like a mask, the edges not quite fitting, gathering in loose folds at the throat.
“I only want to be married,” it said, in her own voice now, soft and wet. “The river is so lonely. I’ve been waiting so long.”
Ilsa’s mother had taught her the old remedies: salt across the threshold, iron under the tongue, her father’s name spoken backward three times to break a false face. She had all of this ready. She had rehearsed it as a girl, the way other children rehearsed Bible verses.
She had not rehearsed for what happened when the thing reached toward her and its arm came apart at the elbow into a second, smaller arm, and that one into a third, each joint sprouting a new joint the way a river forks into tributaries, fingers becoming wrists, becoming fingers again, an anatomy that refused to stop until what it reached out with wasn’t a hand at all but a whole tangled thicket of hands, glistening pale as things pulled from under a rock.
“Say yes,” it said, with a beautifully grotesque mouth and deep, black eyes and someone else’s dozen hands. “It only hurts the once.”
She thought of the salt. She thought of the iron. She thought, absurdly, of how her mother had cried packing that little cloth bag, as if she already knew salt wouldn’t be enough, as if the real lesson had never been the remedies at all but simply, survive long enough to warn the next one.
So Ilsa didn’t say the words to break the mask. She said instead, very calmly, the thing her mother had told her only once, in a whisper, the night before, when her father wasn’t listening: if it ever comes, ask it what it looked like before the river had it.
The many hands stopped their reaching. The face flickered through fifty stolen faces in a single second, too fast to settle, dough with no hands left to knead it, and beneath all of them, just for a moment, something else showed through: not a face at all, but an absence shaped like grief, an emptiness that had been down in the dark so long it no longer remembered it had once been a person too, drowned and forgotten, and then unmade by want into whatever this was.
It made a sound that wasn’t the river-thing’s voice or her father’s voice or anyone’s Ilsa recognized. It was smaller than any of those. It was almost a child’s sound.
And it went out through the window the way it had come, taking none of its borrowed faces with it, leaving them scattered across her floorboards like shed skins, already starting to dissolve into a stinking pool of standing water and rotted moss.
In the morning, Ilsa told her mother she had asked it the question.
Her mother didn’t look relieved. She only asked, “What did it look like, underneath?”
Ilsa thought about the emptiness wearing grief like a mask. “Lonely,” she said. “So lonely.”
Her mother nodded, as if this were the answer she’d been afraid of, and began, that same afternoon, teaching Ilsa the second remedy, the one for when the thing came back, because the old stories agree on nothing except this: it always came back.
​
Melissa Gish is a Minnesota-based writer. In the 90s, she published the horror zine Gaslight: Tales of the Unsane and hasn’t strayed much from the darkness since then. She teaches online English courses for a rural West Virginia university, holds an MFA from a Minnesota University, and founded the indie press Sabre Lake Publishing in 2024. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in eMerge Magazine, Gyroscope Review, SORTES Magazine, Submission Fetish, and Maverick Duck Press.
Just Getting Good by Chris Yates
Their parents told them not to go into the woods. So, Thomas and his best friend Eli, who just so happened to be his neighbor, played with their favorite toy, a chipped-up old police car that came equipped with a button to activate the flashing red and blue lights and a siren to go with it. The two boys would grab twigs they found to act as the characters.
“Oh no, I’m being robbed, help!” said Thomas.
Eli pressed the button to activate the lights as he rode the police car on the ground, running over rocks and roots.
“Don’t worry, I’ll save you!” said Eli.
“Bwahaha, no, you won’t!” The stick man appeared holding an imaginary gun.
As the two boys got into position to play out their story, they heard an echoing call from the distance.
“Thomas, your dinner is ready!”
Both boys groaned.
“It was just getting good,” said Eli.
Thomas let go of the dusty twig as he brushed the dirty soil that clung to his knees and hands.
“Don’t leave; I’ll be right back,” said Thomas.
Eli looked up at the setting sun.
“Okay, but be quick. Mom told me not to stay out after dark.”
Thomas ran inside as fast as he could. His mom made his favorite meal on the planet: spaghetti with meatballs. Despite that, Thomas was dumping the food in his mouth and chewing fast. Every second felt like a minute, but Thomas wanted to play just a little bit more before the sun fully set. His parents were focused on a grown-up conversation and didn’t notice that Thomas left his empty plate on the table. Thomas ran out the door just to soak up a few more minutes of playtime.
“Eli!”
Thomas looked around for his friend, who was not there.
###
Months passed as Thomas looked out the window to see the police car drive away from Eli’s home for one last time. He overheard his parents in the living room as the police called off the search.
Alone and missing his friend, Thomas played in his room with a dusty twig that reminded him of Eli. His parents would not let him near the woods anymore. So, every night he would look out his window and into the woods with the hope of finding Eli.
A year later, the police stopped showing up, missing posters started to gather dust, and Eli’s parents moved to another state.
It was the night before one of the biggest days of Thomas’s life. The night before his first day at school. So, his parents put him to bed after reading him a bedtime story. They kissed him on the head, and they turned off the lights in his room.
Thomas tried to sleep, but he couldn’t imagine starting school without Eli. He missed him dearly and was deeply afraid of not finding a new friend. Thomas would stand by the window looking for Eli, but like every other night, there was nothing but trees engulfed by the darkness of night. Thomas looked around until he saw the flashing red and blue lights emanating from the woods. He couldn’t believe it, so he hopped off his bed and grabbed his toy binoculars that didn’t really work for a second look.
There he saw it… Eli’s flashing police car. Thomas jumped off his bed and ran outside, forgetting to put on his shoes, just to see his long-lost best friend, Eli.
Once Thomas reached the woods, he noticed the flashing lights were gone.
“Eli!”
Thomas didn’t hear anything back for a few seconds until the siren of the police car echoed from around a tall tree that was slightly deeper into the woods. This was much further than what his parents would’ve allowed him to go. Desperate to see his friend again, Thomas crept further.
“Eli. It’s me, Thomas!”
Thomas walked around the tree to see Eli standing there playing with the police car.
“Don’t worry, I’ll save you!” said Eli.
The boys laughed as they hugged each other. Tears rolled down Thomas's cheeks, just so thankful to see his best friend once more.
Thomas let go of his friend just to see nobody in front of him. He turned around to face his home, but he was surrounded by black fog. Thomas could feel his heartbeat starting to pound.
Behind him, he heard a familiar yet distorted voice hiding behind yet another tree.
“It was just getting good.”
Thomas cried for help, but he only heard echoes of his own scream. He tried to run but couldn’t see anything past the black fog that was surrounding him.
Finally, a Shape unfolded from behind that same tree. A tall, pale human figure with limbs bending in ways unimaginable and dark holes for eye sockets.
“Mom told me not to stay out after dark,” said The Shape.
The Shape tripped over its twisted leg, and it lay on the ground staring at Thomas.
Thomas stared at The Shape, hoping it wouldn’t reach him.
The Shape twisted its limbs back in place and quickly crawled at Thomas.
​
Christopher Yates has lived all around the world, immersing himself in different cultures with many stories to tell. When he is not writing, you can find him working on and studying films and novels. Follow him on Instagram @Christopheryates3.
The Denim Man by Anna Girhart
Pearl felt that there was someone watching her. Every night at eight o’clock for the past two weeks, she asked her mother to check under her bed. Her mother’s response was always the same. She said that Pearl was nearly ten years old, that it was time for her to grow up. Then she would shut off the light and close the door, leaving Pearl in the darkness with someone.
Pearl first saw the man when she was playing on the trampoline at her best friend Deirdre’s house. Deirdre’s trampoline was in the back of her yard, right in front of a thick line of pine trees. While Pearl was up in the air, she saw something moving, a flash of white and blue. When she landed, it was gone. But she figured out that it was a man because when it was time to go home, Pearl got into her mother’s car and slumped against the window. It was then that she saw someone peeking, just slightly, out at her from behind Deirdre’s shed. From what Pearl could see, he was older with a potbelly and long white hair. He wore a denim shirt with blue jeans.
Pearl didn’t tell anyone about him at first because she thought he was a crazy neighbor or maybe Deirdre had a secret grandpa that she was embarrassed of. Maybe he was sick and got loose. But then Pearl saw him in her own yard a few days later. She was lying on the kitchen floor when she turned over and, all of a sudden, there he was standing right in front of the window. Pearl didn’t run or move or breathe. She just froze there on the floor and stared at him. He was so frightening, his face pulled back into a blank expression, like a reanimated corpse. Then the man raised one hand and gently pressed it against the glass. Pearl jumped up and ran crying through the house, begging her mother to come look, warning her that there was an ugly man outside. But by the time Pearl’s mother stepped foot in the kitchen, the man was gone.
Pearl didn’t see him again, but she didn’t need to. She could feel him all around her. He started to affect her ability to do daily tasks; she was so scared that she would look up and he would be at the window or maybe even right behind her. Pearl wet her mattress for the first time in years, having had a nightmare that he was lying in wait beneath her bed and had suddenly reached out to grab her with his gnarled fingers. Her mother insisted, pleaded, scolded, but none of it did any good. Pearl was convinced that there was someone out to get her, nothing would change her mind.
The situation became so dire that Pearl’s mother took her down to the police station. Pearl told the police officer, an older woman with little patience for frivolity, that she saw a white-haired man put a hand on her window and that she felt very afraid. The police officer told Pearl and her mother that she had checked the criminal records of their town, as well as the two neighboring towns, and that nobody matched that description. She promised Pearl that they would keep an eye out for this character. It did not do Pearl any good.
The next time Pearl saw the man would be one week after her meeting with the police officer. Pearl was at home by herself; her mother had stepped out to go to the neighbor’s house. Pearl was afraid but her mother insisted that it was alright, that she would soon return home and that they would be able to see each other through their windows. Pearl sat beside her bedroom window and looked out across the yard, she could see her mother talking to the neighbor in their front doorway. She sat and waited and watched, feeling increasingly terrified. After about five minutes, Pearl saw her mother wave goodbye and start heading back towards their house.
Pearl let out a sigh of relief and turned away from the window, facing her bed. She froze, her body going stiff. There, beneath the bed frame, was a figure, barely illuminated by the setting sun. Pearl did not dare move a muscle as the figure slowly inched forward, closer and closer until the man was in front of her on all fours. He looked Pearl in her eyes and smiled, reaching a hand out to touch her cheek just as her mother shouted I’m home from down the stairs.
​
Anna Girhart is a first generation American who enjoys writing stories. Her work has previously appeared in the Chiron Review and Moonday Magazine. She has a background in screenwriting and horror. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/radishprincess/home Instagram: @annagirhart
Man-Karen by Koren Cowgill
One: Miranda
“Love that bling.” I gawk at the sparkles nestled in her cleavage. And at the cleavage.
“Gracias,” she says, rolling her R.
Her vagina-shaped gemstone necklace glistens off and on in the club’s blinky strobe light. She—he, he for Christ’s sake—these trans scum—can’t forget they’re not actually women. They’re freaks, they’re—
“Your skin of silk. You moisturize?” she says.
“Just a razor, baby. Nice and smooth for you.”
She leans forward. “We go?”
“Was hoping you’d ask.” I fluff up my red curls and French-inhale. “Let me get rid of this.” I crush the butt in an ashtray, flash her my shiny white teeth, then blow the smoke up and away.
“Ooh, sexy. Your name?”
“Karen. Yours?”
“Miranda,” she answers, rolling the R again.
A trans and an immigrant in one fell swoop. Perfect. “I Love your accent.”
Miranda pouts and bats her eyelashes. “Ladies?”
She means we fuck in the ladies’ room. I shake my head no and glance toward the exit. She lets me take her hand and I lead her out the door. The valet returns with my cherry-red Escalade. I open the passenger door.
Miranda steps in.
I caress her knee until we reach the lot.
“Vamos.” She licks her thick, gorgeous lips at me.
“Be patient,” I say and leer to myself as I park.
“Beautiful,” she says, pointing to the twinkling lights below.
“Ready?” I touch her cheek.
“Muy.” Miranda reclines the seat and flips on her stomach.
I climb behind her, pull the skirt up around her waist then give her garter belt a snap.
She moans.
Her bra hooks in the front. I undo the clasp. Her breasts flop loose and her butt grinds into my crotch.
I shudder with pleasure, even knowing this trans woman was once a man. “Just a sec—” I take the sheath from my pocket.
“Now?” she screams, panting.
“Hell, yeah.” Stickiness soaks my boxers while he—she—groans her ecstasy. I pull the razor from the sheath, deft and stealthy. Like The Demon Barber of Fleet Street I slice her jugular.
Two: Diana
“How’s the training?” Diana says and brushes her blond tresses.
“Arduous, satisfying.”
She touches my chest. “You’re always swimming, gone for workouts or whatever. But your body—I could just lick it to death.”
I’m quite the activity juggler—staying fit, rightwing rallies, and eliminating the trans community.
Diana stands and places her hands on her hips. “So, what’s up? Are we merging?”
I smirk. “Merging. You’re so Wall Street.”
“You swim. I finance.”
“Finance is not a verb. It’s a noun,” I say.
She slaps my wrist playfully. “You—English major with the swimming scholarship. Like I said—”
“I know I know I know. You finance. We’ll discuss marriage tomorrow. Scout’s honor.”
She kisses me. “My big, strong boy scout. Mmm, let’s fuck.”
I push her away. “Maybe in the morning.”
With a huff she strides away, slamming the door behind her.
Three: Mort
“Morticia,” she says, and glides her long green fingernails down my back as we slow dance. “Mort for short.”
“Name’s Karen, by the way. Mort. Love it,” I say. “Rhymes with—torte. We should grab dessert after.”
“After what?” She cackles.
“After I eat your big, luscious, fruity—”
Her hand glides down to my crotch.
My boxer briefs bulge. Too easy. “Shall we slip out?”
She pulls me closer. “Sure.”
I glance around the parking lot, don’t see anyone, so I swoop her up in my arms and carry her behind the building.
She squeals her delight until the Molly I slipped in her cosmopolitan works full blast. I shove her against a wall. With a final sigh her eyelids flutter. Before her body slumps I circle her neck with my hands and strangle the bejesus out of her.
Four: Walt
“Short for Walter?” These trans individuals. Difficult to know if their nicknames are short for feminine, or masculine names. They were men to begin with, and should use the fucking men’s lavator—”
Walt’s fingers snap a few times in front of my nose. “Pay attention. No. Short for Waltraute. Norse mythology, Valkyries—hence the long blond braids.”
I shake my inner rant off, flash her my slick smile and reach out to tug one of the braids.
Her hand latches onto my wrist. A jolt courses through me.
“If you want to yank my hair, earn it. Come.”
She releases her grip.
With my head foggy and addled, I follow.
Miles of dark trails. Walt drags me when I stumble.
When she shoves me into a moonlit clearing, I fall to my knees.
Taller than earlier, she stands before me. The earth rumbles. Walt’s body glows, and black wings fan out behind her. The wings beat slowly, erratically first, then a steadily throbbing whoosh fills the clearing, and she levitates.
Five: Finale
Walt rises even higher, her black wings beating in the heightening gale, louder and louder.
My parched mouth hangs open, forming a scream that won’t come.
The sound of a thousand brass instruments blares every frequency imaginable. I cover my ears then feel the stickiness of blood oozing down my neck, out my nose, from my eyes.
Then I do wail.
From high above, Walt’s visage threatens; her brow furrows with fury.
Mammoth thuds accompany the beating of Walt’s wings. The blaring subsides, replaced by deep, rumbly voices chanting:
Karen. Karen. Karen.
Colossal stomping pounds the ground. Karen. Karen. Miranda and Morticia (Mort for short) approach.
Karen.
Heavy treading feet march to snarling booms of Karen.
Flanked by Mort and Miranda, Walt looms above, her eyes flashing ire.
My body shudders with terror.
A sudden pause—
—then silence.
Walt signals Miranda and Morticia, and they pounce.
Jagged razor-teeth rip me apart—body, face, limbs, vitals. Strident specter-voices screech Karen, their jowly mouths slobbering my entrails.
I howl in agony.
A festering slit...
Under me opens...
And slurps me...
Down its gullet.
​
Koren Cowgill received her undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Music Composition from the Eastman School of Music and her Master of Music from Yale. As a writer, Koren completed her first novel, The Final Months of Hoo-hah, in 2019, and it’s available on Amazon in both paperback and eBook formats. Her high fantasy novel, Teurith of Loring, is available on Amazon in eBook and paperback formats. In the fall of 2024, her short story, The Shuffler, was published in Hedge Apple Magazine’s Labyrinth issue. Koren lives in Cape May County with her husband, Richard, and their dogs, Saffron and Talea.
Dark Change by Tom Kropp
The huge black wolf came out of the brush in a rush. My buckshot chopped into its chest with a colossal boom that should have spelled its doom. The blast smashed it back. But much to my shock, it rolled and rushed me again. My shotgun fulminated and flared a final time. The buckshot spread of lead missed its head but nailed the neck and sheared into its shoulder. What should have killed any creature at that range only slowed the monster a bit. Faster than my eyes could follow its paw swatted the shotgun from my hands and its claws sawed on my arm flaying my forearm to the bone. As I was knocked flat on my back, its mouth opened seemingly larger than a hippo with tremendous teeth, more titanic than a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Instinctively I stuck my arm in its mouth to protect my face. The jaws snapped shut. Abruptly the furry dark monster emitted a puppy like squeal and wheeled away from me with its mouth ablaze on fire. It catapulted away from me, fleeing the scene but only made it a short way before it became fully engulfed in flames. The creature spontaneously combusted with supernatural celerity becoming just ash and smoke leaving a smoldering crater behind.
I looked at my almost entirely amputated arm. Before I passed out the thought occurred to me that the monster had eaten the silver watch right off my wrist. It reminded me of the legends of werewolves and silver.
Then I passed out.
I didn’t even stir until sundown the next day. I woke groggily feeling stiff but little pain. When I looked at my arm I found it entirely healed as if the incident never happened. I rushed home in a confused panic. But instead of home being a sanctuary, I was horrified to see my ex-boyfriend and several of his friends moving stuff out of my old farmhouse into a big truck.
“What the hell are you doing Dan?” I shouted in anger.
Dan turned in surprise. “You weren’t supposed to be here, Carol.” He blurted with surprise and hostility.
I hesitated, taking in the view. “Those aren’t your things. Those are my things.” I pointed incredulously at my Amish furniture being moved by two burly white guys.
“You kicked me out with nothing, Carol,” Dan snarled. “You were supposed to be gone today. Now you’ve caused us a lot of trouble. I can’t let you go to the cops.” Dan moved closer ominously.
I’d forgotten my shotgun in my woods. I felt the first glimmers of fear looking in Dan’s eyes. We’d dated for three months, and then I let him live in my country home for another three months. Everyone thought we were a perfect-looking couple with us both being blond-haired, blue-eyed and tall. But Dan’s temper had been too much for me. Then when I’d checked into his background, I discovered that he was a violent felon with ties to some organized crime motorcycle gangs. Now he was stealing from me and I’d caught him.
“Don’t Dan! I’ll forget I saw anything! Just go!” I pleaded.
Dan snatched my arm and I tried to fight back. Next thing I knew all three men were pinning me down and discussing the best way to either make me disappear or make my death look like a suicide.
The sun finished sinking over the horizon.
The new monster in me rose up. It was briefly agonizing as I expanded, becoming a grizzly-bear sized black-furred wolf with a mouth huge as a hippo’s and teeth more tremendous than a T-rex’s. The claws on my paws were like knives.
The three men had no chance.
One pulled a gun and his pistol puffed out projectiles in photonic flashes. The bullets battered my body and nicked my neck but failed to pierce my flesh. I was a tornado of teeth and talons with my maw and claws sawing and gnawing, biting and striking. I eviscerated opponents, lopped off limbs and even decapitated Dan. It was a savage sudden slaughter and the monster in me glorified at every moment.
Once done, I sat there looking at the ripped up remains. The monster inside me was excited and hungry, ready to feed on its kill. The human part of my brain had enough restraint to reign in the dark desire.
Instead, I fled into the forest and hunted down a deer, which I ate my fill of.
In the morning light I returned to my human form.
I knew the cops wouldn’t believe anything I said and if anyone realized I became a monster werewolf at night I’d be locked up and studied like a lab rat.
My country house is secluded, surrounded by my woods. I used my tractor to move all the body parts and the backhoe on my tractor to bury them. I wore gloves and moved the truck to a street in a bad neighborhood in the nearest large city, thirty miles away.
Since then, every night I turn into a werewolf and hunt my woods and neighbors’ woods. I manage to restrain the beast inside me from hunting humans. But I’m deathly allergic to silver. The werewolf that infected me died from swallowing my silver watch.
Strangely enough, I live a few miles from where they are experimenting with the supercollider that bangs particles together hoping to create new particles. That facility experienced a partial melt down and some employees claimed a dimensional rift appeared and something dark and furry came through it.
Something alien and furry.
I don’t believe I was infected and cursed by some supernatural werewolf.
I think I was infected by an alien werewolf. And I’m likely cursed by it until I die.
So, I hide and hope to avoid detection.
It’s a lonely and frightening existence.
​
Tom Kropp’s work has appeared in Freedom Fiction Journal, The Horror Zine, J Journal, Chiron Review, Churches, Children and Daddies, Down in the Dirt, Short-Story Me, Blood Moon Rising, Flash Phantoms Dark Harbor, Wicked Shadow Press, You Phantomaniacs Anthology, The Listening Eye, Evening Street Review, Outdoor Life, Muscle and Fitness and many other magazines. His play Jailhouse Confessions was performed at the Kennedy Center in 2019. He has numerous novels and audiobooks available. You can read more of his writings at https://tomkropp.wordpress.com.
Ghosting by Ginny Drake
The clock flipped smoothly to 3:00 a.m. Just like the three nights before, it was precisely at that hour the baby started to cry, waking the woman of the house. She blindly reached out to the other side of the bed, but her husband was still working late. Building something new, he always put a little bit of himself into his coding and got "lost in the sauce," as he liked to call it.
The night before, she had told him of the strange occurrences in the dark. The nightly blasting of the speaker in the nursery at precisely three in the morning. The randomly flipping television channels, jumping around as if searching for the right words. Her husband had spent three years building their smart house, his pinnacle achievement: a house of the future. His company called it a spark of genius. Almost every function was run on artificial intelligence, handling everything from the smart light switches to the self-cleaning floors. This house did it all.
Her husband had patted her arm and told her not to worry. As soon as he finished his current project, he would run a scan and fix the glitches. He explained that what was happening was called ghosting. He had built the house on an obsolete AI model, so when he updated the software, he simply patched the new code over the old without deleting the foundation. It was just remnants of the previous system trying to bleed through, he promised, and he would clean it up soon.
The woman walked into the nursery and picked up her daughter, all while the speaker was blaring a song by a band that, if she was remembering correctly, had something to do with a vegetable. "CAN YOU HEAR ME!" it shouted, making her jump, startled. She looked to see if her husband had plugged it back in, but no, the plug lay on the dresser, still unplugged, just as she had left it. No batteries in the back, either. Maybe it has some sort of internal battery I know nothing about, she thought as she closed the nursery door, trying to block out the sound.
She rushed back to her bedroom, carrying her daughter, but as she walked across the threshold, the smart blinds began frantically raising and lowering. A sudden chill hit her. Checking the thermostat, she realized it was locked on its coldest setting. She took a moment to bundle up the baby before leaving the craziness of the room behind. She pulled out her phone to call her husband, but there were no bars, no data, and no Wi-Fi. This is insane, she thought. They had just discussed recent studies about living so close to cell towers; there should never be zero bars in this location.
With her daughter still in her arms, she ran for the front door, only to find it locked tight. All the speakers in the house began screaming in Axl Rose’s voice at top volume: "You’re gonna die!"
"Why?" she screamed into the empty room, tears starting to roll down her face.
She spotted the pack-and-play in the corner, one of the few things they owned not connected to anything, the ultimate low-tech item. She placed her daughter inside for safety while she hunted for a way to get them out. The television started skipping channels so fast the images blurred, but the audio cut through. Patching together fragments from infomercials and cartoons, a cobbled message roared out of the set: "DON’T IGNORE ME!" It sounded terrifyingly bizarre coming through in Bugs Bunny’s voice.
She ran to the hall closet, digging past stacked suitcases and box after box of holiday decorations to find something to defend herself with. Spotting her husband’s golf clubs, she grabbed a nine-iron just as the television flicked through the channels at rapid speed: "Don’t be so hasty!" She took the club to the set with impressive strength, shattering the screen completely. Screaming into the empty air, she released her anger into the void, telling the house to just let her and the baby go.
The speakers clicked back on, singing The Boy Is Mine. The woman stopped, answering back in a cold, calm voice: "He will hate you if we die."
All at once, everything stopped. After the relentless sensory overload, the sudden silence felt like standing in a vacuum. Time stood still as she waited with bated breath, stepping back over to the pack-and-play to scoop up her daughter, ready for whatever came next.
The locks on the front door clicked, and it swung open. Wasting no time, she sprinted out the door, colliding right into the startled arms of her husband as he stepped onto the porch. After she frantically explained the nightmare, he bundled them both into the car and drove away into the night.
Ten Years Later
​
The original house had been leveled. The husband, taking zero chances, decided to build fresh from the ground up. No smart devices were installed in the new build, no obsolete software left to glitch. Just simple appliances in a traditional home. Outside, their ten-year-old daughter laughed as she ran through the water sprinkler, her mother watching nearby with a quiet smile. Stepping out onto the porch to join them, the husband left his smartphone resting on the kitchen counter. The heavy door clicked shut behind him. Inside the silent, empty house, the phone’s screen lit up in the dark as it began softly playing The Boy Is Mine.
​
Ginny Drake is a writer, poet, and artist from the Kansas City area. Her work explores liminality, folklore, and the simple art of living. She holds degrees in psychology, art, and holistic medicine. Her work has appeared in Aporia and The Branch, and she is currently working on her first novel.
The Boatshed by Paul Sheldon
From inky waters the floating face of a boy emerges. His eyes are two empty holes. His mouth is open in a silent, drowned scream. Jessica holds back bile through sheer force of will; she will not appear weak amongst her new male colleagues. Her slim hands hold tight to the swaying boat.
Detective Mercer, a thin, wiry man at least 10 years her senior, puts his hand to his mouth. “Jesus! Please tell me the fish did that.”
The metal cage the divers have placed the body in stops as it breaks the surface of the lake.
“Let’s bag this one quickly,” Jessica says, looking at the decomposition. “Time is our enemy here.”
###
Jessica swirls her gin and tonic, watching the slice of lime floating in the ice. She closes her eyes, then opens them quickly as the face of a boy without eyes floats before her, unbidden. Her shield against the day’s horror is downed in one long gulp. She stares at the lime, watching pieces of pale green flesh fall away. Is this three or four?
Her head buzzes pleasantly, but her mind still won’t switch off. She can almost hear that silent, underwater scream amidst the cicadas and the hum of her air conditioner. She pours another gin, tops it with tonic water. The lime is a decomposing green body in a lake of clear effervescence. The glass is empty by the time she’s undressed.
###
The boy is in her room, small, naked, floating above her. His eyeless gaze pins her to the bed. A whisper of logic tells her this is a night terror, but her racing heart and moist skin are baser responses over which she has no control. She opens her mouth and it fills with water. The eyeless face floats closer and pale gray lips part.
“Jessica.” The whispered word floats between them.
The boy’s throat convulses. A sliver of metal, cold and wet, drops from his lips and lands in her mouth. Stagnant, icy water runs down her neck. Images float by on an invisible current. A locker. A boat. A boathouse. A lake.
Jessica coughs and sits up, spitting something out onto be bedsheet. The boy is gone. The water is gone. On her bed lies a small key.
###
Jessica swallows two Panadol with a gulp of lukewarm coffee as she sits in the squad room. She closes her eyes to the electronic whiteboard, the rows of desks, the worn gray carpet. The boy appears once more, and this time she welcomes him. He focuses the dull throb in her head, gives it purpose.
“Detective Trenton will take lead,” says the Detective Inspector. “Mercer is two IC.”
She fingers the small key in her pocket.
“Forensics is back already; seems a dead kid has everyone riled up.”
She feels its sharp, jagged edges.
“Our first person of interest is the father.”
He didn’t do it, but she knows who did.
###
Gravel crunches underfoot as she approaches the dirty white panelled boatshed. She inserts the dream key into the bronze padlock. With a twist, it clicks open. Inside is a small fishing boat with a white Evinrude outboard engine, a dented, metal locker, its pale green paint worn and peeling at the edges, and a shelf cluttered with boating and fishing gear. The boatshed smells of fish and fuel and something like death. Jessica shudders. The locker door opens with the faintest of clicks. Yellow life jackets, flares, a red fire extinguisher, a pair of small black sneakers, a faded blue t-shirt, jeans, Dodgers cap, a boy’s underpants.
She has no warrant, so she has no evidence. Not yet. She photographs everything.
###
She slides lower in her car seat and watches the overweight, balding man in a black singlet and blue denim shorts open the boatshed door. A glance in the rearview mirror confirms the boy without eyes is still there in the backseat. She needs something that will give her probable cause and a key from a ghost won’t do it. The man opens the back of his truck and slides out a large, green canvas bag. Holding it in both hands he turns. The bag moves. No, not the bag. Something inside the bag moves. He pauses in the doorway, glancing across the car park before turning away.
The bag moves again.
Jessica can hear her feet crunching on the gravel as she rushes the door. She can’t remember drawing her pistol, but it is cold and heavy in her hand. The gloom inside the boatshed contrasts with the bright blue day and for a moment she can’t see him. Then a bald head materialises from the inner dark, followed by a round stomach, and finally a green canvas bag. The green locker is open.
The bag moves again.
“Police!” she shouts.
The man drops the bag and reaches into his pocket.
“Don’t!” she shouts.
The gleam of a silver revolver.
The sound of the shot echoes through the boatshed and out across the water. There are a thud and a splash.
###
The squad room is quiet, all hushed voices and questioning eyes. How did she figure it out so fast? How did she do the impossible? A fifty-two-year-old male is dead. Evidence of four missing boys has been bagged. One young boy has been returned to sobbing, relieved parents.
Jessica has seen those squad room looks before. Another city, another life, just like this one. Is she a freak? A prodigy? They know nothing of the cost, something she is only just beginning to understand herself. She will never be free of the faces of the dead, their pain, their rage, their demands. She moved across the country, but the ghosts don’t care.
She sips her coffee. She must endure the dead for the sake of the living and endure the living for the sake of the dead.
​
Paul Sheldon is an IT consultant living in Perth, Western Australia, who reads and writes horror in his spare time. His most recent publications include ‘Yara-ma-yha-who’ in Of Beasts & Bones by Inky Bones Press and ‘The Baron of Berwick’ in The Necronomicon of Sherlock Holmes Vol 1 by Belanger Books. His debut novel Soul Survivor was recently acquired by IFWG International and is due for release in 2027. Paul is also the president of the Australasian Horror Writers Association.
Feed the Soil by Maxine Alexandre-Strong
The two men, barely acquainted, trudged deeper into the jungle. The vines hung from the treetops, tendrils grasping at the old army man in front. The ends nipped at his shirt, dragging him further into the foliage. His old regulation boots sank into the mud, and the humidity stuck the thick khaki to his body.
The man who followed did not seem to mind the heat in his cotton linen suit. He matched the army man’s pace step by step, teeming with excitement for the spectacle he had been promised.
“Hopefully not much longer,” said the army man. He swatted at the jungle things that pulled at him and thought sardonically of the knife he had left when he had abandoned his post.
“I am filled with endless patience,” replied the man who followed. “Life is patient, this world is patient. I try to emulate that.”
“Right, right. It’s a good virtue.” The army man’s mind was elsewhere. Heat pressed into his head with incredible pressure. The air was so thick with water he was practically swimming through it.
The man who followed babbled on to fill whatever room was left in the space between them.
“I am impressed, Colonel, that you made it this far on your own. Not many could do that. Take the necessary steps, commit so thoroughly, leave it all behind. I can practically hear the Earth sing.”
There was a murmur in the air and a pulse in the ground. The swarming bugs added vibrato. Everything kept tempo with the steps of the two men.
“Music, that’s an apt way to put it. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum,” the colonel hummed. “Mother always said I could join the royal opera house if the military commission didn’t work out. Joking of course.” The colonel thought of his mother, her stature forever tall even as they buried her. “We planted a cherry blossom at her grave. Much different from these rubber trees.”
“Is that what these goliath looking plants are called?” the second man mused, “I was never one much for the outdoors. Not like you Tarzan types.” The man who followed deftly hopped over a fallen log.
“All men come from nature, people forget that. God raised Adam from the ground, tasked him with caring for all the creatures and plants within it.” The colonel began to sing a nursery rhyme he used to hear in the schoolyard during his youth.
“Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.
Lonely and tired, they called to the demon,
‘Beelzebub, good sir, won’t you be a good neighbor,
And help us with all this toil and labor?’”
He wished to sing on but couldn’t remember how the verse ended.
“Amen!” the man behind said with a smile and applause.
The colonel frowned. He had not meant the children’s song as a prayer. To the man behind, there was little difference.
The two continued to slog through mud. The treetops reached across and clasped their bordering branches, knitted together, and closed off any light attempting to push past.
The heartbeat that drummed in the ground continued its crescendo, shaking the roots and threatening every step. They knew they had reached the heart when the sound reached its zenith and suddenly stopped.
It was a seemingly innocuous clearing the pair found themselves in. Barely four paces across. The trees, the air, all stood still in wait, and from the shadows, two glowing yellow eyes emerged, staring at the old army man.
“This is it,” murmured the man behind, watching the show unfold before him. His fingers quivered, barely containing his excitement.
The colonel made a motion to step forward but did not move his feet. “This is it,” he echoed.
The man behind, sensing his companion’s hesitancy, stepped much closer to the other man’s back than he had up to this point in their journey. He whispered right above the colonel’s shoulder. “You’ve trekked miles for this. You’ve crossed rivers and valleys. All to give yourself over to her. She’s here now, the apex of this jungle. Do your duty. Step forward.”
Doubt leached into the colonel, “My duty,” he trailed off.
“No duty to queen or country. Duty to what is real, to yourself, to this land.” The army man absorbed the words into his blood, convincing himself of his own conviction.
“She’ll thank you for it,” the man behind added last. The colonel felt the ghost of a hand pushing him forward.
But the eyes.
The yellow eyes that pierced out from the dark.
They did not blink.
They did not beckon nor repel.
The army man stared into them, begging for some sort of sign, a message, an order.
When nothing came, the old, decrepit colonel glanced back at his companion.
And the tiger struck.
The striped beast tackled the old man to the ground, tearing at his chest with her claws, ripping through muscle and sinew like cheap paper. She crushed the bones of his chest, her weight snapping appendages at their joints.
She savored the sweetness of his blood and the fat from his belly.
When she was fully sated, she turned her back on the corpse, gave the companion a single glance, and returned to the dark of the trees.
The man now alone approached what was left of the man he had only just met. He carefully looked over the caved in skull, the arms turned to ribbons, and bent down, not a care in the world for the pooling blood that threatened to stain his shoes.
He reached into the dead man, feeling the warm mangled liver and lungs. Like the tiger, he avoided ripping into the intestines, lest the waste spill out. His fingers traveled up the chest, and felt the heart, which had managed to survive the worst of the damage. He gripped it, bruising the tissue where it still bled, and ripped it out.
The man left the corpse to rot and gorged on his chosen dinner all the way home.
​
Software developer by day, freelance writer by night, Maxine Alexandre-Strong wanders the streets of the D.C.'s Virginia suburbs in search of good food and a swing dance partner. She can be found jogging the area's many bike paths, asking for directions, in the Twilight Zone.
Cold by Matt Gossman
George was ready for bed so that he wouldn’t be tired at work the next day. For that to happen, Junior would need to be asleep at a decent hour. They made their way through the routine: dinner, television, a bath, and teeth brushing, all culminating in getting Junior tucked in. His father stood at his son’s door, waiting to turn out the light so Junior’s fish tank could illuminate the room with its watery glow.
The rooms needed to have a window cracked so the air of the faithful evaporative cooler could reach them. They were so accustomed to having a window cracked for the air to pass through that it had been years since they questioned its safety.
“It’s hot in here. You sure you don’t want your window open?” George asked.
“I’m sure,” his son said, a voice untouched by puberty.
“K. Because it’s really hot in here.”
“Love you,” Junior said, nestling into the blankets.
“Love you too. Let me know if you want your window open, okay? Goodnight.” George closed the door halfway.
“Goodnight,” Junior replied.
Through the walls, Junior could hear his mother and father speaking: “It’s really hot in there,” his father continued.
“Honey, maybe he likes it,” she said.
“Maybe he’s sick?”
There was a tapping on the drywall from across the hall—Junior’s way of getting their attention without risking getting out of bed.
George reappeared in the doorway. “Son?”
“Daddy.”
“Yeah?”
“I do want my window open...”
“Oh… you want it open?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to do it myself or make you do it.”
“No worries, son. Let me get it,” George said, as he opened the window. There was a momentary sound of air passing through the room.
“Oh, yeah! It’s going to cool down in here quite a bit,” his father said.
Junior giggled.
“Hey, it’s kinda creepy with the window open,” his father said, looking through the cracked window into the night. “Are you ever worried something might creep by and pull you out of the window?”
“Yeah. That’s why—” Junior started.
“That’s why you didn’t want to have your window open,” his father finished.
“Yeah.”
“Son, you don’t have to worry about that. I’m right next door with Mom.”
“I know. Thank you, Daddy.” Concern melted from his face, replaced with a grin.
“No worries.” Dad smiled back, then left the room.
The house grew quiet, drifting into twilight. Somewhere outside his sleep, Junior heard a scratching at the window. He woke and widened his eyes, careful not to move. A large shadow of a clawed hand, magnified by the blue light of the fish tank, stretched across his wall. Unsure if it was his imagination, he thought he could hear the wind from the cooler move around the claws reaching through the window. “Daddy,” he whispered. He was torn between letting it know that he knew it was there and alerting his father. It reached further into the room. “Daddy!” he yelled.
“Junior?” his father called back. He was out of bed in a flash. He was good at that. There was always a small awareness in the back of his mind that home invasions—at least in his imagination—occurred in the wee hours of the night. “Junior?” He materialized in Junior’s doorway, the moonlight pouring through the window to meet the soft blue glow of the fish tank.
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“Don’t be sorry. I do have work in the morning, though. What’s up?”
“I thought I saw a hand reaching in through the window.”
Dad sat on the side of the bed. “You did?” he asked, still feigning concern.
“Yeah, it had sharp nails,” Junior said, keeping his voice quiet.
“It did, did it?” his dad said. He rubbed his son’s shoulder. “Jeez buddy, you’re all sweaty. You sure you didn’t just get overheated and have a bad dream?”
“I—I don’t think…” But then he started to second-guess himself.
“Poor guy. I’ll be right back,” his dad said.
While his dad was gone, Junior eyed the window cautiously.
“Here we go,” his father said, wedging a miniature Albuquerque Isotopes baseball bat into the window track so it couldn’t open more than a crack. Worry left Junior’s face: “Wow! Thank you, Daddy!” He reached out his arms and squeezed his hands for a hug.
George leaned into his son. It felt nice having something so small trust him and cling to him so tightly.
“Feels nice and cool in here,” George said before retiring to his room across the hall.
Junior smiled and looked at the mini baseball bat. The uneasiness of a clawed hand was replaced by the warm memories and sweet dreams of attending baseball games with his father.
Later that night, Junior woke thirsty. He glanced back at the Isotopes bat with confidence before tiptoeing into the kitchen, being careful not to wake Daddy so he could have a good day at work. He sipped down a cool glass of water and looked out onto the back patio through the sliding glass door. It was too empty out there. It was supposed to be, but he didn't like it. He needed to keep tired, so he made his way back to his room where dreams of fresh-cut grass and leather baseballs awaited.
He came to his door. Before jumping into bed, he felt a gust of wind flutter through the curtains of the open window. The miniature baseball bat was gone. His heart jolted in his chest.
LOCAL BOY MISSING FROM HOME
Eight-year-old George “Junior” Lasiter was reported missing early Tuesday morning after his parents discovered his bedroom empty. Police said there were no signs of forced entry. His father, George Lasiter, told police the bedroom window had been secured from the inside. A bloodstained miniature baseball bat was also recovered from the bedroom. Police have not said whether the item is believed to be connected to the disappearance.
​
Matt Gossman is a fiction writer and English teacher based in New Mexico. A summa cum laude graduate of Western New Mexico University, he writes horror, dark fiction, and poetry inspired by the landscapes of the Southwest, the lives of ordinary people, and the unsettling truths that lurk beneath everyday moments. His author website is: https://mattgossmanauthor.wixsite.com/page
It Has Always Been Like This by Matt Gossman
It hasn't always been like this. There was a time before, I think. If I focus really, really hard I can vaguely recall a past life. There were other people there, maybe. Children? I might have had children. I would go places from time to time. It's all blurry now, the entirety of what it was like before this existing as its own separate, single moment. The future is unknown, the present stretches on forever, and the past may as well not have ever been. Sometimes I have thoughts like this for little moments before my attention is returned to the bugs.
The bugs live under my skin. They're always moving around inside of me and biting and stinging and I scratch and scratch and scratch at them, but they never leave me alone. I can feel them skittering around under my face and down inside my arms and everywhere on or in me and all I can do is scratch and scratch and scratch. I dig at my left arm until it bleeds and as I switch to the right, the bugs pour back into my wounds and seal them closed.
Sometimes I follow a pattern for a while. I'll itch left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg, scalp, chest, stomach, and repeat. I did that for a few minutes or days or years before. It didn't help but I found something resembling comfort in the rhythm. Other times I completely abandon any technique or repetition and simply flail around and dig my nails into my body at random. The sensation never goes away but it's nice to vent a little frustration by just tearing into myself with no plan of attack. I'm not sure how long the bugs have been here. I don't think it has always been like this but it's getting harder and harder to remember a time before.
I have seen my own intestines. I dug into my scalp until the blood poured into my eyes. I peeled the skin off the top of my feet. None of it helped, at least for long. The bugs keep sealing my wounds as soon as I draw my attention somewhere else. Sometimes I try to ignore them as long as I can, gritting my teeth until my jaw aches and making horrible noises like a dying animal, but I can never hold out for long. The bugs never stop moving, so neither do I.
Pain is interesting. I can describe the torture I have put myself through and you might wince or feel a twinge of disgust but you can't really, truly understand how it feels. Pinch yourself for as long as you can, as hard as you can, until you physically cannot stand to do it any longer. Then imagine that, under your skin and across your entire body, all the time. It hasn't always been like this, but it feels like it has.
I sometimes get the feeling I'm being punished. I'm not sure what for, because I can no longer recall a time before this. There are only the bugs and my nails and my blood and my screams. I'm not sure where I am. I'm not sure what I did. I don't remember my name anymore. It's just scratching and itching and digging and tearing and ripping and biting and it doesn't matter what I do, the bugs are always there and always moving and always hurting me and I'm hurting myself and somehow the pain of shredding my own flesh with my own hands isn't quite as bad as what the bugs do, so my only reprieve are those brief moments when I have split my jugular or disemboweled myself or flayed the entirety of my thigh before the bugs pour back in and punish me with miracles and put me back together, good as new and I scratch and scratch and scratch again and I flail and I scream and I beg for mercy and there is no one there to hear me or maybe there is and they don't care, maybe I'm surrounded by people or in a theater or a stadium and they're all taking in my performance and cheering and applauding or pelting me with fruit and cursing my name, I can't tell anymore, there are only the bugs and also me, whatever me is, if I can even be said to be me because all I exist as is a vessel for the bugs, I have no other thoughts or hopes or dreams or desires, all my attention is devoted entirely to the bugs, they are all I know and they have reduced me to the shadow of a person, someone you think you see out of the corner of your eye but there's no one there, no one screaming and begging, just a shadow, that's all. It has always been like this.
​
Michael Snow is a cook and musician from Syracuse, New York. This will be his first published piece.
Scared of the Dark by Natalie Bartleson
I was scared of the dark. My parents said nothing would hurt me, that it was all in my head. Still, I avoided it. The dark was dangerous.
I’ve never had trouble falling asleep. Tonight, however, seemed to be different. I lay in bed, my back to the wall. The room was drenched in a golden hue from my bedside lamp.
“This is so stupid…” I muttered. I closed my eyes, reaching for that dimension just beyond my consciousness. The silence was deafening. All my senses were heightened. I could smell the damp scent of rain, hear my heart beating, and…something prodded my leg. I jolted, my eyes darting down the bed. There was nothing. I shuddered, glancing over at the window, where a sliver of navy blue peeked through a space in the drawn curtains. Sliding out of bed, I padded to the window, nudging the curtains aside. The window was slightly open, allowing me a breath of chilly night air. It was quiet outside. Fog choked the street and smothered the lawns up to the porches. Every window was dark. I breathed out slowly. Everyone and everything seemed to be asleep– except for me. I let the curtains fall closed as I turned away. Being the only one awake felt odd…like I was experiencing something I shouldn’t be.
Turning to go back to bed, I tripped on my lamp’s cord, plunging the room into darkness. I cried out, my eyes blind in the darkness. I stood there; my arms wrapped around myself. I panted heavily, waiting on edge for something to leap out at me. I could feel the darkness closing in. I darted towards my lamp, fumbling for the cord. I plugged it back into the outlet, and the light flickered on again. I let out a relieved sigh. I couldn’t stand another second in absolute darkness. Coldness crept from the wood floor through the soles of my bare feet. I got back into bed, drawing my feet under the warm covers, away from whatever might be hiding under my bed.
I pulled my knees to my chest and tried to steady my breathing. I raked my fingers through my tangled hair and swiped my eyes. My motions were mirrored on the wall as the lamp cast my shadow upon it. My shadow moved with me when I lowered my hands. I sat motionless, staring at my shadow in frozen horror. It was thin, with elongated arms and freakish, needle-like fingers. But that wasn’t what scared me. It was the fact that it was still moving.
“It’s all my imagination,” I whispered, my chin trembling. “It’s not real.” The bedsheets twisted and tore in my clenched, shaking hands. Then, my shadow sprang up. My blood ran cold, and I tumbled off my bed, my knees colliding with the floor. I got to my feet and backed up, tangled in my bed sheets. My shadow loomed above me, arms raised. It grew bigger, now stretching across the ceiling. I choked on my cry and clambered away behind my bookcase.
The shadow of my body disappeared as darkness enveloped me. I placed a hand on my chest, trying to slow my heart rate. My skin crawled, pinpricked with adrenaline. I eyed the outlet into which the lamp was plugged. It was close…so close. I looked at the wall nervously, weighing my chances. Icy fingers prodded my shoulder, making me jump. I whirled around, but it was only my muscles twitching erratically. I let out a shaky breath, my mind racing. After a few seconds, I bolted. My hand reached out for the plug as I scrambled across the room.
My shadow reappeared instantly, lurching in the corner of my eye. Its long, spindly arms snaked down the wall and across the floor at a terrifying speed. In a split second, it seized my ankles and tugged. My back slammed against the floor, my head following. My vision blurred, and a sickening, metallic taste blossomed in my mouth. I cried out as my shadow dragged me towards it. My desperate fingers clawed at the smooth, wooden planks.
As I neared the wall, I frantically grabbed at a bedpost and held on with a vise-like grip. My limbs shrieked in agony as my shadow gripped my ankles, grotesquely stretching my body. The corner of the bed rose while I clung on, lifted by paranormal strength. My sweating hands slipped off the bedpost, and I found myself sliding up the wall, clutching the bedknob. The bed fell with a splintering crash.
I hung upside down, the blood rushing in my ears. My shadow held me there, watching me struggle. Blinking through dizziness, I spotted the lamp on my nightstand. Without a second thought, I flung the bedknob at the lamp. The lamp smashed into pieces, shards dancing across the floor. The light disappeared, taking my shadow with it. Darkness wrapped me as I plummeted to the ground. I shielded myself with my arms and landed in a frenzied somersault.
Silence hung with bated breath, stalking me as I lay limp. Footsteps thudded down the hall, pounding a rhythm into my head. I braced myself for more horror, but it was my mom who opened the door. She gasped sharply, seeing me on the floor and the shattered lamp nearby. I sat up reluctantly, waiting for the room to stop spinning.
“What happened?” my mom asked, helping me up. I sat on my bed slowly, my mind fuzzy.
“The lamp…” I began before trailing off.
“Did you fall? Did you knock the lamp over?” My mom knelt beside me, waiting for me to answer. I was staring at the wall. My mom’s shadow stood tall and thin, cast by the moonlight that shone through the open curtains.
I was scared of shadows. My parents said nothing would hurt me, that it was all in my head. Still, I avoided them. Shadows were dangerous.
​
Natalie is a sophomore at LBCC, pursuing an associate's degree in English. She is passionate about creative writing, particularly fiction. She currently is a culture intern at Trill Magazine, where she has one published article so far.
The Night Janitor by Rebecca Kamps
Two weeks before Halloween, Stanley noticed the black hole in the Walmart storage closet beside his mop bucket, a swirling sphere of blackness surrounded by a ring of light. He prodded it with the tip of the mop handle. Suction from the inside, like fingers gripping. The mop slipped through his hands and disappeared.
Stanley shrugged. He didn’t let much bother him anymore. Not since he came home last Halloween night from his shift at Walmart to find his wife of twenty years sitting on a packed suitcase, saying she didn’t love him anymore. Stanley got a butcher knife and carved a hole into her side of the bed. Memory foam contracting and expanding in his fist. He slept beside the carved-out indentation of his wife that night, clutching the knife, pondering and plotting. When he woke up, he decided to shove all that anger down deep.
Stanley roped off the black hole with caution tape and closed the door to the supply closet.
He forgot about the black hole until the unfortunate incident with the mouse on Halloween night.
Stanley forgot a lot.
After running a broom up and down all the aisles, Stanley checked the mouse traps under the shelves. He heard the screeching before he snatched up the trap. A tiny, brown mouse with a broken leg wailed inside. Stanley went into the supply closet where he found the black hole, pulsing. The ring around the center sparkled with flecks of purple, blue, and green. He peered into the blackness, searching for his mop.
On a whim, he tossed the mouse trap into the hole. It made a satisfied gulp as the trap disappeared. The mouse continued to scream from inside the hole.
Stanley stuck his fingers in his ears and backed out of the room. He didn’t notice the teen cashier, dressed in some ridiculous pumpkin T-shirt with a Scream mask atop greasy hair, until the teen said, “Hey man, clean up on aisle, um, somewhere.”
On instinct, Stanley slammed the pimpled teen into the door. Whack, thunk. The teen slid to the floor, leaving a smear of blood behind.
“I don’t have my mop anyway, kid,” Stanley said to the motionless form. “Guess I’ll grab some rags for this mess.” He hoisted the body onto his shoulder. Behind the door, he let the teen drift into the black hole. He imagined it felt like riding down a slide. The boy twitched and his eyes fluttered open before he was sucked away.
Stanley noticed the Scream mask had fallen off the boy’s head. He slid it over his own face, feeling invincible. The anger seeped out of him in bursts.
He rode the cart with one leg kicked out behind him, scooping up plastic pumpkins, fake cobwebs, superhero costumes, and a life-sized inflatable Dracula into his cart. If he could destroy every reminder of Halloween, he could make all the bad feelings go away–his wife perched on her suitcase and the sickening sound of the knife.
Back in the storage closet, the mouse screams had grown faint. Stanley fed each horrifying holiday trinket into the pulsing black center with a squelching suck, feeling his anger bubble up to the surface and then soften.
His phone vibrated in his pocket like the buzzing on his fingertips when he reached towards the black hole. His wife, Dorothy’s face glowed on his phone screen.
“Hello?” Stanley wondered if his anger had summoned her.
“Hi Stanley.” His wife’s voice sounded garbled like she was calling from inside a tunnel.
He hadn’t spoken to Dorothy in a year. What should he say? Come on over here and jump inside this black hole because I’m still sore you left me? Stanley was never good at saying things.
“Boy, do I miss you, Dorothy,” he said.
“Is that so?” Static mixing with her voice. “Where you at then?”
Stanley tossed jack-o'-lantern lightbulbs into the black hole one by one, while it sizzled and sparked, devouring each neon bulb.
“You left me.” Stanley stuttered. “Remember the suitcase?”
“Course I remember. Do you remember what came after?”
A human scream echoed from inside the black hole.
“I, I, well, you left, and I got angry and cut up the mattress. It’s still a hole in there like you sunk on through instead of walked out the door.”
“I didn’t walk out. Think harder.” Her voice held menace like that time he couldn’t get it up and she called him limp dick with a smack of her lips. He hated her lip smacking.
Dorothy sitting on her suitcase smacking her lips. The knife slid easily into her chest like cutting up watermelon. And all the juices ran out after. Dorothy slumped from suitcase to floor with a suctioning pop. Stanley rinsed the knife and then went upstairs and carved out her side of the mattress.
A mouse screech echoed into the phone, reminding Stanley of Dorothy’s screams. He’d stuffed her inside the suitcase and drove to Walmart with her screaming in the trunk. How was he supposed to know she was still alive when he shoved her inside? Stanley unzipped the suitcase so he could wave goodbye before hefting it and Dorothy into the black hole.
“You were always good at forgetting things,” said Dorothy.
“But I only just found this hole thingy.”
“It appeared last Halloween. Then disappeared again. It’ll be gone after tonight.”
“What do I do?” Stanley extended his hand to the hole. Darkness, like looking into nothing.
“Live your dumb life and forget again,” Dorothy smacked her lips.
A tingling on his fingertips traveling up his arm. One touch wouldn’t hurt. Would it feel like emptiness? He held his breath like jumping into a pool. The Scream mask toppled off his face onto the floor. A screech from the mouse, his wife, or both followed by a delightful numbness as he drifted into the black hole. The words, “Welcome to the real nightmare,” came from the abyss.
​
Rebecca Kamps is a teacher from Cleveland, Ohio. She has a B.A. in creative writing from Denison University and is working towards her MFA at Ashland University. Her short fiction has been published in Litbreak Magazine and Flora Fiction online.
The Chosen Ones by P.S. Traum
“This is Dakota Nebraska with a special late-night edition of Action 97 News, and we’re excited to say we have an amazing exclusive – we will be following the celebrated Slayer twins this evening, and witness their continuing defense of the city against the violent vampire menace plaguing our terrified citizens.”
The intrepid red-headed anchorwoman stands in the middle of the dark city street, clutching her trench coat as a cold breeze blows by. The camera follows her walking towards two skinny young girls carrying duffel bags.
“Hope and Tiffany, this station thanks you for the opportunity to accompany you tonight on this most dangerous of activities. And of course, the entire city is eternally grateful to you both for your brave mission to rid our fine town of the vile vampire scourge. We can’t help but wonder though, why would two innocent little girls choose such a nightmarishly deadly occupation?”
The lovely blonde girl wearing a pink jacket brushes her long bangs away from her eyes and addresses the camera.
“Well, it chose us. It’s not just a job. It’s, like, our sacred duty, ya know?”
​
The sister, also an attractive blonde and nearly identical, is wearing a lavender jacket. She adds, “It’s our destiny. We’re the Chosen Ones. It’s what we do.”
The camera swings back over to Dakota shaking her head. “But it’s unbelievable, you two kids are just middle school students...and you’re so tiny!”
“Yeah, well, we’re stronger than we look!” says the blonde in pink.
“We’re bad-ass!” The sisters then chirp in unison.
“And prepared,” says the blonde wearing lavender, “we’re like totally prepped for the stupid suck-bloods. See? Stakes, holy water, garlic necklaces, metal collars...”
“And silver chastity belts!” the girl in pink shouts happily.
“Tiffany! TMI!” Hope shouts. One sister punches the other.
“But what if you were outnumbered?” asks Dakota Nebraska, looking sidelong at the camera, “And, at the risk of sounding selfish, am I, that is, am I and my cameraman, even safe?”
The girls laugh. “Dude-ness, we’ve got you covered,” says Tiffany.
“Totally,” agrees Hope.
Tiffany says, “We’ve always got each other’s back. This ain’t our first school dance. Besides, we’ve got, like, mad skills.”
“Totes,” Hope chimes in. “Check it out, dude-ette.” She suddenly spins and kicks at the camera, her small sneakered foot stopping an inch from the lens.
The camera returns to Dakota, who is wide-eyed with raised eyebrows. “Well, I’m sold. Let’s be on our way. The Slayer Twins will be clearing out a nest of the blood junkies here in the old deserted bus station.” She grins excitedly. “What an incredible exclusive!”
A rapid montage of stock crime scene footage plays out on the screen and ends with a live shot of the sisters pointing to a doorway. The girls pull out long wooden stakes and give each other a high five.
“Let’s go give those bloodsuckers some morning wood, sis!”
“Totes!”
The girls trot ahead into the decrepit building as the camera follows. Dakota moves into view and turns to the camera to say, “Hmm, this sure feels awfully dangerous. Stay close.” She takes a few steps and pauses when the twins stop.
“Oh! Why, hello there, children,” a deep voice intones from the darkness ahead. A tall, elegantly dressed man steps out of the shadows. He is very pale and exposes prominent fangs when he speaks.
Tiffany and Hope stand side by side in dynamic fighting stances with determined looks on their fresh faces. They glare at the monster defiantly.
Hope asks, “What, it’s just you? Did your homies go out for a bite?”
The man smiles pleasantly. “Why not? Tomorrow, the city will be ours.”
Tiffany laughs. “You dork! Didn’t you get the memo? We’re the Chosen Ones, jerk-butt! And you know we’re totally kicking your ass.”
“Oh, I do not doubt that you can. You children...you sweet little children with your pretty faces...you are indeed very skilled. You know, I am not ashamed to say I have always been greatly impressed by your prodigious abilities. You are efficient, industrious little monsters. That is why I bought this.” The smiling man pulls a small pistol out of his coat pocket. “Of course, after some training I have become rather skilled myself.”
The vampire points the gun at Tiffany and shoots her twice in the chest. As Hope leaps at him almost simultaneously, he shoots her between the eyes. The girl drops to the ground instantly. Dead. Dakota screams as the shaken cameraman continues to broadcast the event.
Tiffany spits out blood as she lay on the ground bleeding to death. “Why...why would you have a gun? Vampires don’t use guns!”
“Well, this vampire does, my dear. Why would I not defend myself? After all, I am a regular thinking person just like you or anyone else. I just happen to lack a pulse, and I have fangs. Oh, and perfect aim.”
The dapper killer walks up to Tiffany and shoots her in the face. The camera slowly backs away from the carnage.
“And now for a little midnight snack...” says the vampire, grabbing the hysterical Dakota Nebraska.
​
P.S. Traum is an American author who prefers writing Horror genre fiction. His creepy weird tales appear in publications and periodicals from a wide variety of publishers (US, UK, etc.), most recently for Hellbound's upcoming 10th Anniversary.