I have a dark offering for those of us who feel the rose is off the #Easter bloom, especially since the inception of the pandemic a few years ago. A brief summary: four 50-word #horror stories set in a pandemic age in which children experience uncertainty, loneliness, and fear, in which darkness and anxiety are magnified. I am providing a #Medium friend link, no paywall. If you like it, please follow me here, on Mastodon, or on Medium. I return follow. Reblogs/boosts are always appreciated.
https://medium.com/morning-musings-mag
Tag Archives: micro horror
Grotesqueries
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Posted 50 word fiction, micro horror, Writers of Central Florida
inA woman sits on the pavement. When I draw near, she says: Let me introduce you to my grotesqueries! Out from under her blanket spill children with gnarled faces, hungry eyes. They gnash their teeth and lunge at me. Her shrieks stab my ears as I bolt to my car.
Ghosts
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2040, July 4, Pensacola Lighthouse, Southern Redoubt
Confederate ghosts remain sticky around the balcony outside the Fresnel lens where they beg me to turn off the light, believing there were Union soldiers across the bay who will fire at us. I don’t tell Henry lest he believe me incompetent.
Tiny Frights
Featured
In November, the fabulous indie journal Tiny Frights published two of my fifty-word pieces “Ms. Linden” and “Leonard,” pieces I featured here a couple of years ago, but which may now be found in this really cool journal as a zine substack. They also have a website. Definitely worth a visit. So much good stuff! —Margaret
Inktober Day 3: War
03 Saturday Oct 2020
All it took to avoid death was a cloth shield on the face. And yet, there was a state-run mind-warp loud as a bully or psyops equating the wearing of masks with weakness and disloyalty. Many of us are dying yet we war against subversion.
Inktober, part four, repurposed for Mastodon #50WordFriday
27 Sunday Sep 2020
I am aware of how many excellent writers there are out there writing in flash fiction forms and shorter. And there are many places that publish the best of this work. If I have time this month that may be something I explore here.
As for my own work, whether I am writing very short or a bit longer, I tend to write plot driven pieces when under time pressures and word constraints. A professor in grad school even called me a “plot driven writer.” In that setting, it wasn’t necessarily considered a compliment. lols. But that same professor was quick to point out a strength of my collection of stories that first year: A flash fiction piece of a thousand words.
Fifty-word fiction is pushing the boundaries of “narrative.” Some wouldn’t call these pieces stories. And yet, the best of shorter fiction pieces have dimension, evoke a wider context and an ongoing narrative. Fifty-word pieces aren’t simply one or two sentences of words. And a one thousand flash fiction piece isn’t simply a few paragraphs.
Fifty-word fiction is obviously not longer fiction in terms of what it does, how it reads. For me, personally, having run three prompt-based exercises this past year, I think the 50-word writing experience is mainly useful to the writer. Readers may want “more” though a collection of fifty-word pieces on a theme could prove interesting. Or a collection of fifty-word pieces may become an interesting story or imagistic experiment.
But so far, my opinion of writing short and flashy is that it is a way to generate material; sharpen ideas; build characters, settings, and situations; work on tone and point of view. I don’t treat these pieces as “just exercises,” however. I fully commit to trying to tell a story in only fifty words. Like I said, there are those who do more of it and do it better. Nonetheless, I find it immensely enjoyable.
When I fully commit to story no matter the length and no matter the style—plot oriented or more imagistic—I begin to build a personal wealth from which to draw in later projects, sometimes without consciously realizing it. I think of it as similar to an artist doing sketches or studies.
Here are two Inktober pieces from last year that are more suggestive and imagistic as opposed to plot- driven. One is pretty dark. The other is a bit lighter in tone.
Coat
Lady death’s dark coat is long and ragged, dragging in its train the stillborn, accident deaths, junkies, the weak and infirm, victims of famine, disease, and war, dead bones clinking and clanking, the reek of flesh. Souls are not her purview, only death’s physicality, its inevitability, our commonality with animals.
Swing
On All Hallows’, witches swing on electric currents like ballooning spiders, shifting from place to place, their belongings on their backs – potions, books of spells, cats – riding their besom brooms. At gatherings, the thinning veil and a ritual incantation, a single candle in the night, allows their company with spirits.
Death
27 Monday Apr 2020
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There was no time to administer last rites. Spirits wandered hospital corridors. They moaned into the ears of physicians. The moaning was so woeful it penetrated the sleep of the hospital workers at night. Nothing relieved the cries of those who died alone.
Lily
27 Monday Apr 2020
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A bird man watches the lithe lily girls dancing on the graves. Ashes, ashes we all fall down! He fills the beak of his mask with flowers. He points to one of the girls with his claw, indicating whose family will be next to die.
ghost
21 Monday Oct 2019
Posted 50 word fiction, Halloween, Inktober2019WriterEdition, micro horror
inTags
My ghost is unhappy. She says we haven’t spent much time together.
She complains while I’m in the bath, sipping wine.
I feel myself nodding off, my chin dipping into the water while the tub fills.
Now this is what we needed, she says. Girl time n’ special k.