My short story Firefly has been accepted by The ManifestStation. It’s a simple story about a young girl who captures a firefly in the back yard to help cheer up her ailing sister.
Missy caught the firefly in mid-air, cupping her hands around it to form a tiny, dark cave. She could feel the insect’s delicate footsteps tickling her skin as it wandered across her palm, searching for a way out.
“Got you!” she whispered, victorious.
Two of my horror drabbles, The Fog of War and Everything You Know About Witches, have been accepted by Tiny Frights.
My post-apocalyptic eco-horror story From Below has been published by MetaStellar.
In the flooded remains of Old Manhattan, the wealthy stay dry and well-fed in their penthouses, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves against the unseen horrors lurking just below the surface.
Content warning: cannibalism (implied), gore, suicide
My short horror story Something’s Wrong With Mom has been published by Literally Stories.
It’s the story of two brothers who wake up in the middle of the night to discover that their mother is on the ceiling. Again.
Content warning: suicide (implied)
My eco-horror story From Below has been accepted by MetaStellar.
In the flooded remains of Old Manhattan, the wealthy stay dry and well-fed in their penthouses, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves against the unseen horrors lurking just below the surface.
The boy from the boat—the one who had spoken to him only minutes earlier—was at the window, pounding on the glass. His face was a mask of pure terror. Panicked, the boy looked over his shoulder, then down at Jeremy. He screamed, his lips forming two words that Jeremy easily understood, even through the thick, soundproof glass.
“Help me!”
My short horror story They Say Crows Can Remember Faces has been published in A Coven of Witches by West Avenue Publishing. When a bully kills one of Ava’s favorite crows, he quickly learns that some birds never forget a face.
Content warning: bullying, animal death, mild goreThe stone hit Ava in the back of the head. She stumbled and fell, spilling her schoolbooks out of her arms and onto the dirt road in front of her. Gravel dug into her palms as she threw out her hands to break her fall. Her knees skidded painfully across the ground.
“Have a nice trip!” a boy’s voice called out from behind her, to a chorus of laughter. “See you next fall!”
My post-apocalyptic horror story One Last Step has been published in the Halloween Special Edition of Dark Matter Magazine. It’s a story about a little girl stalked by an unseen shadow-thing across a post-apocalyptic landscape.
“Will it hurt?” I watched my father roll the sewing needle between his fingers, its tip glowing orange-red in the heat of the flame. My eyes welled with tears.
“Just a little,” he replied.
My weird fiction story The Salt Circle has been accepted into the Tales of the Strange anthology by The Writer’s Workout.
Imagine a werewolf story where, instead of the main character turning into a wolf when the moon is full, he turns into a slug when he has an early morning meeting.
“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” Linda said, wiping at her nose with a soggy, crumpled tissue. “I’m worried about you.”
I extended my eye stalks toward her, giving her what I hoped was a look of indignation. I couldn’t believe she was trying to spin it like it was my fault. “If you didn’t want me to get hurt, maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to deploy the chemical weapons.”
My body horror story A Thing of Beauty has been published in Beautiful Darkness 2 by Dragon Soul Press.
Interesting scientific fact: the memories of a traumatic event can persist through a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly, despite the near-total liquefaction of its body.
The same goes for people too.
Content warning: sexual assault (implied), bullying, goreThe body hanging from the ceiling began to writhe, straining against the inside of the translucent, teardrop-shaped sac in which it was encased. The sac stretched and distended, pressing outwards in all directions as the figure inside struggled to break free.
The audio production of my horror story Uncle Pumpkin’s Tongue has been released on S20E5 of The NoSleep Podcast. It’s the story of a Halloween carnival ride with a sinister secret.
The story starts around 19:05.
Content warning: sexual harassment
Warren Benedetto 