Month: October 2022

Happy Valentine’s Day, My Love

~ annemcsommers ~ Leave a comment

As you might have guessed this one was written for a Valentine’s Day challenge. It was to write a microfiction about Valentine’s day, and I chose to write this dark, gruesome, twisted love story. I couldn’t post it at the holiday due to contest rules, but it seemed that October would be a fitting home…

There was something powerful about standing over a man whose whole heart was in your hands. He knelt before her, trusting her to take care of him, to do him no wrong, and she would sooner tear out her own heart than betray him

She stepped into the ritual circle, blood still dripping warm between her fingers, and made the offering. She felt the power burning its way though her, more excruciating than anything she had ever experienced and knew that it was working.

As quickly as it had started, it was over, her hands emptied. She collapsed to her knees, energy gone, and crawled to the still form of her lover. She placed her right hand over the hole in his chest, and the left over her still flat stomach. The end of his story had became the beginning of hers, a Valentine’s day gift of a life, and really could anything be more romantic.

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Take 3872, No Go

~ annemcsommers ~ 4 Comments

I will be the first one to admit, that I have no idea where this week’s six-sentence story came from.  Based on the prompt of structure, it rapidly took on a life of it’s own.  So go ahead and read the story of our narrator, who also has had something he was working on take on a life of its own. 

He answered a question, just one, and in that time he looked away from what he had been working on, which is of course when it all went to hell.

There had been a zig, where there should have been a zag, and the entire experiment had gone off the rails, as the structure he had been working towards had been abandoned for something entirely less stable.

There was nothing he could do now though, just let this little exothermic reaction continue until it ran out of fuel and he ended up with another puddle of goo.

It was the 3872nd time he had run this experiment, and each time it went catastrophically wrong, but in a different way.

Hopefully his recorder had caught whatever event had precipitated this particular collapse, as he wanted to avoid whatever it was next time around.

He sighed, as he ran the numbers to see how long it would be, and thought, that maybe, just maybe his sister was right after all, humans were not capable of forming a stable civilization.

They Came at Night

~ annemcsommers ~ Leave a comment

This weeks response to The Writer’s Mess Friday Picture Prompt is a little odd, as the image makes me think of ink monsters. So I went with it, and you can read along with the story of a man who didn’t believe, and got everything he asked for…

He lit the candle, and said the words, but he hadn’t expected for anything to happen. Everyone knew that magic wasn’t real, and he did too, right up until the black smoke started drifting up in blobs from the centre of the circle. 

He tried to reason that he had set something on fire with the candles, but the smoke wasn’t behaving like smoke.  It wasn’t ever rising, diffusing, it was moving like a jellyfish made of inks, lazily making its way towards the window. 

He let it go, not out of ignorance, but out of fear. If it was real, if this was real, if magic was real, then he had released terror into the world, and he didn’t know what they would do to him if they stood in their way. 

He knew there would come a point, where if they were as he thought, that he would have to try and put the genie back in the bottle, but that was a problem for another day. 

After they had taken care of his enemies of course…

Dust in the Wind…

~ annemcsommers ~ Leave a comment

This seemed like a good choice for kicking off October, the month of horror. The is the story of a man who discovers his time is coming to an end, and the realization that he has some loose ends to tie up. One of the many inspired by watching too much Prodigal son.

I couldn’t believe the diagnosis when the doctor handed me the paper, but there it was staring at me in black and white. I had lung cancer, stage 4.

I thought that I had a cold, and maybe at one point I did have a cold, but I was watching a stupid advert with a dancing three week cold germ saying “after 3 weeks, thats no ordinary germ” and I went to the doctor.

I had never smoked. I ate healthy, and my day job didn’t put me at risk. Even my doctor was a bit of a loss to explain it, given the type, I didn’t have any of the usual professional indicators that she saw.

To say I had a hard time accepting it would be an understatement. I may, MAY, have had a little bit of a tantrum in the doctor’s office. I felt even more foolish after as she sat staring, and then asked, when I was breathing heavily and out of energy, if I was done yet.

Apparently that happened a lot, and while she would request, politely, I don’t do it again, not to be too embarrassed. She also printed me a list of common and less common causes of my brand of lung cancer, and booked me an appointment the following week to discuss treatment. And an appointment for a therapist the following day.

I got home, and I felt numb. I was dying, and no matter what they did, they likely could only prolong the inevitable. I went through the motions as I made and ate dinner, cleaned the dishes, went down the the basement, and I only started to feel something again when I was telling Julia about my day.

She just stared, silent, and terrified and I can tell that she too is worried, about what this means, for me, for her, for us. I told her not to worry, it will be okay, but the terror never quite left her eyes. I replaced the duct tape over her mouth and chained her back to the wall, knowing that this won’t last as long as I wanted it to, that I would need to get rid of her before I was too weak. I wouldn’t want her to starve down there, that would just be cruel.

I lumbered back upstairs, and let myself feel all the little aches and pains I hadbeen ignoring, the cancer that ass slowly killing me. I pulled out my laptop, and the pamplets and I began to research. I had gotten to the lesser known causes when I started to laugh, and laugh, until I cried and couldn’t breath.

There, half way down the list, was inhalation of bone dust and it was just hilarious I guess. The shield I used to protect myself from blood spatter had done much to protect me from blood borne pathogens, though I will admit I had caught a few things over the years of cutting up bodies. It was always something small though, something treatable, and now, now the thing I loved most in the world was killing me, and I couldn’t even tell the doctor why. I thought back to Julia in the basement, and heaved a sigh. Well, its too late now, not like one more was going to kill me any faster.