Tag: short-stories

Week 11 Post 1: Soulmate fin

On By MaryIn 2025, WritingLeave a comment

          After, she was a nervous wreck. When his body was discovered, she was worse. She was absolutely certain that officers would swoop in to arrest her any day, any hour, any minute. Given her poor attempt at a flaying, they suspected a copycat murderer, someone targeting men instead of young women. But then they found his souvenirs.

          Like many serial killers, he had kept something from each of his victims. As it became clear that he was the Flayer, the theory shifted. Perhaps a boyfriend or a family member had sleuthed his identity and decided to get their own revenge? They became the focus of investigations, and although most of them were quite vocal that they were glad he had suffered, none could be pinned for the crime. As the weeks and months unfolded, Agatha became more and more relaxed. She hadn’t been caught. She was certain.

          And she would never have to live with such a detestable individual as her soulmate.

          The next strange dreams started one year later. She dismissed the first few, but they kept occuring. And she realized she was experiencing another Calling.

          Each dream had a very clear pattern. The first one started with a young man stumbling through the woods just ahead of her. He had a good head start, but she knew he wasn’t getting away so she walked at a steady pace – she had stabbed him at least five times, all good and deep. When he finally stumbled and fell, his hands clutching at his bloody shirt, she straddled him. She watched large hands, attached to thick, veiny arms – her hands, her beefy arms – cinch around his delicate neck and squeeze. The hands were pale white against the delicate man’s dark skin, the hooded hazel eyes went wide in terror as the man sputtered and choked in her grip. The mess of jet-black curls clung to his sweat-soaked forehead. She watched the life fade from those eyes.

          The next dream started earlier in the act. She was giving a young man a blowjob. She looked up at his face, his eyes closed in ecstasy, to note how similar looking he had been to the last one. Dark skin. Delicate features. Short buzz cut black hair. He moaned, clutching her hair in his fingers as he finished in her throat. As he lay panting, a slight smile on his lips, a strange anger took her. She pulled the knife from between the seats where she kept it and jabbed him, quick, hard, eight times total. The man gasped, desperately kicking her back and fumbling with the door, sliding out onto the ground, trying to escape. She got out on her own side, walked calmly around the front of her truck. Bent down and gripped his neck tight, pulling him out the rest of the way. Choked the life from him.

          At least five more dreams followed over the next three months, in the same vein: she would seduce some dark skinned, delicate looking young man, drive him out to the woods, and give him a blowjob. Then she would proceed to stab him and choke the life from him. Then bury him in a shallow grave and drive away.

          She began to research this particular string of murders, trying to discern where this serial killer lived. A grim determination set in the pit of her stomach, as heavy as a boulder.

          She couldn’t live with a serial killer as a soulmate.

          She would have to end it.

Week 9 Post 2: (Untitled part 2)

On By MaryIn 2025, WritingLeave a comment

(I didn’t really know how to end this so it’s a total cop out.)

          Jennifer decided to record the next night’s message as well to see if it remained the same or gave more details. Instead, only one new word flashed over and over again: HELP.

          Did her neighbor need help in some way? Or was something wrong with Jason? She still felt that it had to be him, but couldn’t make sense of why he would be asking for help. Confused, she decided to grab a Ouija board that afternoon. It was nothing fancy, just the colorful board game version sold for kids. She felt nervous as she unpacked it. The rules usually said to not play alone, but she didn’t want to try to explain her insane reasoning to anyone else yet. Still, she decided to go all out in setting the mood. She lit a few candles and sat them nearby and dimmed the lights. She sat with her fingers resting softly on the placard and after clearing her throat, nervously said, “Is it you, Jason? What do you need help with?”

          She sat perfectly still. The seconds dragged into minutes, making her feel sillier as they multiplied. The house was very quiet, the only sound the ticking of the wall clock and the drip of her bathroom faucet. “I need more information. I need to know what you need help with,” she tried again.

          After several more moments she sighed and stood up. This was pointless and childish. She felt tears burn at the edge of her eyes, and she felt surprised at how emotional this was making her. A part of her had truly hoped she could hear from Jason again. She decided to go to the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face. As she turned, perhaps a little too quickly in her strangely emotional disappointment, the board flipped onto the floor and the candle toppled onto it, the wax crackling in the flame as the board threatened to catch on fire.

          Cursing, Jennifer quickly patted out the flames, ignoring the searing pain of the hot wax on her fingers. Now more angry than sad, she tossed the lot into the trash.

          That night she had trouble sleeping again. As she tossed and turned, half between dreamfulness and waking, she was convinced she could hear a soft knocking from somewhere in the house. She couldn’t tell if it was real or a dream. If it was morse code, it was too quiet and muffled to translate for her. She could hear Jason’s voice as well, calling out for her, and screaming. This, she knew, had to be a dream. Jason had died years ago, right after they had started college. They had been young and stupid and drunk and hanging with friends. They had decided to drive out (to what? Jennifer couldn’t remember. Some stupid local legend spot, like crybaby bridge or a haunted forest). And they had crashed. Jennifer could remember the blood rushing to her head as she was still strapped into her seat, her ears ringing. She could hear someone crying, and someone else screaming. And she could feel Jason tapping on her shoulder in morse code: please be okay please I love you I love you I love you.

          She had wondered why he wasn’t speaking but when she turned she could see the way his neck was crushed, the blood spread across his face and soaked into his shirt, the glazed look in his eyes as the life faded from them, the slowing tap of his fingers as he stilled.

          The next morning she reviewed the tapes again, wondering if perhaps she was reading a pattern into something that wasn’t real. The nightmares and memories had left her feeling unsettled and exhausted. But now there was a whole sentence repeating again and again: PLEASE COME HELP ME!

          Jennifer marched across the street and knocked on her neighbor’s door. She wasn’t sure what she thought – she was halfway between wanting to explain that she thought the older woman was in danger, and accusing the woman of having set up this awful prank in the first place. As she went to pound on the door, she realized it wasn’t fully latched closed.

          Pausing, she knocked, not as hard as she had originally intended. Despite the softer knock, the door creaked open. “Hello?” Jennifer called. She started to wonder if the woman was in danger, perhaps collapsed in one of her rooms. She didn’t seem old enough to hurt herself from the fall, but maybe she had a heart attack or something else? Jennifer pushed the door open and walked in. She decided to take a quick perusal of each room and then show herself out, just to make sure things were all right.

          The house was quiet, and no one answered. As she opened one of the bedroom doors, she found a room – what must have once been a home office or a small bedroom. Strange symbols were carved and scrawled all over the walls, the floor, even the ceiling. As she opened the door, the symbols flashed bright enough to blind her, then dimmed with a strange inner light. Jennifer could hear a knocking, morse code, beckoning her inside. She gasped as she tried to step back, but it felt as though something pulled at the same time, and she stumbled forward into the room.

          Wendy watched from the corner of the room, unseen by Jennifer as the younger woman stumbled in and disappeared as she entered the circle. She breathed a sigh of relief, glad that the trap had worked. When she had learned that the girl across the street had once been a twin, she had felt particularly blessed. It wasn’t often that you could offer two interlinked souls as a sacrifice, and she was certain the boon from this would be great.  

          She asked the being beyond what it would grant her.

          And smiled as she listened to its whispered promise.

Week 9 Post 1: (Untitled)

On By MaryIn 2025, WritingLeave a comment

(I know I’m going a little all over with what I’m choosing to post lately, but this struck my brain owing to the fact that the neighbor across the street has a berserk sensor floodlight. Once I get it out, I’ll finish out the other short about soulmates, and then work on the longer story again)

          The neighbor’s sensor light was going haywire. At first Jennifer thought that it only flashed on the occasional nights. She assumed it was windy nights when perhaps something was setting off a much-too-sensitive sensor. But then she realized it was flashing regardless of the weather. And during the day, when the sensor should have realized it was too light out to be necessary. Not only that, but it was bright – brighter than the others in the neighborhood. And it faced Jennifer’s bathroom and bedroom. She would lay awake at night, staring at her wall as it was lit up intermittently. It wasn’t the source of her insomnia – if she had fallen asleep, she might never have noticed. But she couldn’t sleep, so all she could do was stare at the flash. On. Off. On. Off. Through the night.

          When she had finally had enough, she angled one of her outdoor cameras toward it. She wanted video evidence of how annoyingly frequent it was. Her plan was to take it to her neighbor across the street and complain. The neighbor in question was an older woman. She lived alone but occasionally had the company of a man about her age who would come by to mow her lawn and take her out for the evening.

It was only while reviewing the video, speeding it up to count how many times it flicked on and off through the night, that Jennifer began to notice the pattern.

          Jennifer had learned morse code as a child. It had been her twin’s idea. Jason and her had become adept at it when they were in elementary school, tapping out messages on their bedroom walls at night. When he slept over at his best friend’s house, angled across the ditch and down the next street, he would bring a flash light and they would signal each other to say goodnight. Jason had managed to talk their parents into buying them little devices that would sound off a tone at the bush of the button. They would use it to communicate while playing with their neighborhood friends, making plans and laying traps. Their friends decried this as unfair, because none of them ever learned enough to be as proficient or quick as the twins.

It expanded through middle and high school – sometimes if they were in the same class, she would tap out test answers discreetly on the floor, bouncing her foot as though she were a bundle of anxious nerves. When the history teacher finally caught them, he had been impressed with their scheme. Still, the school had decided on separated them in their classes. Sometimes around their parents they would tap on each other’s shoulders or backs or discreetly communicate to each other.

          It had been like their own secret language. Morse code was emblazoned on her brain, as natural as speaking. It always made her think immediately of Jason, so strongly that she could feel her throat constrict, just as it did as she watched the video. She wondered if somehow he was trying to contact her from beyond the grave as she watched the one word repeat over and over:

          DANGER

          Jennifer didn’t know what to make of it. Sitting and watching the video filled her with more curiosity, strong enough to override her previous annoyance. She wanted desperately to communicate back, because she felt instantly that it had to be Jason. It was too strange of a coincidence otherwise – a sensor floodlight that shone directly into her window communicating in the same way she had always talked to her dead twin?

          What else could it be?

Roadblock

On By MaryIn Prompts, WritingLeave a comment

The prompts for this week are “the road is closed” and “flirt.” This was the first scene that I came up with, but it’s really super problematic. For one, it feels more like an opening to a story rather than a full story. For another, the main character doesn’t really do anything that seems to earn her the outcome (that being said, realistically, do any of us?) I suppose if extended out into a full scenario it could work, but I’d get bored of it quick. There’s a lot of stories like this.

Also, apologies if the flirtations are not flirty enough, I don’t know how to flirt.

          Alice groaned as she approached the large, orange dividers blocking off access to the road. She had seen the reflective panels right after she had made the turn onto the road and had hoped that the road was open. But now she was close enough to see that she might have to turn around and take a different way home. She rolled to a stop as she eyed the street past the dividers – it didn’t look like there was any construction being done, nothing looked new or changed or wet. There were no people that she could see. This was her shortest route home and she was tempted to drive around the blocks and keep going.

          She gasped at the sharp rap against her window, her head swinging towards the man standing there. She hadn’t seen anyone on her approach, but now a cop wearing a reflective vest stood at her driver side door, looking annoyed. He made a motion for her to roll her window down, and she complied. Her instinct when dealing with most policemen was to turn up the charm in the hopes that she could be let off the hook for whatever minor traffic infraction she had been caught doing.

          Alice smiled wide as she leaned to look up at the man through her lashes, and asked, “I’m sorry, officer. I didn’t realize the road was closed. Is there some kind of accident ahead?”

          He stared at her for a beat too long, shining a light directly into her face so that she couldn’t see him. She wondered if he hadn’t heard her. For a moment, she almost felt stupid, holding her smile in place too long. Then he finally spoke. “There was one.”

          “Was,” Alice pressed, batting her eyelashes and doing her best to look and sound concerned. “I hope no one was hurt.”

          “It was bad, but it should be cleared up by now.”

          Alice internally cheered at her timing. Maybe the cop had been out here to remove the dividers. She smiled at him pleadingly, leaning herself forward in the hopes that her cleavage really popped. “Would it be possible for me to drive around the divider then? This is my shortest route home. I’ve had a long day and it would mean so much…”  He paused again, and it was hard to see against the light he was still infuriatingly shining at her, but she had the victorious impression that his gaze flicked down.

          “Give me a moment and I’ll have it out of the way.” The man walked over to the divider, shifting it aside to give her enough room to drive by. He waved her through, and she waved back at him happily as she drove forward. She couldn’t believe her luck.

But then she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that he was replacing the divider, moving it back toward the center of the road. A strange sinking feeling caused her stomach to dip, but she ignored it and continued driving. Just don’t stop for anything, she thought to herself resolutely as she rolled her window back up. She gripped the steering wheel. She kept her eyes wide as she continued, looking for any signs of danger around her or on the road. She thought she caught the faintest glimmer of metal in the headlights, then heard a strangely loud sound. The steering wheel dragged hard to the right, and she gasped as the car slipped beyond her control – a tree loomed ahead – a cacophonous sound of metal crunching, air bag gas hissing, and glass shattering –

“She seems kind of weak. Do you really think she’ll make good game?”

Alice felt dizzy and nauseous, pressing her eyes closed tight as she became aware of the sounds around her. The words were alarming, but she could barely focus on them.

“Pretty though. Sometimes the weak looking ones surprise us too.”

“She’s already pretty injured. Gotta be a concussion. Hunting her isn’t going to be any fun if she’s already concussed.” The voice paused, and she felt a finger push against her head. An eruption of searing pain caused her to see lights behind her closed eyes and she gasped.

“Well, then what she would do?”