Hello! I've been very busy. ;_; I have plans to post some longer writing in the near future.
In the meantime, I thought it would be nice to collect the microfiction I've put up on Mastodon so far, mostly from the Horror365 tag (and a couple of unposted things too!).
Stay tuned for some longer fiction coming down the pipeline.
(CW: Horror, monsters, blood, insects, mentions of violence, body horror)
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Horror 365 (12/1/22): Nightmare
Some houses bled, some writhed, some twitched, straining against metal spires pinning them to the ground like insects on a board. Some wandered along the hills, pecking at the ground like top heavy chickens, while a great waterfall spilled from the windows of an office building and crashed silently into the snapping pavement.
Too incomprehensible to be real, too real to be a nightmare.
Over it all, half a cow floated placidly through the sky.
—
Horror 365 (12/3/22): Gargantuan
The tower cast a long shadow across his mind, small and unassuming on its hill, yet gargantuan in the space it held in his thoughts.
He saw it in the words spilling from their poison mouths, in the horrors pouring from their eager minds, day in and day out.
It was just a hunk of metal, he tried to reason. Nothing special. Just steel and wires, just the locus of the desperate hatred flowing through him. Just the reason he would never see home again.
—
Horror 365 (12/3/22): Emerald
They had dressed the valley in the night, dyed the emerald hills a sickly purple-black, dimmed the sky and filled the streets with a thousand sparkling eyes pointed to the station in silent reverence, at the man tied to the tower mast, bare feet grazing the roof.
A full house then, for the little spectacle they would make of him.
In the distance, the repeater walls shimmered their warning, dazzling and terrible. The end of the world, at least for him.
—
Horror 365 (12/8/22): Machine
The generator sat in a cavern below the town, a wheezing behemoth manned by armies of its vacant-eyed victims.
No, he thought lightly, watching the empty bodies shuffle by in the coal dust. A machine is only a means to an end.
It was he who had become foreman, a monster in a long line of monsters that cast blame at towers and turbines and screamed that they were the true martyrs of circumstance all along.
Still, it was a hell of a machine.
—
Horror 365 (12/10/22): Shop
Kitty sat in the tacky coffee shop and seethed. For some unknowable reason, her boss liked to meet in person, despite having nearly unlimited access to her brain.
'Work-life balance' he called it. She suspected he just enjoyed eating scones and preening over what a Very Normal Human Being he was.
He was not, in fact, a Very Normal Human Being. He was an abomination, a parasite that invaded minds and rewired them to suit his baffling agenda.
He was also late.
—
Horror 365 (12/12/22): Pilot
He sat defeated in the nest of wires, a stack of moldy binders cast aside in frustration. Wires, needles, knobs and switches. Procedures written by dead men who's unimaginable hubris shone bright in their handwaving and dismissals.
They would always be the ones turning the dials, after all.
And so he was adrift, pilot of a doomed ship, unwilling siren tied to the wheel instead of calling sweetly from the rocks.
The lighthouse was long extinguished.
—
Horror 365 (12/13/22): Bite
Fascinating, she thinks, watching him sob into the dirt. What a hopeful little puzzle. Perhaps the dull, dim wreck of a man has a chance after all, clinging to life despite himself, willing to bludgeon someone to death to eke out a few more days of misery.
She knows she is witnessing something profane, a bite of the bitter apple of wisdom never undone. Briefly, she remembers the grief of it, watches the strands of his hair soak blood from the ground.
—
Horror 365 (12/17/22): Chimera
The effect was nauseating, like an infinity mirror in his head. He saw himself from two sets of eyes, disheveled, half-mad, gaping at the chimera of wires and legs and everything he was terrified of becoming.
He raised his arm and watched his flickering twin do the same, felt the confusion and fear swirling in its mind as it struggled to disobey.
“What are you?” It murmured, terror flashing across its stolen face.
—
Horror 365 (12/21/22): Blind
Three days it went on. Three days the woman dragged herself through the town, mind blown out, wailing and tearing pieces from herself like a ghost trying to escape its skin.
And when he couldn't take it anymore, when he was on the edge of doing something unforgivable, she looked up at him from blind, empty eye sockets and begged him to make it stop.
Well, he'd always been a coward.
It was a mercy when they finally found her face down in the reeds.
—
Horror 365 (12/22/22): Snow
Blood on the snow was a sure sign of trouble.
This, though? This grey ooze, sizzling and spitting and crawling its way across the patio…
When he burst into the kitchen, wild-eyed and raving, he caught Rita with a bottle of ketchup half raised to her mouth, red staining the jagged maw in her chest. For a brief moment, they locked eyes in startled terror.
“Oh, you met Carl?” she said casually, shoving the bottle behind the stove. “Yeah, we mostly ignore Carl.”
—
Horror 365 (12/24/22): Beast
Glass rained to the floor in the hallway.
The house made a strange noise then, a low, guttural grinding from deep in it's walls.
A warning.
What lurked outside was forbidden to enter, made to wait at the doors, never cross the threshold.
But the rules that bound them were broken now, their overseer laid out on the dining room table. The house railed against the transgression, growling like a beast as shuffling intruders echoed down its halls.
—
Horror 365 (12/25/22): Incarnate (unpublished)
The picture of misery, piteous incarnate. The man was talented at feeling sorry for himself, if nothing else.
His eyes were glassy, fixed, his face wearing a strange expression as if straining to hear murmurs from another room.
—
Horror 365 (12/26/22): Fall
She found him with the ashes of his latest failure fluttering around his shoulders, lost in misery, three delicate finger bones clutched in his hand.
“No finesse, no control,” she sighed, brushing ash from the console and watching it fall to the scorched tiles. “Now look what you've done.”
She knows he’s heard her, can tell by the almost imperceptible flinch. A phrase that cuts to the core of his trouble, she's afraid. They'll try again once he's forgotten.
—
Horror 365 (12/28/22): Charisma
An ex once told him that he was the most self-centered person he'd ever met, no charisma, no ambition, the kind of guy that buckled in a stiff breeze.
Well, maybe the guy had a point, he thought, yanking the cord on the chainsaw, wincing as it kicked to life with a roar.
Well-adjusted people generally didn't end up in these situations, did they?
He turned to the hissing, spitting demon caught in the circle of salt.
Maybe he should talk to someone.
—
Horror 365 (12/29/22): Lace
The kettle is whistling along with the noise in his head. A major third, his brain supplies helplessly. Ding dong, Beethoven’s 5th. He considers throwing it through the kitchen window, fills his chipped blue mug instead.
And truly, he doesn't even like tea, but it’s something to look at besides the blood on the counters, the cupboards, the lace curtains that used to be eggshell 45 minutes ago. Something to think about other than whatever the hell just happened
—
Horror 365 (12/31/22): Contain
The basement door isn't locked. He finds that strange, given how jumpy Christopher seemed when questioned about it.
“Haven't been down there for years.” He’d said, attempting to be casual. “Don't bother with it. Nothing down there but tetanus.”
Christopher has always been a terrible liar, all twitchy-faced and fidgety fingered, so he had a suspicion the basement would contain a lot more than tetanus.
What he did not suspect, however, was the body.
—
Horror 365 (1/3/22): Vine
For some it was an intoxicating way to die, adorned in glamor and plied with the promise of endless possibilities.
For others, it was a long sink into the bog of their own minds, their basest fears laid out for all to witness.
But the valley took them all, sooner or later, wrapped around their throats like a wisteria vine and strangled the life out of them. They were a sad pack of soon-to-be ghosts, fighting and dying and sucking dirt for nectar.
—
Horror 365 (1/4/22): Timber
It was a sad stand of timber, a half mile sliver of old growth spared by some quirk of suburban churn.
And yet there was a strange sort of aura about those woods.
At night, the superstore parking lots frosted its edges in an amber glow. No more than that. The heart of it stood like a wall, a strange, defiant sort of gloom that didn't suffer trespassers.
It was well known back then that a fair few who went poking around never did seem to come back out.
—
Horror 365 (1/6/22): Offspring
I was born with a head full of someone else's dreams and a life I never lived.
My horrible twin, he hid himself behind my eyes and cast me in the role of all his sins. To him, I was a figment, a vessel.
Even when I'd bucked my shackles, sent that horrible twin down a long fall into a hell he'd helped create, I remained no more real than a passing thought. Just the offspring of an echo and a dead man's shadow.
Funny how I'm the one that's still here, though.
—
Horror 365 (1/7/22): Chop
We swung our axes neatly at their bases, a ring of righteous saints in our sullied Sunday best, too drunk on blood and luck and victory to see how sharp our teeth had grown.
One by one, we culled those hulking beasts our fathers nurtured in their ignorance, winnowed down their numbers until the least and lowliest remained.
And when the last chop hit the marrow, our axes rang out a strange question.
One soon to be answered by the homesteads and the hollows.
—
Horror 365 (1/9/22): Owl
He can see the calendar from where he’s cowering under the desk, the day marked with a big, red smiley-face.
She knew what was coming then, of course she did. He feels a twinge of rage at that.
And maybe it’s because it’s the same tacky calendar the admin at his old job had, badly typeset, filled with owl eyed kittens staring forlornly at the camera, maybe that’s what finally snaps him out of his stupor. One last little jab, even in death.
“Hang in there!”
—
Horror 365 (1/11/22): Picnic
We ought to get out of the house more, she said.
Sarah slammed the fence post into another screeching, five-eyed abomination.
It'll be nice, she said.
To her sister's credit, the weather hadn't mentioned any horrible eldritch rifts today, so they could probably chalk this little fiasco up to bad luck.
Still, forty dollars was a lot to waste on a picnic when you were working part time. The least her sister could do was leave her damn work at the office.
—
Horror 365 (1/14/22): Faint
They never did fix the roof.
Every night, she listened to the faint pitter patter from the ceiling and thought about the night the sky opened up. Ten dazzling minutes it lasted, people flying to the heavens with their arms outstretched, with that look on their face.
And when they came crashing back down, they made such an awful mess.
It was strange how nobody seemed to remember that. All those people, all that mess.
And they never did fix the roof.
—
Horror 365 (1/16/22): Fragile
When the house burned a fragile sort of peace descended on the valley.
Of course there was still my horrible twin, old king despair on his junk heap. He'd forgotten me, locked himself away in a tomb of consoles and wires and set about his desperate bid to escape.
I could still feel him there in the back of my head, still lived as his useless thrall, but I was tasting freedom. The day was coming when that old monster's sins would be payed out in blood.
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Hello! I'm Nilly. I write stuff and draw stuff.
You can also find me at mastodon.art.