Horror Writing Competition: Voting
 

Happy Halloween, everyone! After I post all of the submissions, vote for your favorite!

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I was not there. There was a sign on the door pointing out my absence. My dwelling was only apparently asleep, not lurking but waiting. The club-footed table was slightly out of focus, as contrasted with the haggard chair‘s razor-sharp outline. The big chest in the corner was abiding, its immense keyhole gazing more alert than ever. The little oven seemed intimidated by the imposing portliness of the cabinet beside it.

On the first day dust, falling in slightly skewed trajectories right out of the air, accumulated itself into irregularly but not randomly distributed heaps which rested on the horizontal surfaces, then flattened, crawled towards each other, merged, not entirely centered, on the floor, becoming a black, at first dull but then, in the further course of the solidification, increasingly shiny sphere, which rolled around, awkwardly at first, then seemed to have made a decision and disappeared with a short electric buzz. Just an elongated, arrow-like stain remained in its spot.

On the second day a non-geometric form resublimated at the tip of the arrow, made out of a worrying, obviously living, but equally obviously non-organic substance. After finishing the phase transition, the form began strutting or crawling or driving around the table, on barely, or at least only shortly existing legs or arms or wheels, inquisitively looking or listening or fumbling around with sensory organs which grew here and there, rapidly sprouting and atrophying again, moving the chair multiple times, its position seemingly causing discomfort, then climbing or flowing or flying onto it, jumping or rolling or mounting onto the table from there. Once on the table, the form finally became geometric, namely cylindrical, and rigidified as a white, porous column the size of a loaf of bread.

On the third day three figures exited the cabinet and positioned themselves around the table, contemplatively gazing at the object in the middle. The woman, her body a zigzag, unstable and pendent, her face distorted by euphoria, withdrew a small knife from a case hanging around her neck, looked at it benevolently, longer than necessary, and then cut into the white cylinder with a single, continuous, infinitely complex movement, so that it inexplicably fell apart into several small, absolutely regular and similar dice. The man, more wide than tall, rectangular but slightly rounded at the corners and ledges, his expression betraying gushing ennui, then placed the pieces on a plate which he seemed to have produced from somewhere behind his back. The child, of uncertain sex, overall uncertain, vague, inchoate, asked first her then him for permission with a glance, exhaled in spurts, for a long time, too long for such a diminutive body, and then devoured its meal, methodical, silent, terrifying, after which all three returned into the cabinet, leaving only the empty plate and a slight metallic odour.

After a while I emerged from the chest, blinked, for the first time in three days, stretched my arms, joggled my legs, made several ungainly steps, stood at length at the table, put my hand on the plate, felt its cold, smooth surface, comprehending that I still wasn’t there and never again would be.

In The Cold, Cold Night

You think you know? No. You'll never know, the cold like I did. Just by that disgusting, polluted river, filled with the feces of the feces it feeds, and strewn with the trash, thrown by the trash you can find all around.

I heard a wheezing, the last squawk of an old friend. Found himself within the embrace of plastic remnants of a six pack devoured twice over by now. Strangled to death, until he was nothing but a whisper. But nobody cares. Isn't that the real horror of it all? That no one cares?

I'm Sorry

An I find myself the bait of my own trap. Nothing sinister, just me strumming my guitar in the parking lot of a truly sinister education system. Who am I trapping? Maybe a companion. Thats all they-we-i-you really want. A friend.

Is it so? There she is, walking up smiling, bouncing, happy. She just listens and carries on, leaving me alone again to my strumming. Left to tears in the back of that old pick up.

And I drive and drive

and drive.

She takes the wheel, slams us into a ditch, twisting metal, ripping flesh. Ouch. It's burning. Tssssssssss.....

And I open, not just my eyes, and I see her clawing at my chest and ripping even more flesh from my body, when she pulls out my heart and eats the entire thing right in front of me. That bitch.

And I'm walking through that sinister school, the house of lies, and I see her. And she smiles, and I smile, and its all over then. We talk, we laugh, her names Alice, I think you would really like her.

Whoever you are.

She wore rose colored glasses, not that it matters anymore. And the poor, little thing just needed a ride. So I ask where she wants to go, she says No.

Nowhere? No, there. You know where, you remember. She was right, I did remember. and I turned left, I turned right, repeat the process, brake, blinker, dirt, dirt, DIRT.

Park. The sounds of insects flood my ears, while pollution floods the waters. To her surprise, I pull a knife and slit.

Her poor throat. I knew what she would do to me, I remember. She's not dead yet, just almost, and she looks confused, and I laugh, because she can't trick me.

I hold the brake, shift to neutral, and slit my own wrists. I didn't want to just continue after this, i felt like I was done. And we roll, and roll until we drift into the river, polluting it with the rest of the trash and the feces. Just like she would have wanted.

David adjusted his eyes to the dim light of what appeared to be a sterile, white room. He couldn't lift his arms, but that's ok, they were sore and heavy. He thought only to lay on the cold gurney, sure that a nurse would tend to him soon.

He examined the double sink to his left, staring in wonder at the steel tools laying on a damp drying mat. A sterling clock ticked away on the tiled wall behind him. He couldn't move his neck, but that was ok. A nurse would surely be there soon.

A floral calendar littered with illegible writing lay on the wall in front of him. He strained to read it and realized his glasses were missing. A bedside table was nowhere to be seen, but that was ok. He'd have company shortly, he figured.

Dave wondered how he'd landed himself in this place. He remembered his commute to work that day, merging on to the freeway as he turned up Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" on the radio. What he didn't remember, however, was meeting Susan on the ferry as he did every morning, as she shook her tartan umbrella (the rain has been relentless lately) or the way she laughed at his obviously stupid jokes.

Oh, Susan....

He heard footsteps echoing through the corridor. At last, the nurse!

He was so thirsty, he could hardly breathe, and his skin ached as if he lay on sunlit pavement.

Dave's expression curiously remained indifferent as a man dressed in white entered the room with his intern. The man, wearing a photo badge, was Arthur Collins, M. O.; his assistant remained nameless.

"David R. Peters, aged 49. Time of death. 6:21AM, October 27th, 2015."

"But sir, I'm not..." David thought, unable to even sigh.

"Cause of death", Mr. Collins continued, "trauma following immolation in motor vehicle accident."

David couldn't even gasp.

"Gabriel, please close the patient's eyes."

"Yes, sir", Collins' intern bleakly responded.

"We'll begin by making a Y-incision on the patient's chest, extending well into the abdomen....."

Ghosts Aren't Real, But Other Things Are

A haze of cigar smoke filled the cabin, giving it a sickeningly sweet scent, as the men and women throughout the small but lavish compartment continued to talk and laugh heartily. Memories were shared, drinks were spilled, and deals were made, while the rhythmic pattering of raindrops gave the party an audible white noise in the brief moments of silence. In her youth, Claudia had relished the chance to appear at such social gatherings, seeing them as a relaxing break from her work. However, she had realized a long time ago that keeping up appearances is a job in and of itself, one that became pure torment to a disillusioned mind. The laughing, the constant smiling, the lies, the pointless repetition of the dance of self importance, all drained her of the energy that in her youth had seemed naturally endless. And yet, whenever she caught herself mentally groaning at her situation, she couldn't help but smile. "Poor girl," she would mockingly say to herself in the mirror, as she made small white lines on the bathroom sink's counter top. It had been years since she had last felt the grip of true hunger, but even at her parents' lowest descent into poverty, she had always had a roof over her head, and opportunities to make money. Having to attend lavish parties, and now being able to live a life where her every whim was instantly satisfied, complaining was hardly something that she could explore without feeling like a fool that didn't appreciate what she had.

"D!" yelled Mike, her husband, from across the room. She hated when he called her that, and shot him as disinterested of a glance as she could muster. The cigar in his hand glowed as he dragged on it, before exhaling and vigorously waving her over, his face still red from previously laughing at a joke that must have been terribly funny. Though she dreaded the inevitable embarrassment that was to befall her, she eventually forced herself to walk over to his side, preparing herself to fulfill the nightly tradition of slapping him after being insulted. Such is the way of someone who has neither the courage to truly fight their benefactor, nor the cowardice to completely submit to them. "D," he said as set down his cigar, and placed his hand on the small of her back, "we were just talking about the time that you were in that 'car accident'. Remember?" The fervent heat of anger and disgust rising inside her, Claudia restrained herself and nodded apathetically. In her mind, she once again saw the broken man with the clear green eyes. He appeared every time that the story was told, though in a way he was always cast over all of her thoughts, like a thin but boundless shadow. "Well, it was a Friday," Mike continued. "I remember, because I had played golf with Terrence that day, and we've made a habit of playing on Friday since the merger, about ten years ago. Anyway, it was late, very late, just about midnight if I remember correctly. So there I am, watching some show about animals mating, when I get a phone call. It's D, of course. I mean, she's scared and talking so frantically that I barely recognized her, but I could tell it's her, because she asked me for something. She always asks me for something. 'You've got to help me,' she says. So I say, 'Hey, slow down. What's going on?', right? And she tells me that she's on Auxley Road, the stretch next to the cornfields, she's hit something with her car, maybe a deer, and she needs help."

Claudia remembered it all vividly, and every word that came from Mike increased her disgust. Not just disgust at him, but disgust at herself. She tried to subtly back away, but Mike grabbed the back of her dress, keeping her from leaving without struggling and putting on a show for everyone. "So naturally, I was worried, and I got there as fast as I could, and, well..." he stopped to look up at her and smirk, before continuing "It sure as hell wasn't a deer that she had hit." She tried to back away again, this time more forcefully, but his grip tightened. The two people listening to the story were either too drunk to notice her distress, or too set on not spoiling the evening to care. "It was some bum, just lying there in a bloody heap," said Mike, before picking up his cigar with his other hand and taking another drag. The man across from him laughed, and quickly said "That happened to me, back in Florida! They're everywhere in the cities, and they just jump into the street without any caution. Fucking bums. I told you about that, didn't I? I must have." "Yeah," replied Mike, "I think you did, when we had lunch together on Tuesd-" He was cut off as Claudia pulled herself away from him, causing him to fall out of his chair before loosening his grip. "Oh, what's the matter, D?" he asked loudly, as he stood up. "You're disgusting," she replied. Mike laughed, and said "Let me guess, you blame me for it, right? It's all my fault. Everything's my fault. If a fucking meteor fell out of the sky and destroyed the whole damn world, it'd be my fault." "You think I don't know that I fucked up? I do. I think about it every fucking second of every fucking day, trying to come up with some way, some scenario, where it's not my fault. Where it's anyone else's fault. And I can't. I just fucking can't. But what I don't do is turn it into some fucking gag to amuse a bunch of assholes that I desperately want, need, to be my friends, so I can pretend for a moment that I'm not a lonely, vapid insect." "Oh fuck you. You see all of this? All of this glitz and glamour that you 'hate' so much? I earned it, every last piece of it. And guess what? This is just life. It may seem fake compared to your nostalgic little memories of the world, but it's the same shit you'll find anywhere. It's not my fault that you can't handle it. And you really can't, because nothing I could ever do would ever make you happy, would it? Jesus, you had the money and the time to do whatever the hell you wanted to, and you turned yourself into a fucking coke whore. How the fuck am I supposed to react to that?"

In a flash, the nightly tradition was fulfilled. After slapping him, Claudia put on her rain coat and stepped out of the cabin. Mike laughed as he let his anger slip away, putting a cold drink up to the red mark on his cheek, and the party soon resumed as if nothing had happened. As she stepped out onto the deck of the yacht, Claudia was hit with a hot wave of spring humidity, and the rain began to soak her clothing and wash away her makeup. She didn't mind. She found a peculiar type of relaxation in taking a walk in the rain, so long as she wasn't caught in it unintentionally. As she leaned on the deck's railing and stared out at the swelling waves, she couldn't help but think about the broken man with the clear green eyes, and the way he looked up at her as she and Mike buried him in the woods. Though badly wounded, he was still alive when they put him in the ground, as they hadn't had the stomach to put him out of his misery, figuring that he would bleed to death soon anyway. Even after the dirt fell across his face and broke his gaze, he never stopped staring at her, and he never would. After reflecting for a few minutes, Claudia blinked and cleared her nose as he came back to reality. Reaching into her coat's pocket, she found a half-eaten bag of gummy bears. She smiled weakly as she took it out, and popped one into her mouth. She figured that it was a childish habit, and that they were probably horrible for her teeth, but she had loved them for as long as she could remember, and they always seemed to have a strange way of making her dark situations a little brighter.

As she started to chew, she put the bag back into her pocket and leaned on the rail once again, scanning the horizon. Before long, she noticed something moving amidst the waves in the corner of her vision. She took a closer look, trying to make out what it was. As it stretched itself up above the waves, Claudia could see that it was a human, and they slowly began to lift their arms as if signaling to her for help. Claudia ceased chewing, and her heart began to pound. She had never been particularly adept at keeping a clear mind during an emergency, and simply stood there and stared, as if hoping that this was all a daydream that would soon fade away. It didn't, and as the man began to struggle and wave more vigorously, Claudia came to the realization that someone had indeed fallen overboard. Now sure, and with a mind heavy with guilt and desperate for heroics, she jumped over the rail and fell into the water. After all, the yacht was anchored, and the waves hadn't yet become strong enough to sweep her away. Still, she almost immediately regretted her haste. She should have told the others and grabbed a life preserver, just in case, but hadn't thought that far ahead. She had always made fun of people for acting irrationally in action and horror movies, doing things without thinking them through, and now that she herself had been forced to make a decision in a crisis, she could somewhat understand and sympathize with them.

As she swam towards them, a thought suddenly came into her mind. Who was it that had fallen overboard, and how? As far as she knew, nobody had left the cabin during the party, except for her. How could anyone have possibly fallen off of the ship? She also found it odd that they were simply splashing around helplessly in the waves. All of the party goers were perfectly able swimmers, and they easily could have returned to the anchored yacht and climbed the side ladder at their leisure. Could it be that someone from another boat had been stranded? After all, they weren't terribly far from the harbor. As she drew closer to them, swimming as fast as she could, she eventually reached them and threw her arms around them. It was then that she lifted her head above the water and looked at them, to see who it was. To her utter confusion, it wasn't a man at all. She let out a gasp as she pushed herself away from it, her hands slipping against it's slimy skin. It seemed enough like a man from far away to fool someone in a panic, but it was void of details. It had no eyes, ears, or really any features at all, and seemed to be nothing more than a vaguely human shaped figure. Up close, it's 'arms' were more like tentacles with rudimentary fingers, and they had ceased their swaying. Before Claudia could examine it further, she felt a surge of pain in her chest, before being pulled beneath the waves by some powerful force. Air bubbles poured from her mouth as she gasped, and looking down she saw some kind of large creature had sunk it's teeth into her, planting them firmly into her midsection. Terrified, she tried to free herself, only to find that she was not strong enough to pry open the monster's jaws. Oddly enough, in the heart of her panic and desperation, she couldn't help but feel like she had seen the monster before. It pulled her away from the water's surface, and darkness began to surround her as she started to pass out from the massive blood loss and her lack of oxygen. As the last bit of light faded away, and her vision began to blur, Claudia took a final glance at the beast, and finally remembered where she had seen it before. When she was a child, she had owned a book about fishes, and she had never quite been able to forget how terrified the picture of the angler fish had made her, a creature that had adapted to specialize in fooling and ensnaring it’s prey. For a moment, she wondered how long it had taken for this mysterious variant of the species to come into existence, developing alongside humanity since their earliest days, preying on swimmers along the coasts and dragging them to their doom. Her curiosity and fear soon faded away, along with her mind, as her vision became nothing more than darkness.

"Not There" gets my vote, but I'd like to know if the Collins/Gabriel reference in "Slow Burn" was intentional. As well as the story sharing a name with a Bowie song and the main character being named David.

Well, done, guys/gals.

I forgot to submit my story :(.

It's not too late. Gimme gimme gimme. I can start a new thread, and ask the mods to delete this one.

I think I'm a mod now. Would you like me to just add myself to the poll?

Oops, I forgot about your ascension. :laughing:

Yeah, go for it. Edit the poll, and stick your story somewhere in the thread. You can PM it to me and I can post it, but everyone who saw the thread before the edit will know which one is yours anyway, so I'll just let you decide what to do.

I had lost sight of the road, but I continued to drudge through the gravel that crunched and shifted below my feet. I could tell that there was a curb to my left that disintegrated when I stepped onto them. I repeatedly stumbled over the crumbling sides of the road to practice catching myself for the rare occasion where something convinces my foot that there is nothing to trip over as it’s taking a step. I could not understand the fact that although I could clearly see the streetlights bleeding into orange pools that collected around the poles, I was effectively blind to anything else in my immediate area. The road had vanished as a particularly interesting spot on the wall does during a dull conversation, but the conversation was over and there was no road in sight.

Off in the distance, a light peered out from behind the forestry. In the lake of impenetrable black that I was drowning in, the flash ripped me from my thoughts. As instantaneously as I had noticed the glimmer seeping through the barrage of trees off in the distance, it slipped off of the face of the earth and left me alone in the claustrophobic darkness again.

A colony of miniscule droplets swarmed my body as the fog substantiated, kissing my cheek, clinging to the fabric of my shirt before becoming one with it. The lamps were leaking quicksand into the pools, legions of gamboge granules fluttered aimlessly toward the puddles below. As I wandered forward, doing my best impression of someone who hadn’t developed a case of selective blindness, the drizzle began to give me the impression that I was confined to a space that ended immediately beyond my flesh. This worried me.

I hadn’t even thought about my heartbeat before it abruptly stopped during my bout with inexplicable dread. My lungs began to collapse as I panicked and waited for the ordeal to be over. There had been times where I lived through eternities in a matter of seconds like this. My muscles began to lay way to fatigue, at which point I decided to crouch on my hands and knees for good measure. As I did this, my heart began to bang against my ribcage, as if it was trying to escape. The passage to my vacant lungs was still blocked off, but at least I could be sure that I was alive again.

I was sure that I was not alone at this point. Even for someone in my state of blindness, suffocation makes it easy to examine the world about them in intense detail. While I paid close attention to my surroundings to take the edge off of this involuntary asphyxiation, I developed a sense of genuine intuition that allowed me to see without seeing.

I could feel the presence directly behind me. It overtook my shaky crawl without effort and proceeded to force a mask lined with pins onto my face. I could not reject the mask as I was incapacitated by fear and breathlessness. Paralyzation struck me when the mask was able to cling to my face without assistance, electrifying not only the points where the needles pricked me but also the immediate surrounding areas. I attempted to take refuge by going on a journey of several hundred years towards the only sight I could make out: the leaky streetlamps.

My arms on the verge of collapsing, I pulled myself forward towards the oval at the bottom of the leak’s path. I could feel the road beneath me begin to sway. Rocks pressed into my palms, cutting deep into them, but I didn’t notice. What I did make note of was the fact that I was reaching the breakpoint of this ordeal as stars began to crash into the earth and danced around just beyond my mask. My convulsing heart rate had dried out at this point, pumping useless, deoxygenated blood to my weakening muscles. My stomach churned and pierced itself in my determined odyssey. The stars began to overcome the earth; at this point there were as many stars as there were beads of rain in the night’s drizzle.

Suddenly I noticed something directly in front of me. A vibrant, reddish set of fingers had entered the puddle by the lamp post. Out of astonishment I gasped. The flurry of stars that had descended on me before intermingled with the gravel and dissipated. The edges of the mask’s spikes began to soften as it melted, glazing my face over, drenching it.

Shallowly breathing, I started to come to my senses and regain my strength. I touch my face to feel for the mask only to come back with sopping fingertips. The cold of the night became more and more apparent as the eve prickled my exposed skin. Now that I was in a state where I could more readily control my body, I had lost the confidence that I had when breathing was an impossibility. I couldn’t tell for certain if it really was the road that I was kneeling on, if I was really alone or not, or if there was anything happening in my immediate surroundings.

I tried to find anything outside of the lamp’s glow to no avail. Choosing not to stand for fear of heights I continued to crawl onward to the next puddle of light. Exiting the glare and crawling under the vantablack veil, I began the next arduous pilgrimage. The sand caked my hands to form a protective screen, compressing, infiltrating my palms and becoming one with my skin as I made my way forward.

Something knocked against my knuckles before it attempted to run away, clanging as it went. I quickly chased after it and it must have realized that I was on its tail since it promptly gave up on the escape attempt. I reached out trying to find the object in the dark, waving my trembling hand back and forth before finally coming upon it.

I gingerly grasped it and began to turn it over in my hands. I didn’t do this for identification purposes—at least not initially—but to know that there was something else there. The glossy surface of the object was chilled to the point where it singed my hand when I touched it. My conquest to extend the world beyond my flesh was too strong for this to deter me. I could tell that it was broken in half because of the jagged edges at the bottom that sliced into my hand as I went to inspect the opening. The inside was moist yet uneventful. The outside felt familiar, and it wasn’t until I clasped my hand around the top of the object that I realized that it was a broken bottle.

Pleased with my success of discovery I took the opportunity to relax. I sprawled out and stretched with the bottle in my right hand. After releasing a deep sigh that soothed and unlocked my taut muscles, I opened my eyes.

On the sterile black canvas of the night sky, I noticed the sliver of the crescent moon for the first time. Tomorrow it will rise as a new moon, undoubtedly. Although the sight was so miniscule that it was practically nonexistent, I reveled in the fact that the world had grown so immensely in such a short period of time. After imploding from what I knew of before and condensing itself into the limits of my human shell, it hesitantly stretched out to include the bottle that I had taken in before spreading out over several thousand miles to reach the moon.

While I surveyed my new discovery, I could see that the silver hair that lingered in the sky was thinning out. Shadows were invading and the world was ready to shrink again. The white string retreated into itself and was almost gone when vermillion hues lit the opposite side of the moon’s sphere. The strip vanished as the new light flowed over the surface of the moon, illuminating it in its entirety. I raised the bottle to my right eye, using it as a telescope.

The moon espoused itself as two beings. Formerly aligned, they began to slowly swing back and forth, trading sides of the oval where they intersected. The oval surged in lucidity alongside the dulled crescents to either side of it. The wavering intensified immensely and the crescents disappeared, forming the moon into an oblong ellipse. Slowing down, the two beings were divided into three once again before settling down even further into realignment.

A small point on the side of the moon where the maroon had creeped in caught fire. The light of the flames descended on me and funneled down the bottle, singing my eye. Snapping upright, I let the bottle fall to the ground where it shattered. I brought my hands to my now closed eyes to stifle the pain of my right and to protect my left. The afterimage that remained in my right eye bled over into the left, leaving me with nothing but a neon glow.

When I accepted the pain as fact, I mustered up the courage to open my eyes. Peering past the oversaturated painting the flash had left me with, I saw with my left eye. The empty road I was sitting on, the crooked posture of the lampposts, the pile of broken glass directly next to me. I looked to where the moon was, but I could not spot it because of the overwhelming presence of the sun. My left eye grew weepy, almost out of sympathy for my blinded eye that was still seething in pain. My vision grew blurred behind the tears. I gradually leaned back into the caress of the road and squeezed my eyes shut.

Vote, you sultry ne'er-do-wells!

Looks like "Not There" wins.

I'm gonna give it some more time, since you're the only person that voted. Let's say the first story to get five votes wins.

Why haven't you voted? Or don't the writers get to vote?

errbunny vote.

your lady love has a story in this thread just fyi

Yes, the writers can vote. I, however, am waiting for an auspicious time.

Who are all the writers so we can guess? Or are we going off of the full slate?

They can announce themselves if they want to. You and Lis already have, so there's two out of five for you. I wrote one of the stories as well, so make that three. I'll reveal who wrote which story after one of them gets five votes.

I wrote "Slow Burn". :/

Damn it, Lis. It's fine to tell everyone you wrote a story, but you're not supposed to say which one until after the voting. >.>

I wrote one of these.

God damn it. Total anarchy. This is what happens when parents let their kids listen to Captain Beefheart.

Edit: Nice edit, you ninja mod.

lool whateverrr

Now I miss WhateverDude. :(

Looks like Ori has discovered the other problem with getting people involved in a writing competition: getting everyone to actually read the stories.

Not There - unnecessarily chewy. I liked your concept, but it was hard to get a grip on exactly what was happening at times.

In the Cold, Cold Night - I liked this one. The ending could have been drawn out a little bit more imo. I like the nonlinear style you use. I think this piece could be expanded even more to make something really special. The stream of consciousness style works very well in the piece, but I wanted the narrator to feel more. It's too distant of a character to make me care.

Slow Burn - The one I voted for. Well executed twist.

Ghosts Aren't Real, But Other Things Are - This is the one that I enjoyed reading the most, but bringing in the monster (while I do grasp the symbolic nature of it) was too much of a non-sequitor for the story and kind of ruined it for me. I think if you made it a horror story by going more into the internal conflict of the main character and making her guilt and her relationship the "monster" of the story, it could be an incredibly strong piece.

Unseeing Eye - What a pretentious piece of ****.

I like that one, it's really abstract. I mentioned to the author that I thought it was about making bread (the dust is flour, which is rolled into dough, and then made into a loaf/cylinder, which is then sliced). You know, in a very avant garde way of describing it. Turns out I was wrong, but hey, it was a fun interpretation. :laughing:

It did have a good concept, but the lofty language made that concept less effective. I know how to recognize this because I do it in my writing as well.

Maybe. Anyway, I voted for Slow Burn as well. Speaking of which, hey Lis, you never answered Pet_Sounds when he asked if the references were intentional! The world has to know!

My vote goes to 'Ghosts Aren't Real, But Other Things Are'.
Sure, the ending kinda comes out of left field (I get the symbolism and I get the red herrings, but still...), but it was overall well written, fun to read and, while being a 'classic' horror story in a way, still doesn't feel threadbare.

How do you guys feel about Unseeing Eye? Personally, I thought it was fun trying to figure out what was going on. It kinda sounds like someone recounting a bad acid flashback that they had while walking down the street. :laughing:

At times it felt like it could grow into something powerful, but it was overall to impressionist and vague to really have much of an impact. Trimming it a little might have helped.
Sorry Frown!

Keep on voting, for the glory of horror!

Anyway, the next contest is going to be a theme-less free for all. If you want to start writing your stories now, keep in mind that it's anything-goes, so let your imagination go crazy.

I can understand that few people are voting. I'm usually far too lazy to read a bunch of amateur stories on the internet myself. But it seems not even all the authors have voted yet.

Alright, this has gone on long enough. Whichever story has the most votes by the start of next week wins.

Someone break the tie. :laughing:

So, Slow Burn and The Story With Too Long of a Title both win! If the authors want to, they can reveal themselves now. You guys have all probably already guessed which story was mine, though. :laughing:

I wasn't at all able to guess which was written by whom. I'm terrible at picking up even the most obvious clues.

I'm pretty sure though, that mine was kinda obvious.

My story was Ghosts Aren't Real, But Other Things Are. :thumb: