Flash fiction project: one dark story per day, all the way through October, each one based on one normal thing gone wrong. More of this year’s stories here. You can find last year’s stories here, or at Amazon as October Nights.
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Normal thing: Pulling into the driveway after a long trip
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DUTIES AND OBLIGATIONS
How many times had she pulled up into the driveway after the trip, arms and legs tingling, tired, the backs of her thighs sweaty and stuck to her jeans, turned off the engine, and listened to the fan blow a few last gulpfuls of air onto the hot engine? How many times had she offered herself up like this?
She kept the paperwork in the glovebox, in a separate envelope from her registration and insurance so she didn’t accidentally hand it to the cops if she were pulled over: the deal, the bargain, her inheritance. It was written in words that she couldn’t read but everyone else involved took for granted, liquid words that moved on the page. The phrase duties and obligations had swum up to her once, and a priori given in perpetuity to.
Home was a word that she had not yet begun to reclaim; according to the contract—although she couldn’t read it, everyone behaved as if this were true—the word didn’t apply to this place in front of her now, the people who lived there, the memories and attachments she had formed with them, the love.
Don’t be so melodramatic! It’s nothing like that. What are you even talking about? We should get together more.
None of that mattered. All that mattered was the car, the road, the ritual, and passing the boundaries–ah yes, to the place where nobody was allowed to have any boundaries–across the dimensions to a place that didn’t really exist.
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Dark, strange, twisted, and wonderful – #paranormal #horror and #mystery stories from Wonderland Press.