Originally published as a Ficlet, this short piece was written to an exact character limit and has never been revised.

It isn’t like peeling an orange. It isn’t like popping a walnut. Skulls are harder than I’d imagined.

How long do I have, now? I’m still here, enough to know this is wrong, but I love my wife and I love my kids and I want to hold onto those memories and for that I need a brain.

Someone is coming closer, hesitating, slack-jawed. I scream at him, meaning to send him words like, “Fuck off! This is mine! I caught this one!” but I think all I holler is noise. I’m not really there. I’m in my fingertips, scouting over the surface of this slick and bloody head.

I get the jaw in one hand, the head in another, brace the whole thing against my chest, and pull. Something gives. But no go. His mandible waggles like a broken toy.

With his head in my hands, hair sticking to my bloody fingers, I drag him to the curb. I stomp. Something is cracked, beneath the skin. I nip at skin like it’s a cellophane wrap. I get fingernails into the crack. I pull. Fingernail breaks. This brain, and maybe I’ll remember my wife’s name.

(This was a weird Ficlet I wrote through a bad head cold. I’m posting it here so I’ll know where to find it again.)

I’m blind and I breathe fire. My mouth is full of molten rock, sloshing like soup too hot to close your lips around. I cough out black smoke, splattering out searing liquid as I do. My mouth fills again with magma, bumped up like bile from my guts.

I am buried in the sand, up almost to my lips, head tipped back, agape. I have no arms, no legs. My throat runs deeper than my bones, down to the churning guts I share with other mouths, other souls.

Flakes of jagged metal, like bits of broken rust, scrape my throat on their way out. They scrape the sky and the smoke. They make sparks, and lightning arcs out of my mouth. I am sick, sweating inside, and desperate.

This is when they come.

I don’t know how they look, but they feel light and tiny. They stand on my lips and sing songs. Then they leap into the soup and become bundles of twigs. They’re cool to the touch, for a moment. Soothing.

I swallow them like pills. Two and three at a time. They dissolve.

Then the liquid cools into stone and I sleep.

This post originally appeared as a guest entry at Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days.

Halloween has come and gone, and with it went the Twitter-fiction event, Cthalloween, which I first wrote about at Gameplaywright. (See the whole event via the Twitter hashtag: #cthalloween)

I went into the event with hardly a plan in mind, writing as things struck me, aiming more for mood than story, because I figured only a few people would catch more than a few tweets at a time. Plus, I had to bail before the end of the event, due to Halloween parties and my untweetable phone. Maybe that was an ill-thought plan, but I’d been focused on too many other writing assignments to really devote much time to planning this little riff. So it goes.

What I ended up with is a little less than 700 words of somewhat creepy ramblings with a bit allegory, I think. In hindsight, this reveals more about what I find scary, I think, than it does anything about how to write horror.

What was planned was the notion of taking something omnipresent and trying to twist it towards the macabre somehow. That is my go-to formula for horror, whether it’s in fiction or games or the performance art of running storytelling games. What was also planned was the idea of my character being a melange of the suggested archetypes (Citizen, Artist, Professor, and Cultist) — I went with the Citizen’s paranoia, the Artist’s chilling visions, and a trace of the Cultist’s lunacy. You tell me if any of this ended up at all creepy or Lovecraftian.

If I had this to do over (like, say, if another MMOSE happens), I’d create a character that wasn’t so isolated and unraveled, so that I could directly interact with the tweets of other writers, especially locals like @Servantofproces. Instead, I tried to keep my tale small (without giving up the Lovecraftian alien monstrosities).

Here, then, is my #Cthalloween story (”story”), modestly edited but still in the form of its original 140-character bursts, and with a lurid purple title slapped on it:

Branches Beneath The Silver Tower

Bad dreams last night. Yet the further I get from sleep, the sharper the images get. I remember branches, black branches.

Trying to shake last night’s abnormal dreams. Going for a walk to take in some jack-o-lanterns. Neighborhood’s real quiet.

People are just standing at their windows, staring out into the street. Staring at me, as I walk by. Pumpkins are glowing.

The rain has stripped the leaves from the trees. Naked trees arch over the street above me, tangled black branches.

Back home, where the trees seem bare, not like they were when I left. Locking the doors.

Last night’s dream getting sharper—black branches snaking against a sky of pallid clouds, and a sound like chewing.

Trying to work, but when I blink I see serpentine veins pumping black sap. I picture hooves pounding quaggy ground.

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Weird Tales has launched its multimedia flash-fiction series, “One-Minute Weird Tales,” which is planned to run all the way to Halloween. Here’s the first installment.

Oh, and Weird Tales won the Hugo last night. Congratulations to Stephen H. Segal and Ann VanderMeer!

This was originally published as a Ficlet — a bit of flash fiction limited to 1,024 characters — at the now-dead site, Ficlets.com. This slightly revised edition doesn’t stick to that 1,024-character limit.

“Not anymore, Herr Doctor,” she said. “And never again.” Behind her teeth brass cylinders rotated, clicking together to form the right shapes to transform the air from her bellows into words.

“How can you say that?” the Doctor asks. Behind his glasses his eyes are red and swollen.

“I cannot”—the cylinders catch and hiccup—”love, love you.” The Doctor reached out to her with his good hand and brushed her porcelain face. “I cannot, not, not—love you,” she said again.

Mortimer spoke up. “I’m sorry, Doctor.” He pulled a phonographic record, black and grooved, from the front of his apron. “Do you want try number 221?”

The Doctor put his plush-and-fabric hand to his eyes, scrubbed away tears. “I don’t know how many more of these I can take today,” he said, pinching the next record and swapping it with the one on the back of her brass skull. He cranked up her insides, like the weights inside a grandfather clock, and fitted the needle against the record. He sighed.

“Good morning, my dear,” he said.

She looked at him. “Good morning, my love.”

This was originally published as a Ficlet — a bit of flash fiction limited to 1,024 characters — at the now-dead site, Ficlets.com

It’s spring in the forgotten colony, when the bugs and the bullets come out. The last of the police died this winter, but Kitridge doesn’t even know that. He’s up on top of an aluminum shell that was supposed to be a factory that would’ve fed and funded them had the corporate ships ever shown up.

He’s got his rifle. He’s got a bottle of moon-grown moonshine. He’s got his wife’s picture and a badge that’ll get him back to Earth on a transport ship that’s not coming.

To the couple driving by, he’s a lunatic on a roof, spraying gunfire at the stars, screaming and stamping his foot. To the couple driving by, he’s a dark shape against the curve of the gas giant they orbit, revealed in the ragged light of machine-gun muzzle flash.

The bullets come down at an angle, thudding through the car. One of them comes out of the driver’s mouth, knocking out his teeth. The car coasts into another one. Inside, their RFIDs go dead.

The stats get beamed in the direction of Earth. It looks like no one’s listening, but they are.

This was originally published as a Ficlet — a bit of flash fiction limited to 1,024 characters — at the now-dead site, Ficlets.com

“Can you keep a secret?” he says.

“No! Not this secret!” I say.

He’s got his back against the secret door at the back of the tomb. On the other side, crafted from sand and bronze, animal bones and dung, is an automated man, jackal-headed, with accusing glass eyes.

“Keep your voice down,” he gets out through grinding teeth. The secret door thuds.

“It wants out!” I yell. “It knows we’re here. How do you figure we can keep this a secret? Why would we even do that!?”

“I, uh, sort of promised it I would.”

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