#horrorwriting — Public Fediverse posts

Why Read and Write Horror?

Even though it's not a genre for everyone, author T.J. Payne considers why people read and write horror stories.
The post Why Read and Write Horror? appeared first on Writer's Digest.
https://www.writersdigest.com/why-read-and-write-horror

#Genre #Horror #WriteBetterFiction #horror #HorrorWriting

I incorporated a story about Bob Ross and apocalyptic nightmares from my book series. Enjoy. Free to read. More details about the series in the post. Thanks.

#GreenlandDiaries #HorrorWriting #IndieAuthor #AmWriting #HorrorFiction #PsychologicalHorror #WeirdFiction #DarkStories #ApocalypticFiction

https://patrickwmarshauthor.wordpress.com/2026/04/22/from-the-greenland-diaries-happy-little-trees/

51RA

They stamped his body in sections beneath white factory lamps.

The men on the line did not know his name, though some of them felt it move in the machines before ever they heard it. They knew only that the air in Bay 4 had changed over the past few months. It had become charged in some way difficult to explain without sounding foolish. Small things accumulated. The press would shudder once before starting, as if waking from unpleasant dreams. Finished receivers, lined in neat rows, sometimes gave off a smell like struck flint though no spark had touched them. More than one worker complained of hearing what sounded like breathing through ear protection, a slow, deliberate inhalation and release beneath the pounding of stampers and the whine of torque drivers. Most laughed it off. Factories had their noises, their quirks, their little ghost stories. Men who spent ten hours a day amidst repetitive thunder began to hear all sorts of things.

But Owen Kreel had worked the line for seventeen years, and he knew the difference between a bad bearing, a loose panel, and something for which there was no mechanical name.

The first time he truly noticed it, a lower receiver had come down the conveyor and stopped directly before him, though the belt was still moving and the others behind it continued their slow approach. That should not have been possible. Nothing stopped without jamming the line. Yet there it sat, black and unfinished, rocking ever so slightly as though it had arrived under its own intention. Owen stared at the serial engraving panel, waiting for the code to blink into the screen above his station.

Instead, for the briefest instant, he thought he saw letters already there.

S I R A

Then the belt jerked. The receiver slid on. The monitor filled with ordinary production data. Owen said nothing.

That night, he dreamed of a great hall filled with rifles standing upright like candles. Not piled, not racked, but planted muzzle-up in a black floor that shone like church stone after rain. Between them walked a tall figure in a long coat, his hands clasped behind his back, moving with the calm assurance of a bishop inspecting graves. Owen never saw his face clearly. Only the cheekbones, the severe brow, the mouth that seemed always on the edge of pronouncing sentence. The figure paused before one rifle and laid two fingers against the barrel almost lovingly. At once, all the others turned—not physically, for they had no heads to turn, but inwardly, spiritually—toward that touch, as brambles turn to light. Owen woke with his heart hammering so violently he thought for a moment that someone had been pounding on his chest from the inside.

By dawn, he had persuaded himself it was nothing.

That was before the first shooting of autumn.

The television over the breakroom refrigerator showed the same images all afternoon: parking lot tape fluttering in a cold wind, ambulances, a woman collapsed against the hood of a cruiser, children being led in a line with their hands on each other’s shoulders. The model name of the rifle was spoken and respoken by anchors with grave expressions and professionally moderated sorrow. Owen stood among the others holding a paper cup of coffee gone lukewarm in his hand. Nobody said much. A few cursed the killer. A few muttered about mental illness. One man began, reflexively, to complain about how the media would twist it, but even he could not summon conviction. On the screen the camera cut to a close-up of investigators carrying evidence bags. One bag contained part of a shattered black receiver.

Owen spilled his coffee.

There, just for a second, under the harsh bloom of the news camera, visible through blood smears and fingerprint powder, was a marking like a scratch or flaw in the metal. A tiny hooked incision near the serial block. Owen had seen it before. Three days earlier, at his own station, on a piece he had assumed defective and sent back down the line.

He told himself it could not be the same one.

But after that he began to see the mark everywhere.

Not on every unit. That would have been simple. This was worse. It appeared only on certain pieces, and never exactly the same way twice, yet always with the unmistakable coherence of a signature. Sometimes it looked like a hooked thorn. Sometimes like a stylized numeral. Sometimes like the vertical of an I crossed by accident. Once, after a twelve-hour shift, he found himself tracing it on a fogged bathroom mirror before realizing his finger had moved without instruction from his mind.

His wife, Mara, asked him twice that week if something was wrong. Owen told her he was tired. It was the season, he said. Mandatory overtime. Election noise. The world being what it was. He did not tell her about the dreams, nor that he had begun waking with words in his mouth that felt old and metallic, as though he had been sleeping with bullets under his tongue. He did not tell her that at work, when the riveters screamed and the line thundered and all the men bent in rhythm to the making, there were moments he felt less like a laborer than a priest attending some dreadful liturgy.

Soon he could no longer ignore the sense that the rifles were not being manufactured.

They were being prepared.

It was around this time that the old man came into the gun shop.

The shop stood forty miles from the plant, out past a line of cornfields already gone brown and a stand of bare trees black against the lowering sky. Owen had gone there before, though never with any real pleasure. He told Mara he was looking for parts for a deer rifle inherited from his father, which was not entirely false. In truth he had gone because he had started to feel that if there was an answer anywhere, it might lie not in the factory but in the places where the finished bodies came to rest before entering the hands of their owners. If there was a haunting, perhaps it deepened at the point of choosing.

The bell over the door gave a dull, funereal clatter as he entered. The shop smelled of old wood, solvent, rubber mats, and a faint undernote of mildew. Rifles lined the walls in patient ranks. Glass cases held pistols like relics. A television in the corner played a hunting show with the sound turned off. Behind the counter stood a young clerk with a trimmed beard and an eagerness in his face that made him look almost childlike. Near the back, seated beside a rack of black semi-automatics, was an old man in a dark coat with a cane laid across his knees.

Owen noticed him at once not because he moved, but because he did not.

He sat absolutely still, as if he had been there for years. His face was narrow and bloodless, his hair a thin silver swept behind the ears, his eyes hooded but very bright. There was something ecclesiastical about him, though not in any comforting sense. He looked like a minister defrocked for cruelty, or a judge who had confused punishment with righteousness so long ago he no longer remembered the distinction.

The clerk asked if Owen needed help.

“Just looking,” Owen said.

The old man smiled without showing teeth.

“That is how it begins,” he murmured.

Owen turned. “Excuse me?”

The clerk either had not heard him or pretended not to. He busied himself with a receipt printer that had suddenly begun to chatter.

The old man lifted one hand from the cane and gestured toward the rifles behind him.

“Most people believe they choose these,” he said. His voice was soft but had an odd carrying power, each word landing with careful weight. “But objects have their devotions too. They wait for the hand fitted to them. They have a patience greater than ours.”

Owen should have left then. Instead he found himself stepping closer.

“I know you,” the old man said.

“No,” Owen replied, though the denial came weakly.

“Not by name. By trade.”

A pulse began to throb in Owen’s neck.

The old man’s gaze shifted to the nearest rifle on the rack, a black carbine with a rail system like exposed vertebrae. “There are houses in the world,” he said, “and there are lineages. Men think they invent lineages because they stamp their trademarks into steel. It is the other way round. The lineage chooses its workshops. It passes from forge to forge, flag to flag, century to century. Sword, musket, repeater, carbine. Each age gives it the body it deserves.”

Owen swallowed. “What are you talking about?”

At that the old man looked at him fully, and the eyes were so pale they seemed almost colorless.

“I am speaking,” he said, “of Sira.”

The name entered Owen like cold water poured down the spine.

He took a step backward. “Who told you that?”

The old man’s smile broadened very slightly. “He did.”

From the wall behind him came a soft metallic tick, as though one of the rifles had shifted on its peg.

The clerk looked up at last. “You okay, sir?”

Owen glanced toward him, grateful for the interruption, but when he looked back the old man had not moved by so much as a breath.

“What is Sira?” Owen asked, before he could stop himself.

The old man considered him. “A principality,” he said at last. “A hunger. A masculinity severed from mercy. The ecstasy of force. He has worn many names. Mars in polished marble. Tyr in frost. empire, nation, defense, honor, destiny. He likes whatever title men use when they want to kill without having to call it killing.”

Outside, a gust of wind struck the building and made the front glass shiver in its frame.

“He is not the gun,” the old man continued. “Do not make that mistake. The gun is only his favored mask in your age. He resides wherever metal extends grievance faster than conscience. But certain forms suit him especially well. Repetition suits him. Modularity suits him. Civilian devotion suits him. A thing built not only to fire, but to signify. To reassure. To threaten. To complete a certain kind of broken man by giving his fear a skeleton.”

Owen wanted to laugh, or curse, or walk out, but all three impulses failed in him. “Who are you?”

“A witness,” said the old man. “Too late, as witnesses usually are.”

Then, leaning forward slightly:

“And perhaps a coward. I have seen him before.”

The shop lights flickered. For one impossible instant every rifle in the place seemed to deepen in color, black turning to a kind of abyssal sheen that swallowed reflection. Owen smelled hot oil and something else beneath it—something like a battlefield after rain.

“When?” he asked.

The old man tapped the cane once on the floorboards.

“Whenever men discover that industry can manufacture destiny.”

The clerk finally intervened, smiling uneasily. “Sir, are you shopping for anything in particular?”

Owen blinked. The old man was simply an old man again, thin hands folded over his cane, expression faintly amused.

“No,” Owen said hoarsely. “No, I think I’m done here.”

He left without remembering the walk to his truck.

That night the dream returned, but now the hall of rifles was a cathedral. The black floor stretched farther than sight, and the planted weapons rose in long aisles beneath an unseen vault. At the far end stood Sira.

He was not monstrous in shape. That was the most dreadful thing. He possessed the severe beauty of authority, tall and lean, clad in something like a military coat cut with liturgical elegance. His face was gaunt, his mouth composed, his eyes dark hollows lit by a disciplined fire. He looked neither young nor old. He looked inevitable. Around him there clung no chaos, no slobbering demonic frenzy, but order—perfect, ceremonial, merciless order.

When he spoke, his voice was the sound of boots in a corridor, of bolts sliding home, of a crowd falling silent before a podium.

You have helped build my chapels, he said.

Owen tried to run, but in dreams one rarely runs well.

The rifles all around him began to whisper.

Not loudly. Not with words at first. Only a susurrus like men reciting vows under their breath.

Then one voice separated itself from the rest, and Owen realized with horror that it was his own.

He woke with his throat raw and his hands clasped together as though in prayer.

His wife was already up.

He could hear the TV in the kitchen serving up the news.

There had been another shooting.

51RA

They stamped his body in sections beneath white factory lamps.

The men on the line did not know his name, though some of them felt it move in the machines before ever they heard it. They knew only that the air in Bay 4 had changed over the past few months. It had become charged in some way difficult to explain without sounding foolish. Small things accumulated. The press would shudder once before starting, as if waking from unpleasant dreams. Finished receivers, lined in neat rows, sometimes gave off a smell like struck flint though no spark had touched them. More than one worker complained of hearing what sounded like breathing through ear protection, a slow, deliberate inhalation and release beneath the pounding of stampers and the whine of torque drivers. Most laughed it off. Factories had their noises, their quirks, their little ghost stories. Men who spent ten hours a day amidst repetitive thunder began to hear all sorts of things.

But Owen Kreel had worked the line for seventeen years, and he knew the difference between a bad bearing, a loose panel, and something for which there was no mechanical name.

The first time he truly noticed it, a lower receiver had come down the conveyor and stopped directly before him, though the belt was still moving and the others behind it continued their slow approach. That should not have been possible. Nothing stopped without jamming the line. Yet there it sat, black and unfinished, rocking ever so slightly as though it had arrived under its own intention. Owen stared at the serial engraving panel, waiting for the code to blink into the screen above his station.

Instead, for the briefest instant, he thought he saw letters already there.

S I R A

Then the belt jerked. The receiver slid on. The monitor filled with ordinary production data. Owen said nothing.

That night, he dreamed of a great hall filled with rifles standing upright like candles. Not piled, not racked, but planted muzzle-up in a black floor that shone like church stone after rain. Between them walked a tall figure in a long coat, his hands clasped behind his back, moving with the calm assurance of a bishop inspecting graves. Owen never saw his face clearly. Only the cheekbones, the severe brow, the mouth that seemed always on the edge of pronouncing sentence. The figure paused before one rifle and laid two fingers against the barrel almost lovingly. At once, all the others turned—not physically, for they had no heads to turn, but inwardly, spiritually—toward that touch, as brambles turn to light. Owen woke with his heart hammering so violently he thought for a moment that someone had been pounding on his chest from the inside.

By dawn, he had persuaded himself it was nothing.

That was before the first shooting of autumn.

The television over the breakroom refrigerator showed the same images all afternoon: parking lot tape fluttering in a cold wind, ambulances, a woman collapsed against the hood of a cruiser, children being led in a line with their hands on each other’s shoulders. The model name of the rifle was spoken and respoken by anchors with grave expressions and professionally moderated sorrow. Owen stood among the others holding a paper cup of coffee gone lukewarm in his hand. Nobody said much. A few cursed the killer. A few muttered about mental illness. One man began, reflexively, to complain about how the media would twist it, but even he could not summon conviction. On the screen the camera cut to a close-up of investigators carrying evidence bags. One bag contained part of a shattered black receiver.

Owen spilled his coffee.

There, just for a second, under the harsh bloom of the news camera, visible through blood smears and fingerprint powder, was a marking like a scratch or flaw in the metal. A tiny hooked incision near the serial block. Owen had seen it before. Three days earlier, at his own station, on a piece he had assumed defective and sent back down the line.

He told himself it could not be the same one.

But after that he began to see the mark everywhere.

Not on every unit. That would have been simple. This was worse. It appeared only on certain pieces, and never exactly the same way twice, yet always with the unmistakable coherence of a signature. Sometimes it looked like a hooked thorn. Sometimes like a stylized numeral. Sometimes like the vertical of an I crossed by accident. Once, after a twelve-hour shift, he found himself tracing it on a fogged bathroom mirror before realizing his finger had moved without instruction from his mind.

His wife, Mara, asked him twice that week if something was wrong. Owen told her he was tired. It was the season, he said. Mandatory overtime. Election noise. The world being what it was. He did not tell her about the dreams, nor that he had begun waking with words in his mouth that felt old and metallic, as though he had been sleeping with bullets under his tongue. He did not tell her that at work, when the riveters screamed and the line thundered and all the men bent in rhythm to the making, there were moments he felt less like a laborer than a priest attending some dreadful liturgy.

Soon he could no longer ignore the sense that the rifles were not being manufactured.

They were being prepared.

It was around this time that the old man came into the gun shop.

The shop stood forty miles from the plant, out past a line of cornfields already gone brown and a stand of bare trees black against the lowering sky. Owen had gone there before, though never with any real pleasure. He told Mara he was looking for parts for a deer rifle inherited from his father, which was not entirely false. In truth he had gone because he had started to feel that if there was an answer anywhere, it might lie not in the factory but in the places where the finished bodies came to rest before entering the hands of their owners. If there was a haunting, perhaps it deepened at the point of choosing.

The bell over the door gave a dull, funereal clatter as he entered. The shop smelled of old wood, solvent, rubber mats, and a faint undernote of mildew. Rifles lined the walls in patient ranks. Glass cases held pistols like relics. A television in the corner played a hunting show with the sound turned off. Behind the counter stood a young clerk with a trimmed beard and an eagerness in his face that made him look almost childlike. Near the back, seated beside a rack of black semi-automatics, was an old man in a dark coat with a cane laid across his knees.

Owen noticed him at once not because he moved, but because he did not.

He sat absolutely still, as if he had been there for years. His face was narrow and bloodless, his hair a thin silver swept behind the ears, his eyes hooded but very bright. There was something ecclesiastical about him, though not in any comforting sense. He looked like a minister defrocked for cruelty, or a judge who had confused punishment with righteousness so long ago he no longer remembered the distinction.

The clerk asked if Owen needed help.

“Just looking,” Owen said.

The old man smiled without showing teeth.

“That is how it begins,” he murmured.

Owen turned. “Excuse me?”

The clerk either had not heard him or pretended not to. He busied himself with a receipt printer that had suddenly begun to chatter.

The old man lifted one hand from the cane and gestured toward the rifles behind him.

“Most people believe they choose these,” he said. His voice was soft but had an odd carrying power, each word landing with careful weight. “But objects have their devotions too. They wait for the hand fitted to them. They have a patience greater than ours.”

Owen should have left then. Instead he found himself stepping closer.

“I know you,” the old man said.

“No,” Owen replied, though the denial came weakly.

“Not by name. By trade.”

A pulse began to throb in Owen’s neck.

The old man’s gaze shifted to the nearest rifle on the rack, a black carbine with a rail system like exposed vertebrae. “There are houses in the world,” he said, “and there are lineages. Men think they invent lineages because they stamp their trademarks into steel. It is the other way round. The lineage chooses its workshops. It passes from forge to forge, flag to flag, century to century. Sword, musket, repeater, carbine. Each age gives it the body it deserves.”

Owen swallowed. “What are you talking about?”

At that the old man looked at him fully, and the eyes were so pale they seemed almost colorless.

“I am speaking,” he said, “of Sira.”

The name entered Owen like cold water poured down the spine.

He took a step backward. “Who told you that?”

The old man’s smile broadened very slightly. “He did.”

From the wall behind him came a soft metallic tick, as though one of the rifles had shifted on its peg.

The clerk looked up at last. “You okay, sir?”

Owen glanced toward him, grateful for the interruption, but when he looked back the old man had not moved by so much as a breath.

“What is Sira?” Owen asked, before he could stop himself.

The old man considered him. “A principality,” he said at last. “A hunger. A masculinity severed from mercy. The ecstasy of force. He has worn many names. Mars in polished marble. Tyr in frost. empire, nation, defense, honor, destiny. He likes whatever title men use when they want to kill without having to call it killing.”

Outside, a gust of wind struck the building and made the front glass shiver in its frame.

“He is not the gun,” the old man continued. “Do not make that mistake. The gun is only his favored mask in your age. He resides wherever metal extends grievance faster than conscience. But certain forms suit him especially well. Repetition suits him. Modularity suits him. Civilian devotion suits him. A thing built not only to fire, but to signify. To reassure. To threaten. To complete a certain kind of broken man by giving his fear a skeleton.”

Owen wanted to laugh, or curse, or walk out, but all three impulses failed in him. “Who are you?”

“A witness,” said the old man. “Too late, as witnesses usually are.”

Then, leaning forward slightly:

“And perhaps a coward. I have seen him before.”

The shop lights flickered. For one impossible instant every rifle in the place seemed to deepen in color, black turning to a kind of abyssal sheen that swallowed reflection. Owen smelled hot oil and something else beneath it—something like a battlefield after rain.

“When?” he asked.

The old man tapped the cane once on the floorboards.

“Whenever men discover that industry can manufacture destiny.”

The clerk finally intervened, smiling uneasily. “Sir, are you shopping for anything in particular?”

Owen blinked. The old man was simply an old man again, thin hands folded over his cane, expression faintly amused.

“No,” Owen said hoarsely. “No, I think I’m done here.”

He left without remembering the walk to his truck.

That night the dream returned, but now the hall of rifles was a cathedral. The black floor stretched farther than sight, and the planted weapons rose in long aisles beneath an unseen vault. At the far end stood Sira.

He was not monstrous in shape. That was the most dreadful thing. He possessed the severe beauty of authority, tall and lean, clad in something like a military coat cut with liturgical elegance. His face was gaunt, his mouth composed, his eyes dark hollows lit by a disciplined fire. He looked neither young nor old. He looked inevitable. Around him there clung no chaos, no slobbering demonic frenzy, but order—perfect, ceremonial, merciless order.

When he spoke, his voice was the sound of boots in a corridor, of bolts sliding home, of a crowd falling silent before a podium.

You have helped build my chapels, he said.

Owen tried to run, but in dreams one rarely runs well.

The rifles all around him began to whisper.

Not loudly. Not with words at first. Only a susurrus like men reciting vows under their breath.

Then one voice separated itself from the rest, and Owen realized with horror that it was his own.

He woke with his throat raw and his hands clasped together as though in prayer.

His wife was already up.

He could hear the TV in the kitchen serving up the news.

There had been another shooting.

🖤 February's darkness found its champion.

Nenad Mitrović's The Hangman — a story that redefined how a childhood game ends.

Congratulations to every writer who dragged us into the dark this month. You never disappoint. 🕯️

#DarkDescent #HorrorWriting

Shaving: A Greenland Diaries Flash Fiction

Nigel couldn’t believe his beard had gotten this long.

It was down to his chest, tangled and frizzy. It was black, but almost brown at its feathery edges. He could hear his father yelling at him to trim it, his high, almost husky voice echoing in his head. His father was ex military. He loved the clean shaven look and forced Nigel to follow that hairless motif, even though Nigel hadn’t picked up a weapon until the Drum started. Now, he always had one with him. The ravaged green world demanded it, even with the Drum destroyed and the Unnamed no longer hunting him at night.

Nigel wondered if his father was still alive in the nursing home in Saint Louis Park. He had barely been alive before the Drum. It wouldn’t make any sense for him to be spared.

Nigel had been lucky to hide in his Golden Valley home for most of the apocalypse. He had left for a few weeks to join survivors fighting an Unnamed by a lake that kept attacking them. It had been a hard fought battle. Only Nigel and a few others survived. None of them had the appetite for further confrontations with the Unnamed, and they all retreated to their former hiding spots. Those had been the last people he’d spoken to, except for a band of soldiers passing through who told him the Drum was destroyed, and the Unnamed were nonviolent unless attacked.

Nigel felt his dark, reflectionless face. His features were gaunt, weathered by a lack of nutritious food. His cheeks were flat, his nose large, his forehead dry. His lips were cracked and bloody in places. The weather had been fine. It was the fear eroding his flesh. The constant worry of the Unnamed returning, or a crazed Reanimated storming through the neighborhood.

Slowly, above his white bathroom sink, he began to trim his beard. There was no electricity for his razor, so he resorted to a pair of orange handled scissors he kept in his office for trimming documents. They were sharp, but loud as they crushed the fibers between its blades. In minutes, most of his beard was reduced to a prickly edge beneath his fingers. He sighed.

“I guess it’s time. They said it was safe.”

Ahead of him hung a wool blanket, yellow and brown, duct taped to the wall in miscellaneous streaks of silver adhesive. It dangled just above the sink.

It blocked the mirror.

He’d put it up during the first week, when he noticed the shadows watching him. Now, with the Drum destroyed, survivors passing through told him mirrors and reflections were back to normal. They no longer held phantoms.

He slowly reached for the fabric, then stopped.

“I can’t do it.”

He walked out of the bathroom with a shrug.

“I can’t believe it’s okay.”

I really enjoy writing about these quieter moments in the Greenland Diaries, where characters are learning to live again after a horrifying ordeal that shook the foundations of humanity. These bits of flash fiction give me ample opportunity for it. You can learn more about the mainline series right here. Thank you for reading!

#author #blogging #bodyHorror #books #cosmicHorror #darkFantasy #darkFiction #decay #fantasy #fiction #flashFiction #grief #hauntedLandscapes #horror #horrorWriting #identity #isolation #liminalSpaces #machines #memory #monsters #obsession #patrickWMarsh #poeticProse #prosePoetry #psychologicalHorror #shortStories #speculativeFiction #survival #teraryHorror #theGreenlandDiaries #transformation #trauma #weirdFiction #writing

I Can’t Leave: A Greenland Diaries Flash Fiction

Rob had memorized the pattern of abandoned cars in the parking lot outside the building. A red van, a blue truck, a few white sedans, silent and sun faded, lay scattered across the velvet sheet of greenery in the basin around the office tower he’d been hiding in. He’d been fixing a boiler in the basement when the Drum began. Most of the building was empty that first night. Everyone had already left for the day. Only a handful were torn apart beneath the Unnamed’s obscene claws.

And then the office was empty.

Except for Rob.

He had always imagined himself different at the end of the world. At six foot five, all elbows and height, with an unkempt beard dropping to his chest and a perpetually worn Minnesota Twins cap, he’d figured he’d look the part. He had thought of himself as stereotypically male, chew, flannels, and a quiet, lumbering confidence. But when the monsters arrived and stalked the hallways, he learned quickly how fragile that image was. Back on his grandfather’s farm, he and his friends in their local anti government militia had joked that if the world ever collapsed, they’d be ready.

But once the Unnamed descended and began mutilating and resurrecting their victims, the only thing Rob grew adept at was hiding.

For someone so tall and broad, sneaking through the office should have been impossible, yet he’d shaped himself to its shadows. He learned to bend beneath desks, wedge between bookshelves, flatten against cubicles. Even when the Reanimated drifted through, he found ways to slip past them, though other survivors told him not to fear them. Those survivors were nothing like him. They weren’t afraid of the shadows. They fought them day and night. He’d heard their skirmishes echoing through the Drum. Even now, with it finally over, the night outside carried only wind, insects, and the soft groan of the building settling.

How were they so brave?

A few survivors had passed through recently and told him he could go home, or even find work with the Reestablishment. But he couldn’t force himself to leave the gray block of the office. Every time he packed his few supplies, slung the rifle he’d taken off a dead soldier, and started toward home, he barely made it a few blocks. A shadow, a rattle of debris, a shift in the wind, anything could spook him, and he’d sprint back to the familiar corners of the office floor.

Day or night didn’t matter.

He just couldn’t leave.

Thank you for reading my flash fiction from the Greenland Diaries. In this story, I wanted to show a character you might expect to be strong because of how they postured their identity, but when the apocalypse appeared they realized it was all an image without integrity. They weren’t actually built for the conflict they thought they were seeking. Monsters are an excellent mirror.

#author #blogging #bodyHorror #books #cosmicHorror #darkFantasy #darkFiction #decay #fantasy #fiction #flashFiction #grief #hauntedLandscapes #horror #horrorWriting #identity #isolation #liminalSpaces #literaryHorror #machines #memory #monsters #obsession #patrickWMarsh #poeticProse #prosePoetry #psychologicalHorror #shortStories #speculativeFiction #survival #theGreenlandDiaries #transformation #trauma #weirdFiction #writing

I registered for this course just now. I’ve been eyeing it for a while. I hope it’s good! https://www.unb.ca/cel/enrichment/leisure-learning/writing-horror-online.html #HorrorWriting #WritingClass #Horror #WritingCommunity