Nightmare Fuel, Day the 30th. Wrapping up a month of horrible things

Today is All Hallows Eve, a fitting day to close out the 2013 Nightmare Fuel season. IN the past month, I've shared fairy-tales, all-dialog stories, flash pieces, poetry, Keroac-style wordsalad, a homemade Zen koan, and more. We'll wrap with an homage to one of the great American writers of short horror fiction. If there's a prompt today I may or may not put a bow on the month tomorrow; we did repeat Day 19, so I'll count this as 31 entries in 30...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day the 28th. Attick Door

Day the 28th as we count down towards the end.This one is a skeleton of a real story, and a metaphor. It's another that might be worth revisiting at some point."Attick Door"by L Czhorat SuskinThey say that "Cellar Door" is one of the pretty phrases in the English language. Cellar doors themselves, of course, are some of the loveliest things you humans have made. Warped metal shedding flakes of green paint and rust onto waterstained concrete stairs,...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day 27. Dragonbones

For this one I ignored what the picture looked like and instead used the one in my head.The ones in my head are always much prettier. Chas Redmond on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/34768732@N00/19031262Creative Commons Attribution license."Dragonbones"by L Czhorat SuskinSome say that the bones were the remains of a gargantuan beast caught by the island's mightiest fisherman. Some say that the great beast was not captured, but crawled...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day 26 - Enlightenment

This one I'm not sure about. There are elements that I like, but it veers a little close to the trope of romanticizing and exoticizing East Asian philosophies without really living or understanding them. It's too easy to make a game or a plaything out of someone else's culture in a way we'd not do with our own. That's not what I intended to do here, but I can see a manner in which it could be written that way.I'll present it in the respectful spirit...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day the 25th. In the Fog

Image courtesy of Bill CollinsThis is another little bit of an experiment, and another ghost story. As we get closer to Halloween, there should be more ghost stories.This is Day 25, but my 26th posting (remember, we did day 19 twice). So, there will perhaps be six more of these, perhaps five or four. Then we'll move on to something else."In The Mist"by L Czhorat SuskinShe came back today. The photographer. That's all I know her as. She never talks...

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NMF Day 24 - Who You Gonna Call?

A bit playful with the title of this one; a callback for those of my generation.After all, what's October without a ghost story?"Who You Gonna Call"by L Czhorat SuskinWho you gonna call?You gonna call me. You gonna call me, cause I hear better, see better. geishaboy500 on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/geishaboy500/1844991555/Creative Commons Attribution license.What calls him, what lures him out, out of the bed late nights, weak moonlight...

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Nightmare Fuel Day 23 - The Canny Ones

This is an odd one.Again, I wandered away from the prompt - pretty far. I started with the image, came to a story, started to write it and the scene I saw in my head at the start just wouldn't fit. So I'll leave you with what came of this, and let you think of how you see it.Thanks for stopping by. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The Canny Ones"by L Czhorat SuskinWe once knew ourselves....

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Nightmare Fuel - Day 22 - I Dare You

This is another prompt I had no idea what to do with, so I made a poem of it. The breaks in meter were deliberate and meant to create a mood. You can judge if they succeeded. ."I Dare You"by L Czhorat SuskinI Dare you, you said. You dared me to bring the thing up to my head. This empty white carcass unfilled with the spirits the alien spirits the alien spirits of insectlike dreamersof insectlike dreamers with insectlike dreams in their insectlike...

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Nightmare Fuel Day 19 - The Heretic

Day 19, redux. The prompt was posted after I wrote the story, so I circled back. This deals with a theme I've been playing with in my head, but not in a way which I find entirely satisfactory. Anther one to revisit."The Heretic"by L Czhorat SuskinThe warlock was drinking, more and faster than usual. His name was Chris, but we called him the warlock. The only man who'd stayed with the coven past learning that most of us were gay and no, we wouldn't...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day the 21st: The Painting

Day the 21st. I'm still one behind my usual one-behind schedule, but will either catch up or fall farther behind with a couple days of upcoming travel.This one, I suppose, is another fable. It's certainly a big step back towards reality after yesterday's experiment with modernism. The image didn't quite speak to me, so I used the version in my head instead. That one worked better, at least for my taste."The Painting"by L Czhorat Suskin"You want to...

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NMF, Day the 20th. Not my Coven

This is another mad science experiment. It makes even less sense than the sheep meadow sheep from Day 10, but was at least an interesting departure.A handful of literary allusions are sprinkled throughout, to two famous American poets. It also references a very specific place. I'm curious as to how obvious this is to those readers who are not me."Not my Coven"by L Czhorat SuskinThey're not my coven. That's something I've not yet earned,...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day the 19th. A Sketch, a Craft, a Scene

Yes, we missed a day here. Partly because I was away for the weekend, and partly because the daily prompt was late in arriving. I'll catch up at some point to get back to to the one-a-day for October. Since the daily prompt was late, I took the kids' craft from our day at the Washington Irving house up in Sleepy Hollow and built a quick story around that. Enjoy!"At the Fence"by L Czhorat SuskinMadison looked forlornly at the skull. It wasn't...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day the 18th. A fable.

No horror this time, but a simple fable.Next week, watch this space for the promised return of some AV posts. It's been lots of fiction as of late. Not that that's a bad thing."Among The Greenwood Trees"by L Czhorat SuskinThe forest was even greater when we first came to live in this place. The might greenwood trees stood tall, creating a living cathedral of shaded sanctuary for those who would choose to walk among their woods. Then, as our settlement...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day the 17th

Here's another one. The image this time was blatantly horrific; nooses are scary to me because of their associated history.I was going to take this in a slightly different and more realistic direction, but had trouble not being too literal about it. So, we get another short and, perhaps heavy-handed allegory.Enjoy."The Hunt"by L Czhorat Suskin"You sure Big City over there won't cause trouble?" I tried to look relaxed, to wear my mantle of Big City...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day the Sixteenth. At the Crossroads.

The concept wandered a tad as I was writing this; it didn't end up quite where I'd expected, and likely doesn't fit the prompt as well as it did at start. "At the Crossroads"L Czhorat SuskinI only noticed them because it as raining, though I must have seen them many times before. Two young men with the lean angular faces young men have, dressed in heavy cotton button-down shirts and faded work-jeans. It was the kind of misty late-fall day that...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day the Fifteenth. In which I write real horror.

Nightmare fuel, again.No real introduction needed for this one, aside from the fact that I was inspired by the prompt rather than directly incorporating it.This is horror. This is the stuff of nightmares."The Boy who Loved Carousels"by L Czhorat Suskin"More ride! Again! More" Billy was positively vibrating with excitement, with more energy than the carousel with which he was enamored. And what a carousel it was. This wasn't one of those shiny plastic...

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Nightmare Fuel, Day the 14th

Very little dialog again. This one is a bit rushed towards the end, but I love the idea behind it. IN any event, I've made it through an entire fortnight, one story a day. Every day. This is another one in which I took the prompt image semi-literally, and had it appear within the story. Read, reflect, let me know what you think.From hill.josh on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/26756905@N07/2512503670/via a CC Attribution license."Nighttime...

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