Below are five selected excerpts from the 2023 anthology. Download the entire ebook here (always free; always spooky).
Day 1: Pumpkins
Jessie scans his sprawling patch of pumpkins as it gleams like blown glass in the early morning light. Soon, he thinks. Soon the families with their children, the couples, the sororities and fraternities—they’ll arrive. Jessie sets down his rake and checks the time. Three hours until opening.
He’s grown his patch for months, speaking to its flowers and vines. He’s waited months. Three more hours. “Soon,” he tells them. Soon the people will arrive, and his pumpkins will no longer be hungry.
Day 5: Harvest
It’s the harvest. It’s when we go to the fields for one week, vacating our homes and dissolving into the tall corn stalks. Some people pack rations, while others pack nothing. They say the less you carry, the faster you run.
We hear rustling in the stalks. We hear screams of those who couldn’t hide well enough, run fast enough. The Harvested. We don’t know where the Harvested go or what becomes of them. But we know once the week is up and the game is over, we can live in peace for another year.
Day 9: Monster
The monster approaches with hollow eyes and yellowing teeth that chew, chew, chew. Its hellfire stare bores into me—its thin, cracking lips twisted in a sneer.
I’m frozen at my desk, and my best friend sits rigid beside me. I wish I could look at her one last time, if only to say goodbye. The monster extends a gnarled hand, my final exam pinched between two talon-like nails.
“Fail,” it rasps, gum popping like bone as it chews. Mrs. Hill—the monster of Walter High—has just murdered my summer.
Day 13: Unlucky
Crash!
The mirror shatters across from me, the hairbrush once in my hand now in a heap of glass shards. The mirror’s pieces stare back at me, reflecting my face at odd angles—giving me a dozen eyes and a hundred teeth. The face is swollen, disjointed, and angular as I peer at it with a frown.
“Seven years bad luck,” I mutter aloud, and the broken creature in the mirror smiles a toothy, twisted grin.
“Seven years starting now,” it says to me in a voice not my own, its eyes blinking one by one.
Day 28: Purple
Purple tentacles rise from the corpse’s eyes and mouth like flowers from soil. Some reach for the sky while others curl in on themselves and traverse the dead man’s face. His fingers twitch. His arms bend in and up, decaying muscles popping across bone. His legs contort until the half-man, half-creature rises to his feet as if resurrected by lightning. His body moves like a marionette, and the tentacles comb the air like eyes. In a body not their own, the tentacles turn his mouth up in a smile.
About the Freaky Flash Fiction Challenge
This yearly challenge, founded in 2023 by Sabrina Hall, challenges writers to create works of flash fiction under 500 characters in length. The anthology is comprised of the top stories received for each day's prompt, totaling 31 stories for the 31 days of October. To download a copy of the 2023 Freaky Flash Fiction Anthology, click here.
