 NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge
Assignment: 1,000 words Genre: Mystery Location: A recording studio Object: Cheddar cheese Cassandra Lane loved solving murders. She wasn’t a detective, but she was the next best thing: an audiobook narrator specializing in murder mysteries. Over the past twelve years, she’d narrated hundreds of books about everything from murderous housewives to vengeful ghosts, and Cass adored every one. Cass was on her way to the recording studio to meet with Detective Jack Nunez about Annabelle Stone, her biggest client. She released a new novel every year, and Cass had narrated eight of them. They tended to be grisly, but Cass loved them because they were smart. Annabelle’s books were not predictable, no matter how many of them you read.
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 NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge
Assignment: 1,000 words Genre: Drama Location: A "welcome home" party Object: A box of raisins Heirlooms can pass down through a family like blood, and inspire no less loyalty and betrayal. I thought about blood and betrayal, about loyalty and the dying wishes of a beloved grandmother, on the entire five-hour flight from San Francisco to Indianapolis. Blood was finally returning to blood, and I was going home.  NYC Midnight Short Story Contest Assignment: 2,000 Words Genre: Horror Location: A bus stop Object: A pencil As she locked the door to her car and approached the bus stop, Meg recognized the faded black steel frame wrapping the space on three sides, and she knew what she’d find plastered to the scratched and filth-smeared plexiglass bolted in behind the squat metal bench: a Led Zeppelin poster, circa 1975, bleached from the sun and peeling away in strips, so that what looked like an angel—naked, male, enormous white wings extending from a grotesquely muscled body—appeared to be reaching his arms to a torn and hellish heaven.  NYC Midnight Short Story Contest Assignment: 1,000 Words Genre: Horror Location: A clearing in a forest Object: A footstool This story isn’t long, and you won’t learn any lessons from it. It’s simply what happened to me. Take it or not, believe it or don’t; either way, I’m never getting out of here, and the only thing left to me are my words. I sincerely hope that you, whoever you are, burn these pages once you’ve read them, because the only way to end it is to destroy any trace of it.  Originally published in Sick Lit Magazine Test Subject 65382 came out of the vat at 16. Older than most, older by far, but no matter; she was beautiful—perfect, really. Dr. Gilpin couldn’t have asked for better, and he secretly congratulated himself for the decision to leave her in past the customary gestation period. He was alone in his thinking; his colleagues disagreed with his methods, thought he’d become obsessed—dangerously so—and that his disregard for protocol would put the entire team at risk.
 There are stories in the clouds. My mother used to tell me that.
“That one there,” she’d say, pointing to the sky, “is a spaceship, come to land in the Nevada desert and colonize the Earth.” We’d lie there for hours, stretched out on a blanket and looking up at the bright blue sky. Her words fascinated me, and I believed every one of them. There was a time Branson could move 50 dreams in a single night. After 10 years dealing dreams, he’d become the top ace. It was a hungry world out there, and he was damn good at feeding it.
He took a hard-right turn, leaving the poorly-lit sidewalk and entering an alleyway littered with spilled garbage cans and indistinguishable shapes wrapped in shadow. His steps echoed off the cement buildings to either side, announcing his presence to the scurrying rats and the vagrants who battled them for real estate. In my head I hear the sound
Of poetry In my imagination it is a melody I have captured perfectly. Her days are spent shape-shifting, trying on new faces and bodies like hats, switching out arms and limbs like a sweater. No one knows she’s been here always.
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