WINNER, Winter 2025
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY KYLE PLACET
The last time I saw my sister was at a family dinner where she was showing off her new boyfriend. I remembered thinking that this was the first guy she had brought around who actually seemed to fit her. She seemed happy.
She went missing in the spring. The first real rain to break the drought had come that winter, which led to a wave of wildflowers bursting from the ground, painting the hills like pastels. She vanished with the changing season and the flowers continued to bloom like nothing had happened.
I had a dream that she wandered into the hills to enjoy their beauty and lost all sense of time and of self and forgot about her home and her life and couldn’t come back. Standing at the foot of the hills, I watched her go, calling her name. But she ignored me and kept ascending until she was out of sight.
It hit everybody hard. The boyfriend especially. The poor guy was the number one suspect in her disappearance, too. How can you properly mourn someone when you’re being blamed for what happened to them? My mother never really stopped thinking he had something to do with it.
She was declared legally dead a little over a year later. For a while it still remained hard not to think that one day she would just wander on home and everything would be all right again, simple as that. I finally understood that wasn’t going to happen.
I felt lost. Life going forward did not seem to make sense. I would never even get to know why.
I became friends with the boyfriend, out of mutual grief. We helped each other through our loss. Told each other memories of her and made it seem like she wasn’t fully gone. We started dating for a bit but that didn’t last. We could just never feel comfortable together.
He showed me a place that had been special to her. A short hike through the woods and you found yourself at an abandoned railroad station. All that remained was a wooden platform, a small boarded-up ticket office, and a bench. You could hardly see the tracks for all the overgrown greenery. She had found it and had loved its natural beauty and its melancholic serenity. It was where she went when she was stressed and wanted to get away from the world. Now it was where he went to try to feel close to her.
He disappeared in the fall. We had been rapidly growing apart for some time, and at first I thought he had simply left town to start somewhere new, but I learned from a friend of a friend that no one knew where he’d gone. I felt numb to the news. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel worse. It just seemed inevitable. Then late one afternoon I walked through the woods to the old station.
Winter had stripped the place of much of its magic, with the surrounding growth reduced to a hopeless snarl of grasping, dark twigs. The ruins no longer inspired the nostalgic serenity connecting you to the past. All that had been replaced by the creeping unease of something that should have stayed lost.
I didn’t know if I’d ever liked the place as much as he did, even when it was beautiful. Being there had always felt like visiting her grave—in fact, that was why I had come that day. To talk to her. To say goodbye. My life had become a mess and I needed to move on or die.
I had only meant to stay an hour, but I couldn’t pull myself away. I reminisced about my lost sibling and spoke to her in imagined conversations that we never got to have. From time to time, tears ran down my cheeks as if someone were turning a faucet on and off inside my skull. Each time I felt like I should leave, I found myself unable to go. Because I knew that when I left, I would be leaving her behind. And then another thought would occur. Another memory. Another thing to say.
Soon the sun had fallen behind the hills and the distant mountains, and the only light left was the hazy dregs of the dying day, and the rising moon. I finally knew the time had come, and that I never would come back. I said one last goodbye, and got up to go.
Just then I sensed something large approaching. I turned and stared down the overgrown rail tracks through the darkening corridor of shadowy trees. A train was coming, rumbling and snapping through branches and fallen deadwood. As the dark engine drew closer, what little color was left in the day faded away until my eyes were almost seeing in black and white. As it continued to approach, I realized that I had also gone deaf. I could not hear the breaking branches, the rumble of the engine, the wind rattling in the trees, nothing. The silence was strangely overwhelming. Almost painful.
It wasn’t fear that held me there, kept me watching, as that train crawled into the station. I was sure it had also passed through here on the night she disappeared. Her missing boyfriend must have seen it, too.
The train shuddered to a stop, its passenger cars lined up with the platform. A few seconds later, the doors silently slid open.
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Kyle Placet is a writer and library worker living on California’s central coast. He’s a lifelong fan of horror, fantasy, and scifi, and likes to spend his free time doing scary movie nights with friends and running Dungeons and Dragons. He was last published in Pilcrow & Dagger magazine.
