by Editor
on July 29, 2024
HONORABLE MENTION, Summer 2024
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY H. WHEATON
The Red Sox will not win another series for three decades. In three minutes a man who lives down the hall from us will have been hit by a car on his way to work and will die in the hospital. You won’t hear until tomorrow. We won’t be at his funeral because we didn’t really know him. His daughter won’t attend for the same reason. The next United States presidential election will end in an unprecedented draw, and the House will pick a winner, and people will be mad about it and then they will move on. The world will not end within our lifetime, which secretly upsets people. People wouldn’t like the future if they saw it now. Not because it’s horrible, or because it contains a utopia they’ll never get to see, but because it just keeps moving forward, and nothing that has come before it will ever matter. Ringo will be the last Beatle to die. The bronze statue of Henry Winkler will be melted down within the century. Several European Nations will break apart. Texas will briefly secede. We’ll eat something instant and horrible tonight and in the morning my mouth will taste like styrofoam. New Hampshire will go without a governor for the longest period in a state’s history. I will not be present for the death of my mother. The repairman will take three weeks to fix a very simple heating problem in our building. The FBI will kill several Hondurans for very poorly explained reasons. It will turn out that Axe body spray is a key component for a very easy-to-construct improvised explosive. PBS will be defunded. It will rain tomorrow. I won’t be able to [continue reading…]
by Editor
on July 28, 2024
HONORABLE MENTION, Summer 2024
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY CRISTINA BRYAN
On a cool, cloudy afternoon Mr. Bechtold and I met at the Children’s 1935 Flood Memorial in Wilkey, West Virginia. At the time I was working on my master’s thesis in Folklore, studying some of that state’s folk tales. I was specifically interested in the ghost stories that so often evolve in a community after a local tragedy. West Virginia is full of old stories about train wrecks, the murder of girls by their faithless young bridegrooms, and so on, many of these tales based in truth.
What about when a flood from a dam break wiped out 50 percent of the people in a small town, including (most memorably) all the children at a famous old boarding school? How could there not be hauntings where the school had stood? I thought there had to have been hints of this—at least mysterious sounds, a sense people have had of being watched—in later years. I simply hadn’t run across mention of any yet.
I’d started by putting a print ad in the Summers County Times-Recorder and two other papers asking for people with uncanny stories about the aftermath of the flood to get in touch. This is what had happened: the big Tugstone River Dam had burst suddenly one October morning, causing vast, almost biblical-level flooding throughout the deep valley. Wilkey was one of several towns that was practically washed away. The tragic aspect that most people tend to remember about the town is the destruction of the venerable Pierpont Academy. The town was eventually rebuilt, and on the site of the old boarding school they created a lovely park with a big memorial.
The memorial to the schoolchildren is a tall, thick slab of West Virginia granite, black in color, with 48 victims’ names inscribed in slanty letters down its front. While I think it’s handsome in a stark way, I secretly think it’s in poor taste that it doubles as a fountain. A little wall of water burps up about four inches high along the memorial’s top and flows down like a shiny sheet over the drowned people’s names.
I waited four weeks for any responses to my newspaper ad. Finally I got my only one—a message from someone called David Bechtold, who said he was a teacher in Wilkey and knew some interesting things about the flood. We arranged a meeting the following week at the monument in the town park.
Mr. Bechtold was already there when I arrived. We sat on wooden benches facing the black monolith and its roll call of the drowned. [continue reading…]
by Editor
on July 16, 2024
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
. . . is now CLOSED to submissions.
We’ll be announcing and publishing our winner and honorable mentions on or before July 31. But that’s not the end of opportunities for writers to compete, because The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award, for full-length short stories, opens to submissions on August 1. The deadline is September 30, with winners announced on Halloween. You can read more about it here.
Don’t forget to stop back in a couple of weeks to read our top three flash-fiction pieces!
by Editor
on June 6, 2024
Now Accepting Submissions To Our Summer Supernatural Flash Fiction Competition
What is flash fiction—also called “sudden,” “brief,” or “short-short” fiction? Well, different editors will offer slightly different definitions, but for our purposes a flash piece is a supernatural tale of 1,000 words or fewer. Here at The Ghost Story, we really love flash because it’s exciting: It forces writers to eliminate almost all exposition and seize the reader’s attention from the very first word by building a chilling scene or set of scenes that get right to that metaphorical heartbeat hammering beneath the floorboards.
What we’re looking for in the Summer 2024 Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition: carefully crafted stories of 1,000 words or fewer on a supernatural or magic realism theme. Other than those relatively flexible boundaries, we’re wide open to all kinds of approaches—as any perusal of past winning and honorable mention stories will demonstrate.
The author of the winning story will receive a cash prize of $1,000 plus publication here on The Ghost Story website on or before July 31. Two honorable mention winners will receive $200 each, plus publication. [continue reading…]
