Advent Ghosts 100 Word Storytelling

I Saw Lightning Fall: Shared Storytelling – Advent Ghosts 2012

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 1 Comment

Light is the first thing to go as we near the year’s nadir, the days dimming earlier and breaking later. The dark is truly rising. So as Advent approaches, flip every switch in the house, break out the blankets and steel yourself to outlast the gloom. But in all your preparations, pause for a moment, just long enough to peer up into a firmament black and cold as flint. See the frosty flecks of stars? See how the borealis coils its frigid fire around them, eldritch and writhing? What speech do they pour forth to us, and what unearthly knowledge do they show night after endless night?

Come, come. Don’t be shy. Tell us: What did they say to you?

Visit I Saw Lightning Fall: Shared Storytelling: Advent Ghosts 2012. (You can read my submission last year here: https://essediemblog.com/2011/12/24/the-escape-advent-ghosts-2011/. And yes, I’m good for it again this year.)

“The Escape” – Advent Ghosts 2011

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 13 Comments

This is an exactly 100-word flash fiction piece for a tradition of writing ghost stories on Christmas Eve. It’s an interesting concept to me, the idea of acknowledging on Christmas Eve a sinful and hopeless world, and to welcome the dawn in full awareness that Christmas day brings us light.

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The darkness ate people alive, numbing them to the consumption.

You make it yourself with stuff from around town.  It’s so cheap.  I feel like a god.  You have to try it.

In one news item, a band of children managed to escape the hell of their own home, only to run to the neighbor’s house for protection and find all of the adults there dead.  The corpses were thin with mouths full of black teeth and fingers charred from fire damage.  In their hollow eyes one could see they would live forever in a house they could never flee.

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This is my effort in the annual Advent Ghosts 100 Word Storytelling put on by Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall. See other entries there. Many thanks to West Virginia writer S.D. Smith who brought this unusual writing tradition to my attention today.