Hello. I have written another thing. 

My grand, lofty Halloween plans may not have come to fruition due to lack of spirit and stamina, but I still very much wanted to do something to mark the season. So here’s a piece of flash fiction, as a ghoulish little treat.

As a perpetually frustrated and easily distracted creative person, I’m forever trying out new and fresher ways to come up with ideas. For about a month last year, during a phase when I wanted to get back to drawing regularly again, I tried to do a little sketch of the most interesting image my brain had managed to conjure up during the day. One particularly gloomy evening, I drew a goblin kind of thing, and, on the opposite page, wrote about wishing there were creatures that would come and take all the negative thoughts out of my head at night while I slept. And that’s where this story came from.

May the goblins eat away the gloom in your life, too—though hopefully in a much gentler way.

Happy Halloween. 🎃

Hullo. I have written a thing.⠀

A couple of years ago, I wrote a story for Hallowe’en. It was a decision made, as these things are wont to be, on a complete whim—literally as I was about to upload my first post on the first day of October. I figured it’d be fun to do a serialized thing, to write a small chapter to go along with every post throughout the month. And it was fun. And exhausting. Mostly I was proud that I followed through with it. Me! The most fickle of writers! I resolved to make it a tradition—to share a short story every Hallowe’en. I was looking forward to the next year.  ⠀

I didn’t do anything the following year. Mostly because Life, frankly, kicked my ass. I told myself the next year would be different.⠀

Life is still very much a lot lately, to be perfectly candid, but I managed to get this one written and done well before the season. It’s a lot less whimsical than my previous offering—more straightforward horror than quirky fantasy, but I’m just as proud of it.

It was inspired by real life, more or less. That same October from a couple of years ago, during the last week of the month, I noticed that the apartment next to mine was open. It had been empty ever since I had moved into the building earlier that year, so I figured someone was finally settling in or cleaning the place up.⠀

Nobody settled in. Nobody, as far as I could tell, cleaned anything up. The place just stayed open like that for about a month. Then, one day, it was just closed up again.⠀

I told some friends about it, and we amused ourselves by coming up with the wildest, creepiest stories about the empty apartment (it was the week of Hallowe’en, after all). It was all good fun until I started having nightmares about the place—the most vivid of which served as the basis for the climax of this story. ⠀⠀

I hope you enjoy it, if you do read it.⠀

Nobody has moved into the apartment next door, by the way. And it’s remained closed for most of the last two years.⠀

I say “most” because, just last week, I found it open again.⠀

Just a weird coincidence, I’m sure.⠀

Happy Hallowe’en, everyone. 🎃