“Proper Witch’s Home” • by Carol Scheina

 

I shouldn’t have spent all that money on Witch Certification, including the optional course on Perfect Cackling. I couldn’t afford a proper witch’s home now.

For a witch needed a home. A gingerbread house. House with chicken legs. Castle with magic mirror.

After the Town Guard booted me from my camp under the bridge, I wandered along the river. Eventually, I came to a large sewer pipe emitting odors like rotted fish meets skunk. The kind of smell to curse your ex or your least-favorite boss with, or to repel Town Guards.

I did enjoy casting curses. I could get used to the smell here. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. A sewer witch.

I cackled. It sounded perfectly evil.

 

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Carol Scheina is a deaf speculative author whose stories have appeared in publications such as Flash Fiction Online, Escape Pod, Diabolical Plots, Stupefying Stories, and others. Her writing has been recognized on the Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fiction Longlist, and she has become a fan favorite for her finely crafted flash fiction pieces on the Stupefying Stories website. You can find more of her work at carolscheina.wordpress.com.

If you enjoyed this story, be sure to read “True Love is Found in the Bone Sea,” here on SHOWCASE, or “The Burning Skies Bring His Soul,” in STUPEFYING STORIES 24. Or at the very least, read “The Disappearing Cat Trick,” in The Odin Chronicles, Season 1. 

This link will take you to a unorganized list of Carol’s previous stories on this site. I’m particularly fond of “The View from the Old Ship.” You should read it. You should also take a look at “The Burning Skies Bring His Soul,” which you’ll find in SS#24, which is now FREE for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

 

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The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This time the challenge was to write a flash fiction story of no more than 125 words in length that played off the keyword: “homeless.”

REMINDER: There is another Pete Wood Challenge that is open for submissions right now. For details and how to enter, click this link.

 

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STUPEFYING STORIES 26

DOUBLE ISSUE! TWICE THE STORIES! TWICE THE CHILLS!
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• Jamie Lackey - “Blood Apples”
• Gordon Grice - “Stone”
• Allan Dyen-Shapiro - “Midnight Meal at a Kobe Noodle Joint”
• Karin Terebessy - “Bandages”
• Jorge Salgado-Reyes - “Neon Blood”
• Julie Frost - “Beverly Hellbunnies”
• Kevin Berg - “Faceless”
• Anya Ow - “Hungry Ghosts”
• Jesse Dyer - “Losing Things”
• Richard Zwicker - “Possession is Ten/Tenths of the Law”
• Made in DNA - “Something CUTE This Way Comes”
• Cass Sims Knight - “Slugging”
• Nick Nafpliotis - “The Cerberus Protocol”
• Beth Cato - “Water in the Bones”
• Don Money - “Department of Murderous Vixens”
• Chana Kohl - “Murder in the Shuk”
• Patricia Miller - “An Absence of Shadow”
• Robert Hobson - “Watershed”
• Ray Daley - “The Haunted Spaceship”
• Roxana Arama - “All Those Monsters”
• Evan Dicken - “Sunk Ghosts”
• John Lance - “The Mob”