“The Ghost of Moscow” • by Sophie Sparrow

You can fall through the cracks here quicker than frostbite creeps up a leg.  

Demons lurk beneath the potholes, and the only thing Sergei can sedate them with is vodka. He steals it, because the one good thing about the demons is that they have made him invisible.

In summer he can stroll the parks, free as a bird, but now it is winter.

Sergei kicks at an ice troll leering from an uncovered drain. It grins, waves some poor bastard’s swollen, cold-blackened foot.

Corpse found by demons, not street sweepers in the spring?? At least sweepers won’t feast on your ice-hardened flesh.

Subduing the demons takes more vodka than it did before. Sergei flings some at the troll; the liquid spatters. Ineffectually.

The demon smiles.

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Sophie Sparrow writes fantasy fiction and humour. Her work has appeared in PseudoPod, Arsenika, Mad Scientist Journal, (Dis)Ability: An Anthology, and previously in Stupefying Stories, in “Angels.”

She has worked as a content writer, transcriptionist, and software tester, speaks Russian and French, has previously been paid to wander around film sets, and is now quite tired of writing about herself in the third person. She likes cats and red wine, though not in the same glass. Keep up to date with what she's doing at www.writersophiesparrow.com

 

 

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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.