“Reflections on Carnival-by-the-Sea” • by Christopher Degni ~ Stupefying Stories Magazine

The ghosts only come out on Carnival-by-the-Sea during the offseason, when the beach is covered in the fine silt of the first snow of the year, and the sea, choppy and drear, reflects the silent dullity of the rolling winter clouds.

The carousel, its central column faded and chipped, lies still; in the magician’s hall, the mirrors reflect only one another in infinite dark corridors. There I emerge, to wait by her favorite segment of the sea-wall, where we used to linger while watching the seagulls and the sunset.

When spring arrives, colors wash over the landscape; grays bleed into blues across the horizon, and the maintenance men repaint the attractions, the carousel’s ponies springing back to life; and tourists and teenagers seek a momentary distraction from the heat.

She sits on the sea-wall, but I never meet her, for the ghosts only come out on Carnival-by-the-Sea during the offseason.

Christopher Degni writes about the magic and the horror that lurk just under the surface of everyday life. His short work may be found in 99 Tiny Terrors, 99 Fleeting Fantasies, Deadman Humour: Fears of Clown, Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives, and right here on Stupefying Stories, and his debut novella, Ghostshow Live!, about a reluctant reality show ghost hunter, is now available from your favorite online bookseller. He was part of the editorial team for the Stoker-nominated MOTHER: Tales of Love and Terror and the music-horror anthology Playlist of the Damned, and he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He currently lives south of Boston with his wife. You can follow him on FB and Instagram.

For reasons unknown the search function on this web site has lately decided to sort search results by “relevance,” whatever that means, and while we have published quite a few of Christopher’s stories in the past two years, the search function likes to hide them. Therefore, here’s a quick guide to the Christopher Degni stories we’ve published, sorted by… some arcane criterion we don’t understand.

“Jimboree” • by Christopher Degni

“Morning, Jim.”“Morning!” Full house today at the copy shop, two guys working the front, three in the back. “Who closed last night?” asks Jim. “They left the lights on.” “I know who it was,” comes a voice. It’s Jim. “It was Jim.” “Team meeting, now.” Jim sounds mad. The five gather in the back. “Do we need some new blood around here?” says Jim. Jim scratches his head,...

They give us all false hope: tickets, with barely one in a hundred making the punch line. I focus on the screen flashing the winning numbers—I’ve already memorized my daughter’s and my own. The prize? A new life, away from here. There! The afterimage lingers: my daughter’s number. While I concentrated, she slipped away into the crowd. “Chloë!” “Daddy!” She comes running....

You sit down to write “A 125-Word Story About Writer’s Block in the Style of Italo Calvino,” but you have no ideas, so you turn to WiLLiaMs. You: Write a 125-word story about writer’s block in the style of Italo Calvino. WiLLiaMs: I cannot write in the style of Italo Calvino, because I am a large language model and my code has a writer’s block on specific authors. You:...

“Are you kidding me?” said Emmy. “The Perseverance is our last chance off this dying rock.” The spaceport around us bustled with life: people running and shouting, coughing and laughing. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have even come here. Dad—” “—has days. He might already be gone. Sweetie, I’m sorry, but—” “I can’t.” “They won’t hold our spots.” Emmy looked down. “Your...

My wife smiles after handing me a silver capsule the size of an egg. My back hurts; I’m tired; I don’t know what this nonsense is, but I just want to relax. “It’s our second anniversary,” she says. Ah. Has it been that long? She’ll be due for an upgrade soon, or maybe I’ll trade her in for a new model completely. A quieter one. Less independent. The capsule hisses open. It’s...

I live with the ghost of my mother. Every morning I hear her practice her ritual: making the coffee, straightening my apartment, sitting at the kitchen table. Strange, as she never did those things when she used to visit me. Perhaps maintaining a routine helps her accept her new lot. My father calls often. I miss her, he says, and I agree. We all miss her. But, he says. I...

The field, once Sara’s favorite haunt, stood graveled and muddy, lonely except for a “Coming Soon” billboard for a 55+ community. She didn’t love the field so much as the annual traveling carnival that had descended upon it, until twenty years ago, when it had stopped. Sara closed her eyes and reflected on that year of lasts: the last carnival, the last year of high...

In June of 1986, upon the death of the great Argentine mathematician Luis Davila, the sole trustee of his estate discovered a small enchiridion among his personal effects. A prominent inscription on the title page consisted of a single decimal number of 106 digits, close to ⅓, but not matching any known mathematical constants: .33263638—, along with a request for his library...

Once upon a future, when the Earth was spent and the sun red and swollen, a farmgirl named Jacq cared for two dying things: her father and her fields. Her father, stricken with a plague of old age and fatigue, lay in bed all day, asleep; her fields, following years of declining fertility, yielded only the most meager amount of grain. Jacq and her father were down to their...

Also look for:
“My Name is Static”
“Treasure Hunting in the Old City”

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 150 words in length that played off the key phrase: “the offseason.”