Cam and Becca begin the interactive activity. Signs flicker above the first three-pronged fork they encounter.
red // blue // WHITE
blade // CLOUD // pool
Doors click. Hallways lead to new choices. Farther Galaxy promised up to twenty-one doors, depending on selections. Everything’s identical…
BONE // wood // metal
It promised thrills beyond belief.
PAGE // wheel // hammer
“I’m so ready for the bar.”
staff // static // BIRDSONG
Cam stumbles into the parking lot. Jogs back to the entrance. “Where’s the waiting room? I can’t find my girlfriend.”
“Did you read the contract?” the gum-popping clerk asks.
Scrolling through the document, Cam discovers the fine print:
Participate at your own risk! This attraction contains one-way portals that may reroute you to less-populated planets! No returns! No exceptions!
They’ve always said they know each other better than they know themselves.
Heart racing, Cam opens his wallet.
“I’ll take another ticket.”
A native Floridian, C. L. Sidell grew up playing with toads in the rain and indulging in speculative fiction. Her work appears in Baffling, The Cosmic Background, Dark Moments, Dread Machine, Factor Four Magazine, Impossible Worlds, Martian Magazine, Stupefying Stories, Weird Christmas, and more. She’s thrilled to share that her novel, Repetition, will be released by Graveside Press on July 4, 2025. You can find her on various social media platforms @sidellwrites
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Go ahead. Kiss the frog. What could it hurt?
She’d discarded everything after the funeral, except his phone…
Carrie and Vanessa just wanted to find a good spooky story
to tell on Halloween. They got more than they bargained for…
Things planted in the offseason here
grow up real different, they truly do.
Some places can only be found when you’re lost.
“I don’t need an umbrella,” you think.
Then it starts to rain…
The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. For each contest 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 phrase:
“Happy Trails.”
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