When someone is miserable for a long time, it leaves an aura, a trace that seeps into the walls.
Mark died, and I couldn’t do anything anymore. The flat was full of ghosts, memories that hovered around my head while I tried to obliterate myself with reality TV and vodka.
His voice. His smile. Cuddles on the sofa, into which I was now slowly rotting.
Enough. I had to move.
I viewed houses, all bland white corners. Dumps with huge gardens. An apartment so high up I felt dizzy.
Then, a cozy flat by the station.
The constant presence of passing trains could keep me company in the small hours. But mostly it was a feeling, a resonance… the people who lived here before me had been happy.
Maybe, in time, I could be, too.
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,” “The Ghost of Moscow,” “Visions in the Jar,” and “Dangerouser and Dangerouser.”
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
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 inspired by the words:
“Happy Trails.”
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