Frankennovel.

She’d gone missing one Sunday morning. Her husband had woken up to find an empty kitchen, and he’d thrown a fit and called her name, angrily, a bunch of times.

She didn’t show. Neither did she make the coffee that morning.

The husband called her cellphone and it rang shrilly, indicating it was somewhere around the house. He looked around and found it lying on the couch. And there was no sign of her.

He knew nothing about his wife. They’d been dating for two years and had only gotten married six months ago, but he knew nothing about her. He knew nothing about what she liked, or what her favorite color was, or what perfume she wore. He’d never made the effort to get to know her, really. To him, she was a waste of space, a spineless creature who only lived off his money, who did nothing constructive. But she also came from money herself, which was precisely why he’d married her in the first place, despite having fallen out of love with her months ago.

He made himself some coffee and started walking around the house. The silence was nice. Padded. Comforting. It felt so much nicer than having her yell at him constantly.

I hope she stays missing, he thought, sitting down on the couch. Something poked him in the side. It was a hard-bound leather notebook. He opened it and realized that it actually had stuff written on the inside in his wife’s handwriting. She seemed to have been penning down a story. Intrigued, he started reading. It was the story of an unhappy marriage between a corporate guy and a housewife who seemed to have a habit of cutting herself.

He winced at the gory descriptions of the woman cutting herself open and sewing herself back together. Every time the man made her feel small and insignificant, she cut herself deeper.

The story ended rather abruptly with the woman and the man in a verbal tussle. The woman seemed to be hiding something behind her back…

He was shocked when a woman – the same woman in the story – rose out of the pages of the notebook and stabbed him multiple times. The last thing he saw was the woman stepping back into the pages of the notebook and closing it behind her.

50 Word Story: Vegan

Read the first part here.

Mia had recently gone vegan, and had promptly grown as an influencer.

Unfortunately, Shay had caught her eating bacon at breakfast the other day.

“Thought you were vegan.”

“I am, for the ‘Gram,” Mia smirked, posting a photo of her milkshake to her feed. “Hashtag Vegan. Shay, go like.”

50 Word Story: Milkshake

“Mia, look I got you a vegan milkshake! It’s yum, I tried it the other day.”

“Ooh, thanks Shay!”

It would be the last time Mia ever spoke again. By the time the rat poison showed up on the autopsy results, Shay had already left town.

Short: The Hotel

Sabine was twenty when she got married. There were rumors that she had actually been forced into marrying Pierre, who was eighteen years her senior.

He was wealthy and Sabine’s mother wanted to get rid of her anyway.

Sabine was a vision in her beautiful white gown, which sparkled against the lavish walls of the big fancy hotel ballroom. Nobody noticed the desperation and pain in her eyes. Everyone was too busy marveling at Sabine’s wonderful luck and Pierre’s expensive taste.

No one knew when the fire started. The alarm never went off. By the time the firefighters got to the scene, the place had already burned down.

Fifteen years have passed since. They say if you drive down that road in the wee hours of the morning, you can still hear the blood-curdling screams of Pierre and his family as Sabine burns them down over and over.

The Other Man

It was day five. She didn’t want to tell her man what was going on with her.

Darkness fell, and her face changed. She felt the presence of something within her, consuming her, she felt her body start to contort. Her eyes fell on the mirror on the wall. In the low lights of her Hollywood vanity she saw her scleras blacken. Something else stared back as she looked at herself in the mirror.

It was less than a week to the wedding – all she could think of was how to get rid of the other man, this demon that had been taking over her body every night. Every night, at the same time.

“Tattoo”

Madison had just moved into a new apartment with her boyfriend Jonah, a tattoo-artist.

Maddie dressed up as as a vampire on Halloween. Jonah said he loved it, at least a million times, while they were going down to their friend Pete’s, for one of those epic Halloween parties. It was tradition practically. They’d all get drunk and eat too much and just have a good time, and catch up with old friends.

“I wish you’d do your makeup like that everyday,” Jonah kept saying.

Maddie just smiled and looked happy. He’d never complimented her so much before.

The party got wild. Maddie couldn’t remember when or how she went to bed: she was completely wasted.

While brushing her teeth after having overslept, she felt a sharp pain in the face and noticed she’d forgotten to take off her makeup. It was only after she’d gone through two bottles of makeup remover that she realized that Jonah had tattooed on the dark cranberry lipstick on her lips.

50 Word Story: The Wife

They had a commuter marriage. Neither could afford to switch jobs.

On her birthday he stopped at a bar on his way to surprise her. A blonde offered to give him a lap dance.

Nothing could have prepared him for what followed: the blonde was his wife of six months.

50 Word Horror: The Rider

Maya was thrilled when Mason took her on a ride one morning, even though he normally made his weekend trips alone.

They stopped at a white building. Mason led her into a room with steel tables and masked people.

“Fellas, more organs,” Mason said, shoving Maya towards a table.

The Twin

I was getting married in three hours. I’d suddenly developed this awful headache, and told my hairstylist to give me a second.

I must have fallen asleep.

Someone was shrieking rather loudly in my ears, and also shaking me persistently.

“LOU? LOU! Wake up, Louise! Oh, God!”

I opened my eyes and everything was so bright, it took me a while before I realized that I was bound and gagged, in my underwear. My mother was in tears, in shock, and a long moment passed before I noticed that we were Inside Missy’s closet.

Missy was my dead twin sister.

We had gone swimming one night, while on a family trip to Bali, and the tide had swept us in. And I had lost track of time and woken up to find Missy gone. She’d stayed gone. The’d never found a body. We had a closed casket funeral for her, with fourteen-year-old me clinging to my mother’s arm, both of us inconsolable.

It had been ten years since.

The only thing that I happened to register now, at this point, was my very terrified mother asking, “But who did Sean get married to? We all thought it was obviously you! She even called me Momsicle!” The only person – apart from me – who ever called our mother that, was Missy. Who we held a freaking funeral for. Ten bloody years ago.

Sean is – was – my fiancé. Sean was also Missy’s teenage crush. Missy and Sean never happened because of the incident. I’d never meant to fall in love with Sean – I didn’t – but fate has awful ways of meddling with people’s lives and he’d proposed to me on my twenty fourth birthday, after three years of dating.

I looked at the date – February 14 – and realized that he was probably on his way to Florence. With his new wife. Who looked exactly like me.

50 Word Story: Vanity

Her whole life had been dedicated to the pursuit of ridiculously pricey trinkets.

The day she slipped and fell off the cliff while sightseeing, she had on some Manolo heels. A good pair of Nikes would have saved her life, but she’d always loved a rather vulgar display of wealth.