Say Ahhh

A little bit of darkness to brighten your day
This was written for a prompt involving "eavesdropping on a conversation."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just like in the movies...
This one came to me at 2 a.m. and the imagery creeped me out so badly that I couldn't get back to sleep.
His pièce de résistance. His magnum opus. It was there, magnificent, waiting to burst out of him. He could feel it.
If only the sodding shits would let him concentrate.
--------------------
When twin sisters Claire and Chloe arrive to clean out the old family farmhouse their Great Aunt Mabel left Claire in her will, they may have inherited more than they're prepared for.
Tales of slaughtered children, an insane murderess, and ghostly cries in the night are kept alive by the older citizens of the small English town of Brandeston, but Nora Taylor is starting to suspect that the haunting truth of Edgewood’s past might be more disturbing than any local ghost story.
My story, “Edgewood,” is a ghost story, a work of speculative fiction about two women from different times bound together by parallel tragedies and the heavy burden of guilt.
I’ve been chewing it over in my head for nearly a decade, if not more, and 5 years ago, I put it down and hadn’t picked it back up since. It’s time. I’m restructuring, changing some elements, and putting it through a complete overhaul. Rewriting one character completely, and just trimming the fat, so to speak. It was, when first complete, at over 104,000 words; I’ve already cut 10,000 of them. I’d like to get it down to somewhere around 80,000 words.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I always thought if you forgot all the bad things that happened to you, it was inevitable you’d forget all the good things, too. I never thought that focusing so much on the bad things would attract more of the same, like flies buzzing around a pile of shit, ripening in the sweltering sun. But they’re gathering now.
Staying is a story I wrote for the Mocha Memoirs Flash Fiction "Women in Horror" Contest, 2016: http://mochamemoirspress.blogspot.com/p/wih-flash-fiction-contest.html
It won first place. You can purchase a print copy of it and all the other runners up here: https://www.createspace.com/6384605 (Disclaimer: I get no portion of the sales)