Wicked Flash Fiction – Halloween Edition

Happy Halloween, readers! Liz here – and we wanted to do something fun and a little different today to celebrate the scariest day of the year. We’re going to do a flash fiction story – mad lib style! I’ll set the creepy stage…

I’d been watching the new neighbor all week since he moved in to the creepy house down the street. It was dead quiet during the day, but a lot of activity at night. I couldn’t get a good glimpse of the guy either – but every night, like clockwork, he went into the backyard with a shovel.

Sherry: My next door neighbor here on Daybreak Island said he bought the shovel  at her garage sale right after he moved in. At first I thought he was one of those guerilla gardening types–going around the neighborhood grooming people’s yards. But nothing in the neighborhood has improved.  I’m no adventuress like my great grandmother’s friend, but one night I crept down the alley at midnight, approached his back fence. If only my friend Robbie was here with me. I peeked over. That was no clam bake.

Barb: I was shocked, shocked, I tell you by what I saw by the light of the full moon. There were three rectangular holes around the edges of the lawn. Too deep for a garden, too long for a footing for a structure, too wide to plant a shrub. But that wasn’t even the weird thing. The weird thing was this: my new neighbor was resting in a gently rocking hammock while the digging was being done by

Julie: Well, I wasn’t really sure. It looked like a person, in a tattered white dress and what looked like a wedding veil on its head. But when the clouds moved away and the moon shone bright, I didn’t see a face. Instead it looked like a skeleton. I blinked twice and swallowed hard. The clouds had moved back, and the yard was cast in an eerie blue light. Just then

Jessie: I heard the siren. The figure appeared to hear it, too. It turned its head towards the sound of the approaching police car, then dropped the shovel and fled off through the woods. My heart pounded in my chest as I peered after it. The cloud cover parted once more and I was startled to notice

Edith: other eerie white figures swaying between the trees, as if beckoning the digger closer. The siren grew near. I dashed back into my own yard and hurried upstairs to throw open the sash of a back window. My neighbor sat up in the hammock, shielding his eyes against the strobing police lights. “Everything’s fine, officer,” he said after the cop told him a neighbor had called in suspicious activity. “I was just taking a rest. My boy and me, we’re putting in a French drain tomorrow so the blasted yard doesn’t flood every spring. I was getting a head start on the digging.”

I glanced across to the second floor of the house beyond him. In a window facing mine, a ghostly figure waved her fingers at me. I turned away. I’d had it with this creepy neighborhood. I was putting my house on the market tomorrow morning.

Dear Readers: Happy Halloween!