MicroHorror

Mom returned from the kitchen with empty eye sockets. “That shriek was just the cat,” she said, then sighed at my shocked expression. “Did I eat the eyes again? Damn, they taste just like the internal organs. Well, I’ll be more careful this time.” Her jaw dislocated and out shrieked a quivering, crimson-suckered tentacle.

You’re shocked to recognize the oozing pale green face that peeks around the door to your parents’ attic. How could you have forgotten those deep sea angler fish jaws? Perhaps forgetting you ever saw monsters is the only way to find adulthood.

Now the creature smiles its gigantic lower jaw. It remembers you, too.

When I was little I dreamt a man made of lava helped me trap all my recurring nightmares. He promised me he’d guard the jail forever.

I had no more bad dreams until after my high school graduation, when the lava man returned. “It wasn’t a jail,” he explained, laughing billowing ash. “Tonight everyone graduates.”

The white root wrapped itself around the hiker’s tanned ankle and yanked him off his feet. As he was pulled into the root system, his last sight was the tree above: smooth white branches, leafless despite the warm summer.

The next day, the wind rustled the Skeleton Tree’s scarlet leaves, causing tanned seeds to fall.

Computer heard something last night. I don my headphones and say, “Play.” Behind our own interstellar echo (“We come in peace,” and Pythagoras), I’m hoping for little green noises.

Instead it’s… my name, end on end. The voice loves me. I drive with my laptop to WRVR. The voice thinks everyone should know it loves them too.

Visitors to the newly discovered dimension returned speaking gibberish. Cameras sent through recorded only in black-and-blacker. But inert objects survived intact, so the unknowable dimension became our trash dump and parking lot, until cars started returning with symbols burnt into their mirrors. Nobody figured the symbols for tickets. But everyone paid the fine.

“I’ll find you when you open it,” the haunt had whispered as Matt ran away. Home now, he stared at the box until he couldn’t resist. Sliding off the cover, he saw every secret, lie, treason, reason. The reason.

The haunt found Matt seventeen minutes later, curled up, laughing. It nearly took pity on him.

Every morning before work, Cinde met the troll in a warehouse outside the forbidden woods. Once, while undressing, she asked, “Don’t the city’s daylight eyes scare you?”

“No,” his trolley-brake voice answered, “it’s the forest’s day I fear, when the willows awaken. They cry themselves to sleep at dusk, guilt-ridden. Then it’s safe.”

Grasses underfoot, trees overhead, flowers in innocent golden hair. Seeds attach to the unwary. Thorns catch and tear. Spores float menacingly towards us, hayfever attacking our heads and lungs. Vines climb houses, try to smother, suffocate, kill. They leave trees alone to attack us, now.

If you’re not afraid of Spring, you deserve what’s coming.

The Stranger, my brother told me, is using your other hand, so it feels like some awkward girl’s jerking you off. I tried it yesterday, and it felt like little Laurie Smythe after gym. Until the migraine hit, and the vision. A beauty, translucent blue rubber skin and glowing purple organs. I woke up sticky.