Tag Archives: DJ Tyrer

2021 Halloween Microfiction Roundup

It’s a beautiful, sunny day here in Salem MA as I write this. The tourists have gone home. The locals are emerging from their homes bleary eyed and hopeful. Another wheel of the year has turned and brings with it new promise.

This year many of our stories  centered around death. Making peace with it. Saying goodbye. Eking out the very last precious moments with loved ones. If nothing else, the pandemic has taught us the importance of human connection. I do hope you will all take a moment to revisit these stories, or read them for the first time if October was too much of a whirlwind for you.

Cloudless Climes and Starry Skies by A.C. Quill
Danse Macabre / Memento Vivere by Bernie Mojzes
Desire by DJ Tyrer
The Offering by Jennifer Williams
A Little Magic In Me by Avery Vanderlyle
Eyes Wide Shut by Elvyra Venus
The Dark Room by Cecilia Tan

I’m not going to say goodbye this year. I don’t know what the future holds. Things are in flux. Change is afoot. But death is merely transformation. We’ll still be here one way or another. The Circlet Alumni are cooking something up for next year. So long as life doesn’t get in the way you’ll hear from us again.

Until then, thank you. Thank you to everyone who submitted work. Thank you to everyone who read and shared the stories here.

Have a blessed New Year and stay safe.

Halloween Microfiction: Desire by DJ Tyrer

“Desire”
by DJ Tyrer

She beckons in the mist to follow her down steps into the darkness below.

It smells musty, like earth after the rain. Not horrible.

She’s no more than shadow, but I hear movement within the vault, her dress hitting the floor.

Offers a hand with thin, sharp fingers. I take it.

We kiss. No lips touch mine, just bare teeth, fleshless cheeks.

I don’t care. The urge is too strong. We become one.

Flesh melts away. Flesh grows.

In the furnace of our climax, she is reborn and I feel my consciousness burn away to the clatter of falling bones.

DJ Tyrer is the person behind Atlantean Publishing, editor of View From Atlantis webzine, and has had flash fiction published in anthologies and magazines around the world, such as Apples, Shadows and Light (Earlyworks Press), and Journals of Horror: Found Fiction (Pleasant Storm Entertainment), issues of Sirens Call, and Tigershark, and on Cease Cows, The Flash Fiction Press, Space Squid, and Trembling With Fear.
https://djtyrer.blogspot.co.uk/