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Center your story around someone who must decide whether to embrace or fight their inner darkness.

Posted in Angst on Sep 5, 2025

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✍️ 92 stories

The Spice of Death

Submitted to Contest #319

The Spice of Death I rushed into Minneapolis General SICU and almost bumped into Felicia Gainer. The gray-haired nurse stared down at me out of cold blue eyes. I forced a smile. “Well, if it ain’t our perky little Georgia peach, Lucy Connors,” she said. “What’s it been? Ten months? Thought you’d gone back to Atlanta after having the baby.” “Wasn’t in the cards.” “Because you’re broke, I’ll bet. Is it true your husband moved in with his tennis partner?” I sucked in a breath. Even for her, this was low. His attractive ebony face alight, the ...

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This Neverending Fight

Submitted to Contest #319

I stood in the darkness. With a single step, the darkness created ripples as if water was underneath me. I heard my name being called out. I searched but found nobody, all I could hear was the ripples. I fell to my knees only to find my reflection staring back up at me and so I reached. My hand sinks deeper and deeper until my entire body falls in. I hold my breath until I find a light. I see the sunlight's reflection out across the top of the water. I tried to swim up, but the darkness tugs at my feet. A chill ran up my spine as I was force...

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The cupboard door fell open

Submitted to Contest #319

Mabel Pollard was a well respected woman of good standing. Everyone in the town said so. She lived alone in her terraced house on Garden Street, where so many roses grew in summer and the children who dared to pick them, knew that Mabel would only smile and gently shoo them along. She attended church without fail, volunteered at the library, baked for every charity sale, and always had something polite to say. People described her as ‘kind’ or ‘dependable’, which Mabel accepted as any single and contented woman of a certain age would. S...

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Ryland

Submitted to Contest #319

Soft blond curls and a golden crown are crushed in a thick, gloved hand. Ryland stands with forced posture but a high chin. We are surrounded. And I can’t get to his side.I grope for the dagger in my boot, struggling against where my left forearm has been speared through the ruin wall with my own sword.“Run!” My dagger plunges into the dark armor of the figure holding Ryland. Ryland darts, but he slows when a sword emerges from his chest. He falls with the rivulets of blood.“No!” I pull forward, my arm tearing in two, but I can’t-—William bo...

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I Am Become Frankenstein

Submitted to Contest #319

(Warnings: medical abuse, mentions of abortions, mentions of organs, Frankenstein God Complex, and other mental health issues.) “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” -Bhagavad Gita, later quoted by Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity Test. Obsession is a dark, and dangerous thing. Sometimes, you don’t even realize you’ve fallen into it until it’s too late. And by the time you do realize it, you can’t back out. My name is Mallory St. Germain, and I am become Frankenstein. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t go through the excruciating pro...

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A D&D Story With Edgar Allen Poe Vibes

Submitted to Contest #319

What was originally assumed to be simply blood for hire had quickly and inevitably escalated into an ordeal. See, the man who was the presumed target of the tribe of assassins was a traitor to his kingdom. Therefore, he was to be taken alive, before being ceremoniously executed by the eyes of the people in his homeland. Though the tribe had ultimately succeeded, in the minds of many they had still lost. The most severe of those thoughts came from the dragonborn known by the name Cyndergaurd. Though she had decades on her human counterpar...

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Meet the New Me

Submitted to Contest #319

CW: References to sexual abuse Janey Price, a shy thirty-year-old seamstress, lays aside an article she has just read. She ponders,“I’ve never heard of such a thing.Can it be true?” She rereads the quote from renowned psychologists C.Zweig and S.Wolf. “Beneath the social mask we wear every day, we have a hidden shadow side, an impulsive, wounded, sad, or isolated part that we generally try to ignore. The shadow can be a source of emotional richness and vitality, and acknowledging it can be a pathway to healing and an authentic life.”Still pe...

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The Monday Decision

Submitted to Contest #319

The police showed up on the doorstep in the middle of a Monday morning. Julie had seen the kids off to school, cleaned up from the breakfast mess and started the laundry, and she was just settling down with a cup of coffee and the New York Times crossword (too easy on a Monday, but it helped to shape her week). She tsked irritably at the interruption to her routine. Weekends were stressful, and she enjoyed the comparative calm when she was alone in the house at last. Two police officers stood in the doorway: a man in plain clothes and a unif...

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Whiskey and Lilacs

Submitted to Contest #319

She was the definition of perfect, and everything I could never be. A princess who was on track to inherit the throne after her father, beautiful enough with a personality to match and capable of charming anyone she met. I was the shadow that lurked in the dark of the courtroom, everyone knew I didn’t belong here, wasn’t born into the rank I had or the status that came with it. Instead I clawed my way up through the ranks, forging a name stained in rumors of the deals I’ve made. Some of them whispered my name in reverence while others curse...

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The Bone Orchard

Submitted to Contest #319

The orchard is quiet when I first step into it, not a quiet peace, but of a breath held too long. It’s a hush that needles against my skin, the kind that makes you want to whisper without knowing why. The air smells of damp earth, of moss clinging to bark, of sweetness gone just past ripe. The fruit here has secrets bruising under their skin. As a child I was never allowed past the first row. My grandmother would grip my wrist if I wandered too close, her knuckles white with something more than age. “They’re greedy things,” she’d mutter, t...

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A Web and a Wound

Submitted to Contest #319

Danae picked wild berries into her basket and used the monotonous work to clear her mind of the sick dread that perpetually clung to her. She wanted to be alone, to get away from her older cousin, Preston. What he did to her at night made her sick and she held deep resentment for him. When her father died a year ago, she was sent to live with her Aunt Ivy and Preston. She thought things would get better after her father died, but she had only traded one hell for another. Preston was nineteen, three years older than her and a lot strong...

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Mira, Mira, Off the Wall

Submitted to Contest #319

I hate mirrors.Let me correct that. They’re a necessary evil.I mean, they do let me know if there’s a curl of kale stuck between two teeth. Or if my acne’s flaring up. Again. Though I can feel that. But I don’t need a mirror to tell me I’m bloated at that time of the month. By the way, periods rank a close second to mirrors in the necessary evil department. I’m not planning to have kids for years, if at all. So why do I have to bleed now? But at least that’s only once a month. Mirrors are constant. And compelling. How can you pass one and no...

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Ruined Estate

Submitted to Contest #319

“I can’t do this!” The perky real estate agent’s mood changes abruptly once she realizes what she is seeing. We both enter the house with portable floodlights. It looks like a deranged hoarder has been living here. Stepping over the trash, and looking down at the remains of the carpet, I notice the maggots. “I can’t go any further!” She turns around and starts back toward the open door. “Look up there; those white bumps covering the ceiling are some kind of bug eggs.” I haven’t been to my parent’s house in over five years. First, my fathe...

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Weeping Willow

Submitted to Contest #319

Content Warning: Mentions of violence and child death. The Soul Walkers were for the desperate and the angry, and Ret wasn’t desperate. She had been, once, but time had twisted that out of her like the snake suffocated the mouse. It was strange how grief curdled into rage. It was stranger, perhaps, how close she had come to what she wanted. What she needed. Months she had spent tracking a Soul Walker, trekking through forests so dense she couldn’t see the sun and sleeping on stones that jabbed deep into her spine, and she had finally done it...

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The Equinox of Shadows

Submitted to Contest #319

The evening of the autumnal equinox settled across the playground with the color of ripe plums. Abigail darted past the swings with a group of children at her heels, her braids flying as she ran. Feet thudded against packed earth. A ring of girls skipped rope near a tree stump, their chant rising like birdsong. Two boys tore through the tall grass, leaping roots and flinging handfuls of leaves at each other as they ran.The air smelled of grass and chalk, the kind of scent that clung to skin after a long day outdoors.The sun slid lower, and t...

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