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Write about someone welcoming a stranger into their home.

Posted in Thriller and Suspense on Oct 26, 2022

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✍️ 159 stories

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Submitted to Contest #96

The din of the vacuum buzzes heavily in her ears as she dusts the picture frames on the mantle, her gaze following Mark’s unpredictable course through the living room. Her husband’s sun-spotted fingers clutch the vacuum’s handle tightly. He avoids her eyes, focused on the non-existent specks of dirt on the floor. The house is bright, the curtains pulled open for the first time in many months. She is not sure she likes the light that eviscerates their home, exposing their sorrow to the world like a sliced-open abdomen on an operating tab...

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The Art of Staying Awake

Submitted to Contest #96

"I'm going to send someone over," the voice is awfully calm, leaning towards treachery and meekness. He waits, silently for her small voice to slice through but she remains quiet. This, he believes, is called acceptance. "Just treat him like you would treat me, please."She presses the phone against her ears until she can feel the coldness of it. That way, she hopes she can hear his hesitation. When she hears nothing, she looks around at her small apartment and sighs. She can always tell him no, she knows, but she wants to please him. She und...

61 likes 17 comments 17
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Ania's Room

Submitted to Contest #96

I received the email in June 2009. The subject line simply asked one question: “What do you think?” The email was from my wife, Jodi, so even though I was at work at the time, as a good husband should, I opened it immediately. As it turns out, it was actually a forwarded email with the picture of a young girl named Ania. She was just three weeks older than our own daughter, Kelsey, and she was looking for a host family as part of a high school foreign exchange program. The email explained a little about her, including personal...

61 likes 37 comments 37
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What Katy Did

Submitted to Contest #96

Katy arrived on my doorstep drenched from a summer shower with a single plastic bag full of her belongings. Her social worker, Siobhán, smoked under a chic umbrella, dark sunglasses over red lipstick. I offered Katy a towel, while Siobhán stubbed out her cigarette in my trinket dish and tossed her sopping umbrella over a houseplant. It didn’t take long to give the house tour of my ramshackle home. The two trailed along behind me, Siobhán inspecting, Katy drifting, as aimless as a ghost. I opened Katy’s room and stepped aside. I had stri...

30 likes 8 comments 8
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Born To Be Wild

Submitted to Contest #96

Wendy and I bought our first house through an advert in a local North London newspaper. The woman who owned it was leaving the city and moving to Wales. It was a ramshackle Victorian terrace that needed modernising, but it had a peaceful ambiance and a mature garden to the rear that was perfect for a small family. #It’s a well-known fact that most people spend more time choosing a pair of jeans than viewing a new home prior to purchase. You know when clothes feel right and you buy them on that basis. Using the same logic, we almost made...

29 likes 8 comments 8
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A Shark's Guide to True Love

Submitted to Contest #96

If this guide has found it’s way into your hands, then it’s likely that you have come seeking help. And here’s what you must know, simplified. The movies talk about “love at first sight” the same way they talk about true love- like it’s a miracle, like you’re the luckiest person in the world to experience it, like it’s the feeling of every question in the world turning into an answer, everything in your life now making sense. And in a way, that’s true. But out of true love and love at first sight, one is a good thing. And one is just an allu...

28 likes 11 comments 11
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Do you remember me?

Submitted to Contest #96

I sat in the lobby surrounded by my classmates and many of the other girls whose faces I didn’t recognize. I was shaking and someone threw a blanket around me. I stared at the floor intensely so that my stare could probably crack the tiles. The police escorted her out in handcuffs; I only know this because I recognized her shoes. I couldn’t look at her, her smiling face and piercing eyes. She could have done to me what she did to her or maybe I was next. Once she was out people around me moved to make room for the police officer. She had ben...

28 likes 10 comments 10
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Didi

Submitted to Contest #96

The sounds will just never stop. The sound of the leaves dancing to the wind’s rhythm, the sound of various birds chirping, the sound of the cold wind rushing its way, and the sound of the mighty Alakananda flowing at her own pace. Nature has made a pact with us to always keep the richness of her important presence alive, why would the sounds stop?I breathe in the fresh, crisp air; with each breath I take I realize the essence of simplicity. I realize the need to connect with nature. I can feel the air go in from my nasal cavity, creating a ...

26 likes 22 comments 22
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Courtesy for the Devil

Submitted to Contest #96

You must have been freezing out there! Oh, you don’t look cold, but, you know, my cousin Ozzie never looked cold either, and one day, he was outside, and a cow kicked him, and the next thing you know, he’s dead. And by the time they found him, his body was cold as shaved ice, and Uncle Yankee tried to tell us that it was the cow’s kick that did him in, but that cow never kicked that hard. I think he was cold, and the cold sensed it, because cows don’t like the cold, and it kicked Ozzie, and he fell down, but he didn’t die from the kick or ...

26 likes 2 comments 2
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'The stranger in my family'

Submitted to Contest #96

I hated to share my room with Aira, but I had no choice. She was my mother's best friend's daughter. A quiet and timid girl who didn't speak much. I never liked these silent types, who I felt were sly and full of pretenses.I was surprised at the animosity I felt towards the girl.It may have been because I had to share my room and bed with her. I was not sure.A few months ago, it was nearly after midnight when a crying and frightened Aira had called my Mom asking her t...

25 likes 7 comments 7
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Home Invasion

Submitted to Contest #96

Home Invasion One ‘Mum, why are you doing this to me?’ I ask with a glare. ‘Sweetheart, this is not something we are doing to you. It’s something we require of you,’ she states. ‘So, that’s it? I don’t get a say?’ I retort in frustration. ‘A family needs our help, and it’s only seven days. It is the right thing to do. You will see that,’ Mum says with finality. I slump with an overexaggerated sigh. Why us? ‘Only seven days.’ That’s a week of my summer holiday. Any moment, a strange family is arriving to set up camp in our home. Apparently, I...

23 likes 1 comment 1
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I Can Feel the Ghosts

Submitted to Contest #96

Patty sat with her glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, reading Pride and Prejudice. She was immersed fully in reading, and though she’d read it several times in her long life, she wasn’t sure what to do with all the time on her hands. She’d recently retired, and though she liked not working, it was very different.  Outside snow was falling heavily, the thick, wet kind of snow that squished unpleasantly when you walked. It was misery to be caught outside in it, and Patty was grateful that she got to sit inside with her steaming mu...

23 likes 16 comments 16
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An unexpected guest.

Submitted to Contest #96

Content warning: violence   On 25th July 1965, it was raining heavily. A Ford Mustang GT 350 was moving at high speed with high beam light on. The car enters a thick forest area. The signboard says, “WELCOME TO THE SHELBY’S FOREST, WATCHOUT FOR WILD ANIMALS.” With a Leopard picture on it. In the car, with a high volume “Wooly Bully” song will be played. The speedometer shows a reading of 40mph. Suddenly a black panther jumps in front of the car. Immediately, the driver turns the steering wheel to the right and applies brakes to save the...

23 likes 7 comments 7
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The Four Liars

Submitted to Contest #96

Jonathan couldn’t just swing the door shut in the odd man’s face, not with the way those unblinking pair of eyes was bearing into his. He was like that one dreadful thought personified: the kind that nestles in your headspace, and feeds on your pessimism, just when you need everything to go perfectly. The last thing Jon needed on his mind was the mental image of his marriage proposal getting ruined because an armed, trigger-happy sociopath barges into the hotel room, and expresses his unjustified outrage by kidnapping Jon’s to-be fiancé.The ...

22 likes 7 comments 7
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Richard Stays With Us

Submitted to Contest #96

CW: suicide  *** It was a day in spring, near the end of the school year. That was the day that Richard put his knife to his throat. The Principal of the High School was called to the home where Richard was staying, to see if he could talk Richard out of suicide.   It was Senior Skip Day at the High School, so I was home the whole day, when somehow word got to me that something was going on at the Slade’s. I knew Richard from school, and we had become friends. We went on the lake in an old beat up boat I had, which I named “Captain...

20 likes 4 comments 4
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