Young Writers Society

The night sky explodes in a cacophony of light, hurting me deeply. Her ghostly form flickers like a candle flame in front of my eyes. Laughing harshly, her once soft lips curl into a scowl.
"You thought you could get away with it, didn't you? Leaving me here, my corpse left to rot. You destroyed me!'
She lunges at my throat, her seemingly gorgeous face twisting into something grotesque. I scramble backwards, all the while trying to look straight at her.
"She'll get you if you don't..." The old man whispered in my ear not too long ago.
I try hard, but she is too quick. Her long, spindly, talon-like fingers scratch and claw at my right leg til they get hold. They create long, deep, wounds.
Agony and despair engulf me as a guttural scream makes it's way out my mouth, all the while my now leaking eyes stay fixed on her ghoulish shape. My painful defiance angers her even more.
"Why do you persist?!" she screams, shaking the forest around her. "Why do you insist to live, when fate says you must die?"
I grit my teeth and spit at her.
"It's your fault you died Tanya, not mine. I didn't dabble into the occult, you did. They buried your body here, and I came to pay my respects!"
She shrieks like a panther in the night, and digs her talons into my torso. My screams turn primal as my eyes roll back into my head. As soon as this happens, she consumes my body.

I wake with a start the next morning, shaking off what seems to be a bad dream. My right leg and torso feel unbelievably sore and I notice my bed is feel wet.
I lift off my coverlet. My bed and my PJ's are stained scarlet with my blood. I lift up my pajama top, and I see numerous pierce marks on my torso. I pull up my right trouser leg, and I see deep lacerations on my leg.
I gasp at the sight. Then, I hear that cold, harsh, laugh that I know so well.
I scream.

A few notes. Show don't tell, I know you think you are showing but it is far to telly. Consider the last few lines, how can you evoke an image with such bland thread-bare descriptions?

It could be scary, for some it may be scary already. But I think the art of horror and thrillers is in the subtle placement of gruesome deviations. No what makes people scared and weave it in there, the cliches don't work. The image we get when you simply say 'ghost' isn't nearly as crisp or powerful as when you describe a translucent shape forming, and so on. With flash fiction you need to be tight, but afford your prose a little slack to put in some description.

The format is also tough on the eyes, why not keep it black and to the left? What is the effect of centring it? besides hurting my eyes...

Anyway, avoid cliches and show don't tell, and you will be just fine.

JP

Hey this was great! A few mistakes here and there and maybe some things that I would've changed a little if I'd written this myself...but besides that, I think it was really good. I've got to agree with JP about the 'show don't tell' advice, it would really improve your writing (not that it's bad or anything).
'Agony and despair engulf me as a guttural scream makes it's way out my mouth...' probably one of my favourite lines. Great job! Oh, I almost forgot (I actually noticed this right now), 'it's' for that line should be 'its', just a small nitpick. Anyway, I actually thought that the genre for your story was action and adventure when I first started reading, then as I neared the ending, it sort of changed into horror. But anyway, it was great! I liked how you finished it off but I do think that your story could've had a better ending. Anyway, it was still pretty good. I hope to read more of your pieces later on.

Please just left-align this and leave the color black? Changing the format does nothing to make your story any better, and in fact hinders the reading more than anything.

I'm going to echo Josh's comment on the mechanics of the horror genre: what you have here is less horror, more random stew of half-developed plot globs and uncontextualized drama. Believe it or not, yes, horror should have story, as much as any genre. I think you tried to establish something in this department, but the beginning came across as rushed and the end a letdown, as any "and it was all a dream" denouement will inevitably be. Tension is key; without tension, horror is not horror. I'm not seeing any tension here - some people are fighting and then someone wakes up from a dream and screams and the end. Where is that subtlety, that gradual accumulation of suspense?

You throw in these enigmatic references to earlier events and such, but these don't accomplish anything. I mean, who is this old man who seems not to know how to form tangible verbal advice? Why does fate say the narrator must die? Who is the (un)dead girl? It's impossible for the reader to answer these questions, and so they turn from intriguing mysteries into unsolved distractions.

Your description really needs some work. You have that heavy, adjective-laden, comma-shunning style, which you would be best off to drop. Half of description is the fluency of sentences and phrases; your style doesn't really accomplish this.

Anyway. Keep writing, hope this helped, all that jazz.

-Kafka