Missing

Flash Fiction by

Suzanna Lundale (Architect) & JP Relph (Haunter)

This piece is the product of our Tiny Hauntings pop-up sub call. First, we asked you to become Architects, creating stunning, spooky, spine-chilling settings. Next, we gathered Haunters and unleashed them into our favorite Architect-designed landscapes. The results are to die for.

In the school playground, the slide stands sentry over the night quiet. The jungle gym throws shifting shadows onto cool sand pitted by the passage of small feet. The full moon catches here and there on faceted grains to sparkle just a little. The swing stirs gently, waiting for a diminutive pilot to carry it high as the tether allows.

Molly walks over the moon-glittered sand, leaving no mark on its silky surface. Her face a blur of chalky sorrow; eyes like winter nights. The swing’s chains sing of summers past. Summers missing. Ice-cream dripping onto denim, sandals soaring like scarlet birds. A song bringing tears that cannot fall.

There are those who walk past the playground and hear laughter, whoops of triumph. And there are the others. Those who shiver even in the sun, maybe cross the street to distance themselves from the stain of cruelty, the ghost-soft sniffles of misery.

Molly swings, chains wailing all around her. They sing of torment now, of the man with the bone-stretched face, the cold sickle smile. The man who’d catch her—gripping her poking toes with shade-chill hands—then snatch her away. From summer and swings and all that childhood still promised.

The jungle gym throws shifting shadows onto cool sand. The full moon glints in the exposed half of a single quarter nobody dares to claim. Dropped from the pocket of a denim skirt, change from the ice-cream truck. A battered milk carton lies half-buried in the sand nearby; the tooth-grin photo faded like patent sandals left outside.

Molly leaves the swing to its final melody. There’s rain in the air, and something more. Few can feel it. The sickle smile slash, the snatching of summer. She leaves no mark. The slide stands sentry over the night.

Suzanna Lundale is a lifelong writer and observer of the world who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and has made her home in many places since. She is passionate about language, history, travel, dogs, and the loved ones – real and imagined - who form her galaxy. Her dual heritage, Latinx and Scandinavian-American, and her identity as a witch, actively inform the complexity of her worldview and fascination with questions of identity and liminal spaces. Suzanna’s poetry has appeared in such publications as The Crow’s Quill and Goatshed Press, and her short fiction in The Haunted Press and forthcoming anthology The Hyperion: Tales from Hell, of which she is co-editor. She tweets new poetry and fictional vignettes daily as @SuzannaLundale.

JP Relph is a writer from northwest England, mostly hindered by four cats and aided by copious tea. She volunteers in a charity shop where they let her dress mannequins and source haunted objects. A forensic science degree and passion for microbes, insects and botany often influence her words. JP writes about apocalypses quite a lot (but hasn’t the knees for one) and her debut flash collection was published by Alien Buddha Press in June 2023.