Shared Storytelling: Advent Ghosts 2018

We hardly look at the stars anymore or even the lanterns we hung centuries before to blot out the night from our sight. The wind whistles down empty city streets whose cratered and pocked surfaces betray their long lack of use. Commerce of both the legitimate and illicit type takes place in the light-strung skyways linking the megopolis' highest spires or in the metro tunnels beneath the ancient pavement or through the indecipherable network of hand-carved caverns chipped out by generations of subterranean squatters. But only the moneyed or mad or desperate or damned venture out much anymore. Even infants get socketed, and once you've pegged in to the Lattice, slipping the thumb-sized plug of hyperconductive alloy into the surgically installed socket between your C1 and skull, then you see it. The vast digital distraction sends its digital shivers shuddering down your nerves, a distraction bespoke and beautiful—at least until the signal bleeds or the power grid surges. Then the lights go out, and a district seems to shudder, to rouse itself, to move as a great beast wakened from slumber. Doors open onto balconies. Blinking forms peer out into hallways. Children scamper off into the shadows, scavenging up scraps with which to mock physical forms of their digital simulacra. And wide-eyed, jack-scrambled wanderers stagger this way and that, saying they saw those crude golems move.

People laugh, shift uncomfortably, and try not to admit to themselves that there seem to be more children frolicking in the gloom than they'd initially noticed …

Welcome to Advent Ghosts 2018, the ninth annual shared storytelling event at ISLF. For more than a century, the days preceding Christmas have been a time to swap spooky tales, building camaraderie around creepy conceits. So we write, and we hope you'll join us in doing the same. Everyone is welcome, and our only rules for participating are ...

1) Email me at ISawLightningFall [at] gmail [dot] com.
2) Pen a scary story that’s exactly 100-words long—no more, no less.
3) Post the story to your blog on Saturday, December 22 and email the link to me. Hosting on ISLF is available for those without blogs or anyone who wants to write under a pseudonym. (Just so you know, you’ll maintain copyright.)
4) Know that while you most certainly can write whatever you’d like, I will put a content warning on any tale that I think needs it.

Get to writing, fellow scribe! Curious about what previous years looked like? Read the offerings from 2016, 2015, and 2014.

(Picture: CC 2011 by Jonathan Lopez)