Shared Storytelling: Advent Ghosts 2025

The sky above the city was the color of blacktop bleached by countless summer suns, and looking at it, Jocelyn understood why people had once called it the firmament. She understood that, at some point every year, the summer solstice had come to roll up the stony sky, roll it up like a scroll and tuck it away. There were books that showed it, and she'd seen plenty of footage. That understanding, though, was a cognitive thing, intellectual and abstract.

Right now, it was so cold.

Jocelyn would normally wear her mittens, which she'd bought from a wandering tinker for a 12" x 24" PCB and two SD cards, one blank, one containing most of the seventh season of KPop Demon Hunters, a standalone instance of VLC Media Player included gratis. The little man (who'd looked to her like nothing more than an ambulatory turnip) had been absurdly grateful and had parted with the mittens without further haggling. Jocelyn knew the mittens couldn't still smell of the tinker's mule, but the memory of the animal's musty odor stirred in her mind whenever she slid them on.

She didn't have them on now. She was working.

Her fingers felt like wood as she gripped the screwdriver. And gave it careful quarter turns. Because this was an intact tower. And she could take the whole thing. She knew she was strong enough. But disassembly was more practical. She just had to make sure not to —

She dropped the screwdriver.

It pinged and whanged off of the tower's case, and the sound ricocheted through the empty building. Presumably empty, anyway. Jocelyn's head went up, and her eyes flicked left and right. That was all the movement she allowed herself, this surreptitious scanning. Most of the roof and ceiling of this building had collapsed long ago, falling down onto the neat aisles still stocked with tubes of dried cosmetics and swollen canned goods, moth-eaten t-shirts and cards faded to incomprehensibility by age. The pharmaceuticals had been picked over long ago, as had the potable drinks and any unspoiled food. But not this particular tower, and she doubted that even the commotion she'd stirred up would draw the attention of—

Chattering. An unfamiliar patois with the occasional iceberg of familiar vocabulary surfacing amid a tossing ocean of neologisms and loanwords. Growing louder.

Jocelyn clattered through the debris, not caring what noise she made now, up with the screwdriver, back into the tower, working feverishly up until the last screw, then wrenching and tearing the mobo free, plastic splintering, letting the screwdriver drop, and running with her prize, running through the rust-speckled security door, running out into the rutted blacktop streets and the crumbling tenements, the old Holdomored sections, and still she kept running ...

Her story wouldn’t end here. Not if her legs could just keep going.

* * *
"The Engagement Economy—the reality that we consume and market in today—is a new era where everyone and everything is connected." So say the pundits, but can we honestly say that we're now more fundamentally linked than in prior times? From social-media bots to AI slop, online astroturfing to click farms, it's hard to argue that we enjoy more profound togetherness than previous generations. Consider the British, who celebrated Advent by sharing creepy stories around the hearth and, later, by reading print publications ranging from cheap flimsies to the Victorian equivalent of a coffee-table book. Nothing like fostering togetherness while chilling our collective blood with terrifying tales. If you'd like to learn more, History.com offers a nice summary of the tradition, while the Los Angeles Public Library provides classic examples.

You know what else you could also do? You could read prior collections of stories from the ISLF shared-storytelling event Advent Ghosts. We've kept the tradition alive for quite a few years—and you can join us! All you need to do is ...

1) Email me at ISawLightningFall [at] proton [dot] me if you want to participate.
2) Pen a story that’s exactly 100-words long—no more, no less.
3) Post the story to your blog anywhere from Saturday, December 13, to Friday, December 19.
Hosting on ISLF is available for those without blogs or anyone who wants to write under a pseudonym. (Don't worry, you’ll retain copyright!)
4) Email the link of your story to me.
5) While you should feel free to write whatever you want to, know that I reserve the right to put a content warning on any story that I think needs it.