Nosferatu 100: Flash Fiction

Here are the entries for the Nosferatu at 100 Vampire Flash Fiction competition. We are pleased to announce that the winning entry is no. 5, by Becca Gransbury – congratulations, Becca!!

1

You’d been bitten in adolescence, in secret. It festered, like maggots in the body of the person they would’ve liked to see you become, now dead. But you’d already known it was inside you, in your veins, since the very day of your birth. Unclean. The sickness was always there.

Kelsey Shawgo

2

It was under my skin, and I couldn’t scratch it out. Around me, cold eyes gleamed in the darkness, waiting. I didn’t want to join them, but I could feel it already, the pull – the night singing her elegy, the eyes changing, growing warmer, like home.

Lorna Martin

3

Job Interview with the Vampire:

‘What will you bring to this role?’

‘My . . . condition . . . ideally suits me to pre-dawn hours. I move silently; so won’t awaken any households. My diet is dairy-free; I’ll deliver all the produce on time. I’ve had no sick leave in 250 years.’

‘In how long????!!!’

‘Oh, rats . . .’

Emma Halford

4

Eyes from shadow, cold the skin, a pressure at the throat. There’s nothing here, so why are you afraid? The ship you saw last night, ghosting the grey horizon – try not to think about it, and forget that far-off, unreal, broken castle where a corpse waits patiently for his visitor to arrive.

Ivan Phillips

5

Was it a bite, or burnout? I will never pinpoint the moment my body betrayed me. Devoured by my failing health; my bones spur and my tendons swell, my skin pales, and my lips turn blue and crack. The fog descends and I fall with the monster inside.

Becca Gransbury

6

You learn a lot when watching people. I’ve seen things come and go, people, buildings, countries.

A small seed growing into a tree, its roots penetrating and festering itself into the soul – moving for no one.

A child moving from infancy, to teenage years, to adulthood and to death.

A street becoming a town, becoming a community, becoming something bigger than the house it began with.

The changing of the fabric of society as we know it

Except I’ve known many societies, I’ve seen them all

– an outsider

Harley Tillotson

7

I must cover my mouth,

Stop the fever escaping.

Stop the feeding, before

it empties the world.

Leaving only me,

And my mouth,

Always open and screaming.

A gash that can never be filled,

Only hidden

Behind a mask

Covered in pink polka dots.

Gwyneth Peaty

8

‘Vermin!

All of them!’

Mr. Harker said

Pocketing his stake

‘I won’t let you hurt them, John.’

‘Ready the Horses’, he bellowed

‘Everyone … Please . . .

‘Stop this – they’re just children’.

Daisy Butcher

9

O, how cool your sculpted beauty! How you gleam in moonlight! Immortal is our love—we will share eternity. The alien perfection of Art.

But now I feel you crumble into flesh, and warmth. We fall from transcendence into corporeality. Is this decay that I feel? Even Plague?

Bill Hughes

10

The dentist said my two front teeth were abnormal. ‘They have to go’, she said. ‘But why’, I said. Because I looked like a rat. ‘Rats are evil’, she said. So I bit her neck and drained her blood. She tasted of mouthwash, fear and judgement. My heart bloomed in her contagion.

Annalise Spurr