Last week I introduced a new blog series, Fiction Fragments, in which I will share abandoned writing projects. Each week, a different writer will be featured. You’ll learn a little bit about their writing process, you’ll learn a little bit about them, and get a chance to read some of their unfinished work.

This week, I welcome my good friend and fellow writer, Jennifer Loring. I met Jenn during my first MFA in Writing Popular Fiction residency at Seton Hill University. She was one of my first critique partners and I always looked forward to reading the pages she sent me. Since then, we’ve visited a haunted penitentiary, attended horror writing conventions, and talked about our shared love of vampires over many beers.

Jennifer Loring’s short fiction has been published widely both online and in print, including the anthologies Tales from the Lake vol. 1 and vol. 4 and Nightscript vol. 4. Longer work includes the novel Those of My Kind, published by Omnium Gatherum, and the novella Conduits from Lycan Valley Press. Jenn is a member of the International Thriller Writers (ITW) and the Horror Writers Association (HWA). She holds an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University with a concentration in horror fiction and teaches online in SNHU’s College of Continuing Education. Jenn lives in Philadelphia, PA with her husband, where they are owned by a turtle and two basset hounds.

Three Questions

Girl Meets Monster: What inspired this fragment?

Jenn: It was a long time ago, but I believe it was inspired at least in part by a Velvet Acid Christ album cover. Music is always a huge inspiration for me. The general concept was, as you can probably tell from the title, a dying man’s dream. However, this particular man is about to be executed.

Girl Meets Monster: What kept you from continuing with the story?

Jenn: Mostly because I felt I couldn’t do justice to the idea in my head. Which is something we all deal with throughout our careers and something I’ve learned to work through, but I was still fairly young at this point—26 or so, I think—so I didn’t have the confidence in my writing that I’ve gradually built up since then.

Girl Meets Monster: Do you know how this story ends?

Jenn: Great question! I honestly have no idea. I’ve kept it for almost 15 years, so I guess I had the intention of finishing it at some point. His being executed would be too obvious, so maybe he would get a last-minute pardon?

Last Dream of a Dead Man, by Jennifer Loring
The mattress damp with fluids not his own huffed as he sat up and peered at the dirt-encrusted floor beneath him. A dim light came from somewhere, perhaps the same place as the voices that crawled through the walls and into his ears like hissing cockroaches. Liquid puddled in the corners of the room. Too dark to tell if it was water or blood.

Wake up, the voices screamed inside his head. He pinched himself. Awake. He did not know where he was, though the cell looked vaguely familiar.

The girl rolled into his room in a wheelchair, sewing a new leg onto the stump of her left thigh. Both arms and her right leg bore stitch marks made of heavy dark thread. She was the same as that night when he’d taken her, with the pink headband in her long blond hair. “Are little girls made of sugar and spice and everything nice?” she asked him, the needle diving in and out of the leg she held with her other hand. He wondered whose limbs they were or if, being a child, she even cared that they didn’t belong to her. “Or are they made of flesh and blood like everyone else?”

He looked down and found his arms and legs lying in a red pool, the remaining stumps spurting an alarming amount of blood. The girl laughed maliciously and he remembered. He had told her that he wanted to see what little girls were made of. No one ever found her arms and legs, and he never told. “Where am I?” he asked.

“The Needleman is coming. No one will weep for you.” She smiled with a cruelty particular to children, tucked the needle and thread into the pocket of her dress, and wheeled herself into the corridor.

He told himself to move his limbs and they, attached to him again, obeyed. He walked to the door to follow her, but she had vanished into the darkness. Flies coated the bloodstained walls, a living and moving black paint, an ever-shifting shadow. Metallic clanks of doors slamming shut echoed through the hallway. The voices whispered but he did not understand, or didn’t want to.

He felt the stares of invisible eyes upon him and ran to the end of the hall; he pushed open a set of double doors and stared up at the sky. All the stars were gone, and the moon’s huge infected eye spilled bloody light onto the dead grass, staining his clothes and hands. He turned back to the doors. They had become a brick wall.

Ahead of him, the little girl wheeled herself out of the shadows. Beside her, walking on the insides of her feet because he had fractured her ankles, was his favorite. She was the first, and he’d told her to be very quiet. Now a rusted zipper stretched across her mouth so she could not scream, but he imagined the little girl would do the talking for her. In her television eyes flickered images of her grieving parents, her suicidal fiancé, her two younger sisters robbed of their idol. Then flashing video loops of a snuff film worse than any fantasized by even the sickest mind. Each murder, there in her eyes, each moment captured by the camera lens of her pupils.

“Tell us why you did it. That’s all they ever wanted to hear. And if they believed you, they might have kept the Needleman away. Maybe they still can. Go on, you can tell me.” The girl leaned forward, feigning profound interest.

He stepped back, startled. Was that all they really wanted? Was that what could save him? No, he didn’t believe it. She was tricking him. He had no reason to trust her.

“Go on, tell me. Maybe the nightmares will go away. Maybe they’ll save you, and the nightmares will never come again.”

“You’re lying. What’s in it for you if I tell you?”

“Peace. It’s what you want, it’s what we all want. Hurry! The Needleman doesn’t like to be kept waiting!”

“Leave me alone!” He ran into the dark, with the disembodied little-girl voice chasing him.

“We’ll never leave! Not in this life and not in the next! We’re all yours now―you wanted it that way, remember? All yours now.”

He stopped running when both girls blocked his path, wherever it might lead. The tall girl who was once beautiful unzipped her mouth, and a swarm of maggots squirmed out, dropping onto the grass at her feet.

Next Friday, B. E. Burkhead will share some of his poetry fragments here at Girl Meets Monster. Would you like to submit your unfinished writing and talk about what stops you from finishing certain projects? Comment below or submit your fragment to me at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!