I was going to submit this, but then I didn’t because the due date was an insane day for me and also because I just can’t seem to gather up the energy to submit to yet another contest. I covered that in detail in my previous post so I won’t rehash it here. Anyway, here’s a free story. I wrote it for the NPR Three Minute Fiction Round Five. In a way, I used it as a prompt because even as I was writing it I had a feeling I wouldn’t bother to send it in. The story had to be 600 words or less. It had to start with the sentence: “Some people swore that the house was haunted.” and end with the sentence: “Nothing was ever the same again after that.”

I had a blast writing it. Here it is: