flash fiction by cass costa
If You Come To My Haunted House As A Tourist
If you come to my haunted house as a tourist, turn back, don’t do it, leave for good. If my warnings seemed lackluster, then sure, proceed. I mean, it is your neck, figuratively and perhaps literally, if you step beyond the threshold. A threshold where Auntie Mack once slit the throat of a chicken; sprinkled blood upon the planks there. See? See the dried droplets of blood? She promptly buried it beneath the foundations. A foundation built of the wood harvested from a most brutal shipwreck, maybe you’ve heard of it? The one where the tidal wave swept and sucked the passengers out to sea? See here, in this hall, how narrow and claustrophobic it is? How the canvases reach out for you. They say the passengers whisper through the shiplap sometimes. Mostly at 3:37 AM. And speaking of mornings, there’s a woman here, likes to sit right close behind you at dinner and you can hear her wimpy sobs, but only if you scrape your plate with a fork and knife. That’s her pet peeve. And there’s always someone around the corner. You’ll hear them without seeing them. If a knock comes at your window, try not to get up and check the moonlit lawn from your balcony in a nightgown, or they will push you. But hey, if you’ve come to my haunted house as a tourist, you might as well have the full, red-blooded, haunting experience.
Cass Costa is a fiction writer. She explores reality through the absurd, with a deep interest in the surreal. Her works are women-centric, with witches, mothers, spirits, and sentient houses. She delightfully defended her thesis “Milk & Magic and Other Stories” in 2019 and received an MFA in Creative Writing from OSU-Cascades. She lives in Southern Oregon and is excited to share her craft with you.