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You don’t have to look far for inspiration when setting out to write chilling content in North Carolina. Our state is home to a host of authors delivering freshly brewed horror tales. Read on, if you dare, for details on local meet-ups and frights to spur your creativity.

The city forgets, but the bricks remember, lungs filled with the dust of another man’s wealth. Your laughter dissolved into smoke each September.

I wrote this like Psalms etched in the sand, A message from the soul, so I hope you’ll understand. I used to marvel at your magic like Strange with the hands, Now your spells feel hollow, generic, and bland.

I AM the child of pyramids kissed by the Nile, An heir to the wisdom that stretches infinite miles. I AM the scribe of Ausar, the keeper of stars, Charting paths through Orion, unshaken by scars.

We are at the brink of October, that time of wandering souls, Samhain and otherworldly vibes. Here at Ink & Oak, that means we are sending out a call to all you tortured souls and twisted Triangle-based writers to hit us with your finest flash fiction, micro-fiction, and short stories that bring out the dead, the undead, and all that occupies the liminal space between.

Every story begins with a voice stepping out of the dark and offering to guide us through the landscape of plot, character, and theme. Our instinct as readers is to trust that voice, but what happens when it hesitates or misleads us?

I like to touch your scars in complete darkness, bend my fingers over the battlefield of your back, reading your flesh with my own, pondering the violence of the life before us. The circle scar on your spine,

the Haw slides slow past brick and bramble moss threads the wheel spokes a broken beam leans like a weaver asleep at her frame

Near enough to but not inside of  Kenosha and entirely forgotten  by all records              seven–thousand and eighty-two plastic eggs compress because Jeremiah Bumthwaite      (age seven)     has a sloppy swandive

Some nights, the train rattles off the nightstand, following its tracks to the termite-chewed boards beneath our sleep. I have dreamed my friend a face

After the catastrophe, Persephone craves apples, dreams of them, ripe green and gold and crimson, imagines the first tart bite, juice fleeing down her chin.

Roll, roll, roll deep thunder— patient storm. 

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Ink & Oak will begin publishing written works from North Carolina authors in the coming weeks. Become a member to receive updates via...