psychological horror Missy Matchstick psychological horror Missy Matchstick

Santa Monica Eats Its Own

A Ferris wheel at the edge of Santa Monica becomes a machine for chewing through identity, memory, and every life its rider did not live. With each rotation, the city mutates into a more vicious reflection of itself, until the question is no longer how to get off the ride, but whether she was ever separate from it.

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magical realism Missy Matchstick magical realism Missy Matchstick

She Was Waiting in the Hollywood Sign

A woman climbs to the Hollywood sign and slips into another version of Los Angeles, where time moves softly, art still matters, and her life has already unfolded into something fuller than the one she left behind. Waiting there is a woman who knows her by heart, and a future that asks what she is finally willing to choose.

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psychological horror Missy Matchstick psychological horror Missy Matchstick

California, Undeveloped

A cursed camera turns the Mojave into a place of vanishing, where every photograph leaves one woman more alone than before. Beneath the desert sun, she is dragged toward a final reckoning with grief, blame, and the life that was never supposed to be hers.

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speculative fiction Missy Matchstick speculative fiction Missy Matchstick

Race You Back to the Car!

In a ruined medical zone haunted by falling hatchets and impossible visions, a nurse keeps saving everyone she can while something in the sky refuses to strike her. The longer she remains untouched, the clearer it becomes that the real wound was never the apocalypse, but what she has carried through it.

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Writing The California Fever Dream

 

“Outside, the sky began changing colors like it was unsure which version of the sunset to run. A Joshua Tree caught fire, silently. Beautifully. And then reassembled itself in reverse.”

Static at the edge of 29 Palms

“She could taste the day. Hot pennies. Sunscreen. The faint chemical sweetness of melted plastic… She told herself this was normal. California normal. A climate that didn’t ask permission.”

What California Makes

“The heat was biblical and immediate. By the time she had crossed the wash and climbed the low rise beyond it, her shirt was sticking to her back and her thoughts had gone strangely bright around the edges.”

Roofline Blonde