literary fiction Missy Matchstick literary fiction Missy Matchstick

Shark / Skull

Among shark teeth, bones, and objects pulled from the sea, two people begin to understand each other without needing to explain what they’ve survived. Some things are lost, some are remade, and some find their way back anyway.

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All Towers, No Exit

At a secret Tarot Mass where the lost come to be told who they are, the deck begins returning only one card: the Tower. As the ritual devours itself and the congregation transforms under its weight, a single refusal becomes the only exit left in a room built on surrender.

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psychological horror Missy Matchstick psychological horror Missy Matchstick

Lisa Frank is Bleeding

A dead mother’s house starts crying in bubblegum pink, pulling one woman back into the parts of herself she was taught were childish, shameful, and too much to keep. Beneath the gloss and body horror, something stranger is waiting: not punishment, but permission.

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literary fiction Missy Matchstick literary fiction Missy Matchstick

Redwood Crown, Lithium Bones

In the aftermath of a manic break that felt more like revelation than illness, a woman struggles to survive the soft violence of being stabilized. As she moves through recovery, exile, and collapse, she must decide whether the wild self she became in the forest was something to escape or something worth carrying home.

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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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speculative fiction Missy Matchstick speculative fiction Missy Matchstick

Control Subject 516

When a state-sanctioned soulmate system activates and everyone around her is violently pulled into their assigned future, one woman is left untouched. What begins as isolation soon reveals itself as something worse: she was never meant to be matched, only watched.

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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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Where The Desert Keeps Her

Somewhere off an unnamed road in the Mojave, a motel appears for those who have lost something they can’t return to. Inside, the rooms shift with your memory, and a girl who may not be entirely human offers you exactly what you didn’t know you needed to let go.

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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