speculative fiction Missy Matchstick speculative fiction Missy Matchstick

The Chapel with the Backwards Pews

A woman vanishes into a strange, looping world of motel pools, static-lit skies, and identities that refuse to stay fixed. There, in a chapel where the pews face backward and the altar points toward something like truth, she begins to understand that leaving is not always the opposite of becoming.

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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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psychological horror Missy Matchstick psychological horror Missy Matchstick

Red Lipstick, White Noise

A trip to the Integratron sends a skeptical reporter into a desert spiral of sound baths, retro domestic hauntings, and a womanhood she refuses to inherit. But as the white noise deepens and the mirrors stop obeying, resistance starts to sound dangerously close to surrender.

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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