psychological horror Missy Matchstick psychological horror Missy Matchstick

Marriage, Staged

A closeted woman enters a hillside open house where infidelity, resentment, fertility panic, and self-erasure have each been preserved in perfect taste. At the end of the tour, the house offers her a room of her own and a life that would ask almost nothing of her except silence.

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magical realism Missy Matchstick magical realism Missy Matchstick

Rooted With You

The Always Again Saga #3
As the seasons begin to shift around them, Lily and Poppy move beyond chance and into choice, building a life that deepens with every turning. What once felt like fate becomes something steadier, something rooted: a love that grows because they keep choosing it.

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magical realism Missy Matchstick magical realism Missy Matchstick

Every Forecast, You

The Always Again Saga #2
In a seaside cottage where the weather seems to know their names, Lily and Poppy discover that staying can be just as strange as finding each other. As the house begins to echo their love back to them, romance turns domestic, uncanny, and impossible to ignore.

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magical realism Missy Matchstick magical realism Missy Matchstick

Coordinates for Two

The Always Again Saga #1
Across continents, Lily and Poppy keep finding each other in places that feel just outside of time. What begins as chance becomes something harder to outrun: a love that keeps returning.

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speculative fiction Missy Matchstick speculative fiction Missy Matchstick

The In-N-Out Between Worlds

A woman drifting through the California desert follows a mysterious receipt into a world where In-N-Out counters, drive-in screens, and motel ghosts begin replaying the love she never knew how to stay inside. As memory gives way to possibility, she is offered one last order: keep running, or take what was waiting for her all along.

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speculative fiction Missy Matchstick speculative fiction Missy Matchstick

Waffling in the House of Her

In a stilted chapel at the edge of the desert, a woman finds twenty-nine versions of the same lost love waiting in the pews for her. What unfolds is a surreal reckoning with memory, repetition, and the stories we keep revising when we cannot bear to let them die.

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magical realism Missy Matchstick magical realism Missy Matchstick

Pues Se Quedó Pintada, Mija

When a woman returns to the site of a wildfire and finds her lost love painted into the stone, she begins to witness impossible changes no one else can see. What unfolds is a haunting shaped not by ghosts, but by the quiet persistence of a love that refused to disappear.

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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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speculative fiction Missy Matchstick speculative fiction Missy Matchstick

Dyke Mirage

A woman wakes outside 29 Palms and stumbles into Dyke Mirage, a desert fever dream of queer longing, breakup rituals, and beautifully unhinged self-reckoning. Somewhere between the tubs, the time loop lounge, and the oracle in the dune buggy screaming poetry across the flats, healing starts to feel less like closure and more like becoming.

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speculative horror Missy Matchstick speculative horror Missy Matchstick

Red Velvet / Holds Shape

After giving away the red velvet couch she shared with her ex, a woman finds that the breakup hasn’t left with it. As Los Angeles begins to pulse with haunted signals, queer longing, and objects soaked in old ache, she realizes some things don’t hold memories, they transmit them.

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speculative fiction Missy Matchstick speculative fiction Missy Matchstick

A Signal Ghost

A sound engineer with a gift for tuning emotion into music is pulled into a charged reunion with the ex who taught her how easily connection can become manipulation. Beneath the noise of Los Angeles, their unfinished history begins to echo through the crowd.

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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