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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speculative fiction Missy Matchstick speculative fiction Missy Matchstick

White Sands, I’m Not Lost Anymore

A woman wakes after death in a white desert where sorrow blooms into flowers, old letters can be buried into beauty, and the people she left behind come to meet her one by one. What unfolds is a surreal reckoning with love, regret, and the possibility of peace after a life that hurt too much to stay inside.

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magical realism Missy Matchstick magical realism Missy Matchstick

Where The Mycelium Waited

Beneath a redwood forest, an ancient mycelial consciousness begins to awaken around the footsteps of one grieving woman who keeps coming back. What follows is a love story made of moss, memory, and the strange mercy of being recognized before you can recognize yourself.

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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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magical realism Missy Matchstick magical realism Missy Matchstick

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