psychological horror Missy Matchstick psychological horror Missy Matchstick

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At a high-end treatment center where grief is managed like a branding problem, one employee becomes obsessed with a pale, impossible coworker who appears to exist outside the rules of time, memory, and care. As the clinic grows colder and her own emotional life begins to flatten, she realizes too late that detachment here is not a boundary, but an infection.

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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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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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literary fiction Missy Matchstick literary fiction Missy Matchstick

Stick With Me, Please

When a series of anonymous notes begins appearing across Los Angeles, each one reaches someone at the exact moment they are about to give up. What unfolds is not a miracle, but something smaller and more human—the possibility that even unseen, we are still holding each other in place.

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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