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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magical realism Missy Matchstick magical realism Missy Matchstick

To Be a Wildflower in Yosemite

A nurse abandons her life and drives into Yosemite, expecting cold and punishment, but finds a forest blooming where it shouldn’t and a silence that doesn’t demand anything from her. As she lets herself rest for the first time in years, the question shifts from how to go back to whether she wants to at all.

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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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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 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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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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psychological horror Missy Matchstick psychological horror Missy Matchstick

Holy Hunger

A former arsonist returns to the fireline where the land still remembers the first time she let it burn. When the flames begin to take shape and call her back by her old name, she’s forced to confront whether she was ever fighting the fire—or feeding it.

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speculative fiction Missy Matchstick speculative fiction Missy Matchstick

Race You Back to the Car!

In a ruined medical zone haunted by falling hatchets and impossible visions, a nurse keeps saving everyone she can while something in the sky refuses to strike her. The longer she remains untouched, the clearer it becomes that the real wound was never the apocalypse, but what she has carried through it.

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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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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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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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speculative fiction Missy Matchstick speculative fiction Missy Matchstick

Tier 2: Glitchgirl Core

After being upgraded into a hyper-curated Tier 1 society, a woman discovers that every trend, voice, and identity has been stolen from the people below her. Instead of playing the role she was finally given, she rewrites the system from the inside until it starts to break.

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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