Flash Fiction, October 2025
Semi-Finalist, NYC Midnight Scary Story Challenge 2025-2026

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(Content warning: harm against children)

It’s clear you don’t remember me as you arrive at my booth, cash in hand and a toddler on your hip. He’s two, maybe three, with your same sunny shade of hair. 

We met at ten, maybe eleven. I was a child of divorce in seventh grade, broke, overwhelmed and underweight. My lunchbox was just a prop back then. When we were assigned neighboring lockers, I gave you my best attempt at a smile.

Your nose scrunched hard, nearly recoiling into your skull.

“Ew, why are your teeth brown?

My jaw snapped like a turtle’s, lips rolling to a tight, chastened line.  Later, you told your friends I was so poor that all I had to eat was shit.

In ninth grade, on dissection day, you dropped a fetal pig behind my desk. The impact spattered viscera and formaldehyde everywhere, drenching me from shoes to shoulders. Hours, then days of scrubbing myself raw did nothing. No perfume could drown it. I stank of death. First in practice, then in reputation.

In those lonely school days, I found solace in history class. The Victorians fascinated me most of all. They had entire conversations through flowers, gestures, or directional fans held over their faces. They could say so much, and so emphatically, without a single word. 

The Victorians were also wild about arsenic. They mixed it into their wallpaper, their books, their face creams. Sometimes they bathed in it with bubbles and salts. It’d take centuries to connect their slow, excruciating deaths to those little daily luxuries. In fact, there’s plenty of leftover poison still lining the shelves of modern antique shops.

You sit with your son fussing in your lap, torn between tiger stripes and spiderwebs. I say nothing as I unpack my favorite greasepaints. They’re vintage; souvenirs from an oddity shop just outside of town. For antiquated cosmetics, they’re still quite vibrant. Lightweight on the skin. I save them for special occasions, much like this surprise reunion. 

My first brushstroke glides smooth and thick over his dimpled cheek. He’ll be a tiger in no time, fierce with a fully saturated face. Later, when his pores drink up the day’s frivolity, he’ll also reek of death. It will froth over his lips and leak from his nose in a boundless stream. 

When that foul, familiar stink of rot kicks up, who knows? You just might remember me after all.