NOTES

 

I laugh whenever I think about the origins of this story. I’d never written a horror story before and hadn’t really intended for this to be one, but it seemed to fit the requirements of the moment.

Writer’s Weekly sponsors a quarterly 24- hour contest. On the dot of noon, Central time on a Saturday, the prompt is revealed and you have 24 hours to write and submit your story, based on the prompt, though it doesn’t have to contain the exact wording.

I was living in Germany at the time I entered this competition, and since I don’t work on Sundays, that gave me only five hours in which to complete the challenge.

So, seven p.m. my time and the prompt came in:

 

The barren, tan corn stalks behind her

snapped in the cold evening breeze,

the only sound louder than the dry,

fiery red leaves swirling around her tiny,

shivering bare feet.

She'd lost her bearings again and

she hoped the dinner bell would ring soon.

A gray tree with endless arms and fingers,

devoid of any remaining foliage,

loomed before her.

She gazed at the odd markings on the trunk,

which appeared to outline a hand-cut

door of sorts. And, as she stared, it opened...

 

I cast around for an idea, pounced on the mental hospital motif, and ran with it. I whipped the story out in about an hour and hit submit, commenting to my husband and son:

 

“That’s got to be the stupidest thing I ever wrote.”

 

It won a prize and an honorable mention in the contest and I’ve received a surprising amount of input from readers about how much they like this story.

The original version was set in October, but I later made a springtime version for submission to a different magazine, and that’s the version I include here.