The Following was Written for the Sunday Photo Fiction – Feb. 11, 2018 Challenge prompt below:
Photo Prompt Credit © J Hardy Carroll
Mrs. Hudson looked ill when Tina arrived to babysit. She had a dark smudge of something on her hand, across one cheek.
“You don’t look well,” Tina told her.
Mrs. Hudson’s eyes ticked towards the hallway, and the door at the end of it.
“Addie’s been….ill. I gave her something. Just, leave her be unless she calls you. I don’t think she’ll need you.”
Then Mrs. Hudson was gone, and Addie had been silent the whole time.
Tina walked softly down the hall. A fire extinguisher by the girls door was strange. The smell of smoke stranger still.
“Addie? Angel, are you okay?”
The smell of burning was almost overwhelming inside the room, but there were no flames. The room was dark, the strangest thing yet. Addie was afraid of the dark, she always had a night light on.
“Addie, are you awake honey? You okay?”
Blue lights flashed from nowhere, lit the room with a teasing strobe.
There, finally, was Addie. Crumpled on the floor in the center of her room was a tiny wasted, blackened mummy crumpled in the center of a scorched circle.
Tina’s scream was drowned out as a siren whooped in the night.
(198 words)
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Wild Verbs 
Seems there’s a firestarter in the family. Love the way you built up the tension until the final reveal.
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Thank you.
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Some chilling things behind these doors! Should’ve listened to Mrs Hudson.
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Sitters don’t always do what they’re told. Sometimes they find skeletons in the closets.
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The horror of it. You had me wondering was it self combustion or has Addie been playing with the electricity.
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I think the mommy with the mysteriously dirty face might have had something to do with it, but ran out of words to point fingers with.
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Ooh, great tension in this one! Why do people in horror stories always open those doors, when I am yelling at the screen for them to run away? 🙂 Seems like however Mrs Hudson was involved in this, she’s probably long gone by now…
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It wouldn’t be much of a horror if the people made smart choices. lol Maybe Mrs Hudson went to turn herself in for doing something horrible. Why else would the police have shown up at the end?
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I was thinking a neighbor had reported seeing smoke, or the flames through a window. But yes, maybe Mrs. Hudson is doing the right thing: I like that even better. Or maybe Mrs. Hudson didn’t do it, but only discovered her daughter in this state and is going to report it — that would still be consistent with the smudges.
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