100 Word Ghost Stories

NYC Midnight Microfiction Contest Prompt: Ghost story, with the word focus, and action of licking an envelope

The Toast

Mark, always the focus at their table of friends, let Anna sit in a quiet shadow beside him. He would toast her, like he always did, to make up for it.

“To Anna, a bright light lost to shadows,” Mark solemnly spoke as he raised his obligatory glass.

Anna struggled to grip her wine glass, perplexed at the toast and her last fight with Mark. When the fight ended unresolved, she licked an envelope at his insistence, still remembering the odd metallic taste.

Anna went to speak, but Claire sat down through her, grabbing Mark’s hand with a coy smile.

The Promise

“Promise me you will move on,” Wren insisted with ragged breath through the fence. Even through her mask, she could smell his intoxicating spice.

“I want to go with you,” she screamed as he walked away for the last time.

Two years later to the day, she sat at a desk in the grim flat issued to her upon surviving the final wave of illness. Her focus was lost to an apparition on the wall and the smell of spice in the air. Suddenly compelled, she licked the envelope containing her positive response to the previously unrequited love of another.

Violet in the Dark

Violet found the darkest corner of her closet, leaving a tenuous sliver of focus into her room, lit only by unicorns and stars projected onto the ceiling. Her hands were covered in a dark, oozing slime found around the necks of her parents and sister, stiff in their beds.

The apparition was here now, preceded by a telltale chill­. It picked up something off her desk. Violet swallowed her breath as it licked the barely visible flash of a white envelope, setting it down outside the closet door, palpably pausing, then leaving. The note read, “You killed them, not me.”

Maggie’s Last Stand

“Focus is what you lacked, Maggie. I’m finally done taking care of you,” he said before he licked the envelope and slammed it on the table near the stairs.

“The only thing I lacked was your love, Greg,” Maggie said, looking down at her tattooed bruises, colored sunset purple.

With narrowed eyes and clenched fists, he walked past her. Sometimes, he would walk into her, delivering a jab or push.

Greg fell to his death down the stairs that night, the startled victim of a whispered threat. Maggie’s death certificate was found in a sealed envelope near his crumpled body.