The New Tenant
Flash Fiction by
Melissa Flores Anderson (Architect) & Russell Epp-Leppel (Haunter)
This piece is the product of our Tiny Hauntings pop-up sub call. First, we asked you to become Architects, creating stunning, spooky, spine-chilling settings. Next, we gathered Haunters and unleashed them into our favorite Architect-designed landscapes. The results are to die for.
An abandoned beer can rusted in the fog that rolled along the bluffs and wrapped around the ice plants and cypress trees, thick like grey strands of cotton candy and obscuring the view of the cove below. Wooden benches that perched on the edge of a steep drop sat empty, the impressions of summer tourists etched into the planks. The waves churned below, an inky ebb and flow, a riptide breaking violently against the sand. A lone house sat above it all, with four dark windows, condensation dripping toward worn windowsills. Moss grew on the north-facing wall, like ivy creeping up toward the eaves, the brown roof tiles encrusted in salty white residue from the sea air. Tall grasses furled themselves away from the house and over the cliff, the wind pulling them back and forth in a tumultuous tug of war.
It had been a nice place once, a quaint little seaside retreat, but that was a long time ago, months or maybe years. It was back when people—human people—lived here, beating back nature’s inexorable encroachment, believing that the shore belonged to the property. Now the property belonged to the shore, and its new tenant was decidedly inhuman.
She had moved in from all sides simultaneously, from the earth below and the skies above. She peered through its windows with innumerable prying eyes and blew her damp, icy breath upon its face until the window panes rattled and the door trembled on its hinges. She reached out with long, grey-green fingers, wrapped them all around the tiny house, and gripped it tightly, feeling its weathered outer surface. It felt good, like the dirt beneath her fingernails. And it was hers.
The formerly abandoned beer can crawled down the path, the new home of a hermit crab.
Melissa Flores Anderson is a Latinx Californian who lives with her young son and husband. A three-time Best of the Net nominee, her creative work has been published in more than two dozen journals or anthologies, and she is a reader/editor with Roi Fainéant Press. She has co-authored a novelette, “Roadkill,” that is forthcoming with Emerge Literary Journal. Follow her on Twitter and Bluesky @melissacuisine or IG/Threads @theirishmonths. Read her work at melissafloresandersonwrites.com.
Russell Epp-Leppel is always exploring his love of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. With a background in engineering, he enjoys deconstructing narrative systems to see how they work, then reassembling them in new ways. His short horror stories "The Daylight Horror," "The Tooth Fairy," and "The Chimera" have been accepted by Lovecraftiana, 96th of October, and the Creepy podcast, respectively. He lives with his partner and their small menagerie in the Philadelphia area, where he can be found haunting the local woods, and on Twitter @leppeppel.
