Shallow Waters—where nothing stays buried.

With twenty-one dark tales diving beneath the surface of life, death, and the pain between them.

Shallow Waters is the official monthly flash fiction challenge hosted by the award-winning Crystal Lake Publishing. Every month a new challenge is posted online, with authors submitting via email. The best submissions are then posted on Crystal Lake’s Patreon page, where patrons read daily entries and vote for the winner. What you’ll find in these Shallow Waters anthologies include the most popular of our finalists.

Stay tuned for more volumes in this series, or find Crystal Lake Publishing on Patreon to enter or vote on future challenges.

Volume three includes horror, thrillers, suspense, and stories of hauntings, monsters, clowns, twisted love, and the beauty beneath it all.

Introduction by Joe Mynhardt
“Piece Meal” by Madeline Mora-Summonte
“The Anonymous Dark” by Jonathan Winn
“Number Seventeen” by Monique Snyman
“For Her” by Jo-Anne Russell
“Second Chances” by Rob Smales
“Maker of Flight” by Richard Thomas
“Inertia” by Joshua Hair
“Malignant Roots” by Red Lagoe
“Two to a Desk” by Dani Brown
“The Comb” by Theresa Derwin
“Echoes” by Megan Hart
“Haunted Places” by Mark Allan Gunnells
“Hallways, Long and Dark” by Dale Elster
“The Chance of a Lifetime” by Pete Mesling
“GOGGINS” by Stephen Crowley
“Caoine” by Jennifer Loring
“Hacked” By Mark Cassell & Patrick R. McDonough
“Ghosts of the Wood” by Tim Meyer
“Paid in Full” by Roberta Codemo
“This Other Door” by Dan Rabarts & Lee Murray
“Always and Forever” by Jay Faulkner

In this volume…

• This Halloween, the girl might just get more than she bargained for.
• A gumball machine dispenses something far more sinister—and sweeter—than candy.
• Lessons don’t always have to be taught in school.
• You never know what you’ll find at the end of a dark hallway…
• A serial killer reminisces over his last victim.
• An Irish-American man come to terms with the legacy he leaves, thanks to the ancestral apparition that has haunted his family for centuries.
• Some relationships leave scars that linger even beyond death.
• When a Victorian actor’s career comes to a sudden end due to a flare-up of gout during an opening-night performance at the Delphi Theatre, he is left with only one chance to exact revenge on the inflexible house manager.
• Stalked by shadows, a woman prowls the darkened halls of her longtime home.
• Her body found mutilated down the tin mines and pursued by her step sister, she scratches her hooks against the wall as her classmates disappear.
• Some curses are eternal and unbreakable.
• Inertia—a property of matter in which something moves at a set speed and direction until made to change by another force.
• After his dark soul took to the soil, evil plagued the roots of the family tree.
• Houses aren’t the only places that can be haunted...
• A man hunches over a workbench, a basket of tiny birds chirping nearby, wondering if the sky is still blue.
• Charlie’s luck turns around when a storm rolls in, but things aren’t always as they seem when you find love on the sea.
• In the center of a once-beautiful, now derelict forest, the trees aren’t the only things that are dead.
• Sometimes, till death do us part is just not enough.

Proudly brought to you by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.