Ninety-third Issue! Don't Blink
September has a way of changing the mood. The days may still be warm, but darkness arrives earlier, windows turn into mirrors, and every movement at the edge of your vision becomes a little harder to dismiss.
Welcome to the ninety-third edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter.
This month, we’re returning to horror and supernatural fiction with our theme, Don’t Blink. These stories explore the horrors we catch in the corner of our eye, as well as the ones waiting for the moment we close them. Expect sinister bargains, unsettling apparitions, watchful forces and things that move when no one is looking.
Thank you to everyone who submitted this month. You found more ways to make a simple blink terrifying than we could ever have imagined.
Keep your eyes open. This won’t take long.
Congratulations to both winners of the September theme: Emmanuel Blavo and Shannon Fay!
The Shutter by Emmanuel Blavo – A grieving man undertakes a terrifying supernatural trial in the hope of reclaiming what he has lost...
Your Only Duty is to Watch by Shannon Fay – An eerie religious-art livestream attracts an obsessive following as the boundary between art, faith and something sinister begins to blur...
This month's newsletter features:
- NEW Flame Tree Press and Gothic Fantasy titles!
- CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!
- Live & Spooky: A Halloween Scratch Night
- Original Horror Fiction #1: The Shutter by Emmanuel Blavo
- Original Horror Fiction #2: Your Only Duty is to Watch by Shannon Fay
- EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
- Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme
FLAME TREE PRESS | September Titles
Monstrous by Bryan Smith
Accompanied by an unsuspecting target, an aspiring serial killer journeys to a remote mountainous location at the same time as a woman looking to bury evidence of a heinous crime walks the same trail. A sudden unnatural storm transports them to a mist-shrouded field that rolls on for countless miles in all directions. A towering skyscraper stands at the centre that they both must enter – a plaque on the door reads simply, MONSTROUS, a hint of the surreal cosmic horrors lurking inside. Have they been delivered to this strange place for a chance at redemption, or for some ultimate form of punishment not available to earthly forces? Will they ever know the truth?
Original Horror Story #1
The Shutter
Emmanuel Blavo
The needle was hers. It was still threaded in the tin box on her dresser. The thread it was attached to was made of thick, wax-coated cobbler’s hemp. He used it as it was. In the shard of her hand mirror, he pierced the fold of his upper eyelid first, squirming against the pain. He pulled the thread through the loose flesh above his brow and knotted it against the skin. He repeated the motion below, anchoring the lower lid down towards his cheekbone. When he finished, he tried once to close his eyes. The lids strained, bloody, but held.
Akosua had been dead for 6 weeks now. The mourning had been difficult, but the memories that truly ate at him were how he hadn’t been able to be there for her in her final days and hadn’t even been able to bring himself to look at her withering form, always looking for an excuse to look away.
The demon had offered him a deal: walk the Under-Vault, witness the truth of his soul, and bring her back. But if he blinked even once...
The demon was waiting where the roads parted. It shifted through a myriad of forms. Whatever form it took, its blazing red eyes always stood out, unblinking.
"You did not need to do that," it said, silky and amused. “That must have hurt."
"I know what I agreed to." His voice came out thinner and more strained than he wanted. There was an ache forming in his temples.
"You agreed not to blink, and you have made it so that you cannot. I think those are not the same promises, mortal. Ah, no matter. Let’s see how the Under-Vault treats you."
The dark landscape of the crossroads shifted, not unlike the demon’s form. He was nine again, holding the stone he had just thrown through Kobby Mensah's window. His younger brother took the blame. The look of confusion and betrayal on his face was worse. The man did not look away. The scenery shifted; he was 31, drunk at a wedding, hissing something cruel at Akosua for laughing at another man’s joke.
The pain was screaming now. fighting for his attention. The air in the deep places was dry and sulphurous and blistered his exposed sclera.
He accepted the shame and swallowed the horror. He would bear witness to the absolute worst of his soul, all for her.
The scenery shifted again and turned to darkness before receding into a fog. There, at the centre of a shallow, pitch-black pool, she stood. She was as beautiful as the day he lost her.
His ruined eyes burned, but a surge of agonising triumph flooded his chest. He had done it! He took a step forward, his cracked lips forming her name.
“Akosua.”
She turned to face him. But she did not rush into his arms. She did not weep with gratitude.
As she stepped out of the darkness, the veil over her memories parted. This time it wasn’t his memories that were laid bare for him to face… it was hers.
He saw her last days, not through his own tear-filled, mourning eyes, but through her own.
He saw her sitting by the window in their home, looking at him with an expression of exhausting, suffocating dread. He saw the initial shock in her face when she secretly received her cancer diagnosis, but then the determination and…relief. Finally, she would be free from him.
He saw her final breath. As he had wept at her bedside, holding her limp hand and begging her to stay, her dying thought had not been love.
Finally, her spirit had whispered into the dark. I can be free of him.
The realization arrived like a thunderclap. His grand gesture and heroic descent, his horrific self-mutilation—it wasn't a rescue. It was an invasion. He was dragging a woman back to a life she had willingly, painfully escaped.
For a fraction of a second, he hesitated. Was she worth this?
A deep, silky smooth chuckle echoed from the shadows.
"Ah," the voice rasped, "There it is."
"No," he rasped. "No! My eyes are open! Look at me! I haven't blinked! I didn’t look away!"
"The skin of your face remained still, little lover," the demon whispered, coiling around him. "To blink is not merely an act of the eyelid. It is the shutting of the shutter. For a breath, your heart turned away from her."
"I endured the gauntlet!" he screamed. "I didn't blink!"
"Wait!" he begged, straining against the coils. "Let me stay with her!"
"Oh, you will not be staying with her," the shadow whispered into his ear. "She has earned her rest. But you... you made a bargain. You failed."
A tendril of shadow touched his stitched eye. Cold pressure mounted behind his sockets. He screamed as the darkness rushed in to fill his world, claiming him as the entity took its due, leaving the raw, thread-sewn skin of his brow hanging over empty red pits.
And in the silence of the dark, with no sight to distract him, her relief was the only thing left for him to see. Forever.
Emmanuel Blavo is an aspiring writer living in Accra, Ghana. He writes short stories about the weird ideas that come to him at random. One of his stories has appeared in Flame Tree Publishing's Myths, Gods and Immortals anthology, and a flash fiction piece ran in the Flame Tree newsletter's May 2026 edition that he’s especially proud of. Stephen King and Terry Pratchett are the two names he keeps coming back to as inspiration.
His socials: Twitter: @elblavo | Instagram: @big_blavo
Original Horror Story #2
Your Only Duty is to Watch
Shannon Fay
LIVE STREAM TRANSCRIPT:
A fixed-point camera view of a forest glen. In the middle of the frame is a ceramic Virgin Mary about two feet tall. The statue has been altered, the face and middle length of the torso cut away. Inside the hollow cavity is something dark that catches the light and glitters. The statue is set on a tree stump. It’s daytime, and a light breeze makes the leaves move with an inaudible rustle.
The channel is titled “Mother Mary Mnemosyne+.” No other info is provided. Four hundred thousand viewers are watching the stream.
r/DreamInterpretations
Something I watched online has burrowed into my mind • 3mo ago
By user AppleCore
I started watching this weird livestream online. All I’ll say is that there’s a statue. I had a dream where the statue was looming over me, and in my dream I closed my eyes because I was scared. And I felt something like tendrils reach out and choke me.
I woke up and turned on the video, and the statue was normal sized, and seeing it immediately made me feel better.
So, am I cursed?
PervertWhisperer
No. You just dreamed about the thing you watched right before bed.
Chaos_is_a_ladder
I like a good scare—can I see the video?
Ba_na_no999
Looking at the OP’s posting history, I’m guessing it’s this live stream talked about here on r/InternetMysteries.
Chaos_is_a_ladder
Ta!
Excerpts from “MMM+ Group Chat”
Tam
Northern Europe is looking more and more likely
Tam
MG, still waiting on your weather report from the best week
MG
Sorry sorry
Jelly
It is important
MG
I know I know, it’s just that when I start watching the screen, I get so sucked in I forget to take notes
Riki
We’re so close
MG
Yeah yeah
Alric
We nail down sunset/sunrise, we nail down latitude/longitude
MG
Thing is, I don’t know if we’re asking the right questions.
MG
I also want to know where this thing is and who set it up, but what I really want to know is why.
MG
Why set this up? Why?
MG
And how is it in my head? I see it even when I close my eyes.
MG
I get these headaches that only stop when I turn on the stream
Pitch
MG, DM me.
From: True Dark <TD988779@conumail.com>
To: Jacques Auvray <B0250666@Académiedesarts.com>
Dear Jacques,
You have done well to cover your tracks. To put your mind at ease, I’ll explain how I found you. A few months ago, there was a data leak that revealed which YouTube channels were linked to which email. This is how I discovered that your student email was the one linked to Mother Mary Mnemosyne+.
We worship the same god. Our god must be watched at all times lest disaster fall upon our world. Setting up a livestream is a brilliant modern solution, but technology can fail—two weeks ago YouTube was down for maintenance for a mere three hours, and in that time an earthquake hit Indonesia, killing hundreds of thousands. What if YouTube were to go down permanently, or the channel were to be banned?
Myself and a devoted coterie are willing to take possession of the god. We promise to never leave the god unattended or unwatched. We will lift this burden from you.
Please reply so we can arrange a safe handover.
A Fellow Believer
Student Art Project Becomes Modern Urban Legend
(Translated from French in English by Google Translate)
When Academie des Arts student Jacques Auvray started livestreaming the image of a religious icon, he figured he’d get a couple of viewers. “I gave the link to friends and asked them to share it around. Somehow it spiraled far outside my social circle, as things tend to do on the internet.”
Spiralled it did: at one point a million viewers were turning in to watch the tranquil but eerie livestream. We sat down with Auvray to talk about his art project-turned-viral-phenomenon.
Art News: So, how’s life as a viral creator?
Jacques: (Laughs) Not great, honestly. Strangers have been emailing me, calling me, and even showing up on my doorstep. People have become so obsessed with this thing, but they won’t listen to me when I say it’s just an art project.
Art News: Which in a way plays perfectly into the themes of the work, no?
Jacques: Yes, it does. The assignment had been to create a piece that explores faith in the modern world. During the pandemic my grandmother attended mass virtually. It made me wonder, could something holy really be transmitted over a Zoom call? I wished to create a piece that explored such ideas, so I made a digital grotto.
Art News: Where did you get the statue? It does have an otherworldly aura.
Jacques: The statue was created by my girlfriend Naomi-Marie Picart for her series where she transforms religious iconography using items from nature. For this statue she cut away parts of a Madonna statue and filled the inside with geode crystals. It’s always been one of my favorite pieces of hers.
As for the livestream, I’m shutting it down. People are taking this way too seriously. If the statue didn’t belong to Naomi, I’d smash it on a stream just to prove that there’s nothing supernatural about it at all.
PARIS POLICE REPORT:
Double homicide at Av. Du Parc. Victims Naomi-Marie Picart (24) and Joshua Reynolds (26). Their roommate, Jacques Auvray (23), is missing. Neighbours report a group of people breaking into the apartment from its ground floor entrance. Robbery is a possible motive, as the apartment was ransacked.
LIVE STREAM TRANSCRIPT:
A fixed-point camera view showing a dark, windowless room. Floodlights are centered on a Virgin Mary statue, the crystals inside her glinting.
She is set atop a table. Filling out the room are a dozen figures, all shapes and sizes but mere silhouettes thanks to the extreme lighting. Their backs are to the camera, bodies all facing the statue.
There is no channel title.
Five people are currently watching the stream.
Shannon Fay is a writer living in Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia. She’s had oodles of short stories published in multiple genres including horror, mystery, romance, fantasy, and sci-fi. She is the author of two historical fantasy novels, Innate Magic and its sequel External Forces. Her favourite authors are ones who can build huge worlds in small spaces, such as Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, Mariana Enríquez, Samuel R. Delany.
Our next edition of the newsletter will be FANTASY themed, and we are looking for stories around the theme of:
The Thirteenth Hour
Please note that all stories submitted should be within the FANTASY genre.
Terms and conditions for the submissions here: https://flametr.com/submissions.
Please send your 1,000-word story to the Newsletter Editor:
Leah Ratcliffe
flashfic@flametreepublishing.com
The deadline is 20th September 2026.
We look forward to reading your submissions. Happy writing!
Sign up for our fiction newsletter 