(My Attempt at) Two-Sentence Horror Stories

While up late working at your computer, you see one of those disgusting, many-legged house centipedes skittering around on your floor, and resolve to kill it before it gets away. Wielding a rolled-up magazine, you chase the centipede under the bed; but as you stick your arm and head into the dark void beneath the bed skirts, you are seized with a sharp, sudden dread and quickly withdraw back into the brightly-lit room… only to discover that now, they are everywhere.

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Tanya awoke to the sound of some talk show murmuring unintelligibly from the half-muted speakers of her alarm clock/radio, and reached across blearily to shut it off. It wasn’t until her hand brushed over a cold, clammy something resting on top of her nightstand that she remembered she was in a hotel room, and it didn’t have a radio.

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Someone had told Jason that if he put a small animal in the microwave, it would explode, and Jason (having always been a little bastard) tested this claim on his older sister’s pet rabbit; however, though he watched for nearly an hour, all that happened was that the rabbit became more and more frantic in the enclosed space, until an exasperated Jason sullenly opened the little door to return the rabbit to its cage. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), no one had told Jason that you had to turn on the microwave to achieve this effect, or how deeply into a tiny, exposed wrist a pissed-off rabbit could bite.

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Brandon stayed up until 3am playing on Xbox Live with his friend Dustin, both boys chatting, yelling, and provoking each other over their headsets the entire time. The next morning, when Brandon called to arrange a playdate, Dustin’s mother answered the phone and tearfully informed him that Dustin had died choking on a wad of bubble gum – at 9pm the previous night.

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Suzie received a realistic, talking baby doll as a Christmas gift from her father that year. However, try as she might, the doll couldn’t fill the void left behind by the baby that Suzie’s father had killed and buried in the basement after discovering the seventeen-year-old’s unplanned pregnancy.

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Over his car radio, Marcus heard the DJ announce that a serial killer with short blond hair and a skull tattooed on his right cheek had recently escaped from a nearby prison. He frowned and anxiously placed one hand on the pistol he kept at his hip, as the young woman in his passenger seat gazed at his profile with mounting terror and prepared to do God only knew what in her panic.

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Don’t think of a pink elephant: it’s the oldest trick in the book, as soon as you read that phrase, a pink elephant immediately pops into your head. Now, don’t think of a sanity-devouring psychic parasite attached to the back of your mind like a shadow: what little time you have left will be more pleasantly spent forgetting that one of those just popped into your head, too.

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Credit: InfernalNightmare333 / Casey Pierce