Those In The Flames

Clive Martyn, who runs the Elements Of Horror anthology, picked up this story in November and it should appear in the spring or early summer of 2010.

I'm old enough to remember having a real fire in my first London house in the 1970s and, as you do, I'd watch the leaping flames and see all sorts of shapes and figures therein. Fortunately, I didn't go quite as far as our protagonist in Those In The Flames.

This time, they plunged down from the hay loft where I set them in motion. They danced through Hayley's pretty hair and threw her dress mischievously over her head to ride on hot torrents to the roof. One young buck took two leaps up her arm, darted through the flames around her head and burst an eye with a skip and a jump. I couldn't help but giggle.

One of the toughest asks of this story was to do it all, start, journey and end, in 500 words.