Ghouls, Ghosts, Vampires, and everything in-between. Halloween is host to these and many more creatures lurking about everywhere you may look, even here, among your friends and family. Press play and find yourself immersed in seven worlds of wonder and fright with several of your favorite authors.

Shared beliefs will change the world.

This story is based more or less on a theory that I like quite a bit. Has the world always been a sphere, or did the common belief of millions shape the world when a plausible theory had been found? In what way do expectations influence the result? Do we believe we can go to the moon because we can, or can we go to the moon because we believe we can? Our protagonist is about to find out what the expectations of millions can do to you.

This story is a repost (after editing and fixing the tense) from my original post on fictionmania in 2003

Cassie and Brian are best friends, sharing just about everything, including a life-long love of basketball. But what they don't share is Brian's deepest secret.

Isn’t Life Strange?
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

I was on holiday with my husband Mike and his two boys by his first marriage, and we were visiting a brewery in Colorado. They served what looked like a great lunch, so we sat down for a meal, to be washed down with one of their craft beers. I have to confess that I still prefer beer to wine, even after all these years post transition.

Originally posted to Classic BC on February 24, 2004
 

Clarence sat on a wobbly barstool, trying to ignore the static on the television above the bar and endure the smell of fresh vomit wafting from a drunk man three stools away. He just wanted to sip his watered-down daiquiri in peace, with no sissy drink jokes, and no insults about his slender physique or hated first name.

I was surprised when I was called in for an interview, and even more surprised upon being informed that...

Peer Pressure
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

The door burst open and in came Gaz and Foxy with three cases of beer. All three were landed with flamboyance upon the low table by the cabin’s fireplace in front of Yogi, Lonnie and Bull.

The Grandmother

A "Starting Over" contest story

Join a dozen Roses as they attend the SWEET Conference (South Western Exposition for the Embetterment of Transwomen/Transpeople, depending on who you ask.) Rose Gallagher is a registrar for the conference and notices that there are 12 Roses in attendance. On a whim, she contacts them and suggests a meeting of the Roses to share a bit about their choice of the name Rose.

Seven authors collaborate on one story to tell us about

The Immortal Gift
A Spirit of Giving Christmas Fairy-Tale for Grownups.

By
Frances Penwiddy

Copyright©Frances Penwiddy 2016

Tea Ladies
by
Michele Nylons


The Quickening

Mike Harris is a part time transvestite who struggles with his compulsion to crossdress. He hung up his wig and high-heels over two years ago but ‘The Quickening’, his compulsion to dress as a woman, has returned and his alter ego Michele Nylons beckons.

Rose the Bunny

Rosey Red gave me this idea. Make of it what you will.

His name wasn't Scrooge, but it might as well had been.

His actual name was Richard Rose, and throughout the small town he lived in, there was no one richer, but no one less kind or less generous.

And yet there was one person who wanted nothing more than to see his heart soften.

Her name was Penny, and every night she prayed for him, saying “Somebody must have hurt Mr. Rose, which is why he’s so mean. So God, heal his heart.”

Magic makeup?

Dorothy looked at the makeup bag with deep suspicion.

On the face of it, such an object shouldn’t be the object of paranoia, especially since in a way it represented the progress she had made in the last couple of years - finally shaking off fear and beginning a transition to womanhood.

But the bag’s contents now represented a barrier to further progress, and in a way Dorothy couldn’t understand the reason for.

The Good Samaritan

A variation on the classic parable.

“I remember Mummy finding me and giving me water to drink when even my muscles were silently screaming from thirst. As I desperately and gratefully gulped the water she asked, ‘What’s your name, Sweetie?’

‘I’m Billie,’ I replied when she took the canteen from me telling me I needed to drink just little sips, but to drink them often till I wasn’t thirsty any more. ‘I’m three and a half and I’m a girl. My birthday is the first of Christmas.’

“ ‘I see,’ she replied. I didn’t know what she meant when she said, ‘You come home with me, and I’ll make sure that you have everything you need, Billie.’ ”

A ‘Master of the Universe’ Investment Banker and his university professor wife are a happy and successful couple. Then their Psychologist friend persuades them to participate in an unusual study and things change for everyone.

Obsession

I can still remember the first time.

This is something that came to me over the last few days. It may wind up as a scene in a future story. Or not. But I felt it was worth posting on its own.

The therapist sighed.

"I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way..."

It was colder than he had expected, the sleet steadily hardening into snow, but Ken had endured worse. There was a hedgerow running between two of the fields which he thought might work for the night, and part of it looked to be hazel, or at least something with similar leaves, which the shrub had clung to despite the nastiness of the late Autumn and Winter. It had all looked so simple when he was little, the Boy Scout books almost rhapsodising about hatchets and straight staffs as a ridge pole, but walking around with an axe these days would get him lifted by the plod in no time.

Two siblings, children to bakers, form a bet without wages. If no one loses anything more when they lose, what does the winner get?

The Peaceful City

Heartsease like all its neighbouring city states was a peaceful city where dwelt humans and centaurs. The two had lived and crafted side by side for at least three millennia. Mostly they married their own, but there had always been a degree of cross marriage, and most adolescents had had dealing with members of the opposite sex of both species before they settled down. It wasn’t frowned upon, it was just the youngsters finding themselves.

A short story...

Copyright © 2018 by AuP reviner

I Am Woman
By Barbara Lynn Terry

(Author’s note: All song references and lyrics, are the property of Helen Reddy, the original artist, and Ray Burton and their recording company, Capitol Records. Barbara Lynn Terry)

Chapter 1 - Here she comes.

“I am woman, hear me roar …”

Ashley's Song
by Anon Allsop

This is one of my older stories - I knocked the dust off it and decided it could be placed here on Big Closet.

The ancient woman sat quietly in her rocking chair and looked back at me, her watery eyes unwavering. I looked from her to the little girl, then back to her again. I felt terrible for them; this was the part of the job that I hated.

"Mrs. Patrick...ma'am, I'm really sorry to have to tell you this but..." My eyes looked at the innocent face of the little girl. "Uh... this would be easier if she weren't here." My voice was shaking with emotion.

The old woman looked at the girl and asked her to go inside for a while, "Go on." She said gently guiding the child toward the door. She waited until the door closed and turned back toward me saying, "Okay Brian."

Sawyer is a young financial analyst in New York City tasked with profiling the fashion industry for his firm's investors. He's landed a meeting with renown fashion designer Greyson Oliver over dinner, much to his wife's chagrin. But after dinner, while touring the couture house's studio, Sawyer's life is forever changed when he comes across a special set of couture gowns…

There is a common misconception among the general public that cheerleaders have it easy. I've been a cheerleader now for close to eighteen months and I can safely say without a shadow of a doubt that these eighteen months have been among the hardest months in my life. One would assume being the little sister of the cheerleading captain, I would have it made. If one would have assumed that then one would have assumed wrong.

Great Scott

by Jennifer Sue

A Memorial Day Tribute:

On the warm early April Saturday morning the eighth grade boys sounded pretty good as they rocked out in the garage of the Thompson home, especially for their age. The four boys had been playing together for nearly a year, switching from home to home as they drove their parents crazy with their pounding efforts. They knew they sounded good but there was something missing. They just couldn’t figure what.

[This is an oldie from way back. I first drafted it in 2011 and posted it on my blog in November 2018]

[In Scotland, a ‘Stair’ is analogous to an apartment block in the US. One stairwell connects all the Flats/Apartments. Many 'Stairs' in places like Edinburgh do not have lifts yet, are sometimes five floors high and the steps are often pretty steep.]

Just Call Her Lesley

By Joannebarbarella

An old man on a flight from Southern to Northern California tells the stranger sitting beside him about the famous movie villain that had lived next door to him when he was a boy. An actor once well known for playing pitiless vampires and raving mad scientists, but who in real life had been gentle, caring and kind. And while his fame hasn’t endured the way Lon Chaney's or Bela Lugosi’s have, at the time even the movie critics who panned the low budget films he was in would concede that this startlingly ugly man brought a rare sensitivity to the roles he specialized in. As if he knew these monsters’ private pain.

Then the teller’s story takes a weird left turn. A theory about the actor’s supposed suicide which---as preposterous as it might all sound---would be nice to believe. Saying that rather than having drowned himself on that drizzly spring day in 1941 Max Grosz may have found his way to a second chance at life, and a different kind of movie stardom that would win the hearts of a nation...

(inspired by Valentine's "Unintended Consequences")

The advent of cheap genetic testing had made many changes in society. The biggest came when an overly conservative right-wing political staffer came across a demonstration device at a convention. It simply checked the "sex" chromosomes and reported them.

The politician the staffer worked for had been fighting a non-discrimination measure in the state legislature. As usual, he was calling it a "bathroom bill" and claiming it would let perverts invade women's restrooms.

Initially my own clothes fitted, but that didn’t last as I lost height, narrowed at the waist and acquired enlarged hips and a bosom. Shoes were a problem as my feet seemed to have dropped from a men’s size eight to a ladies’ size four overnight.

April was all excited her mother was taking her for a ride. She was going to go and see real horses and have a chance to ride them. She watches as they drove down the highway. She had never been out of the city and this was her first time traveling. She loved seeing the cows and horses as they pasted them.

“Mommy look, there’s a brown horse and a white one.” She points her tiny hand towards them.

A novelette ...

by
AuPreviner

What happens when the reporter becomes the news item instead of reporting it?

Copyright © 2018 by AuP reviner

Sometimes, you're in the right and you have to say so.

Sometimes – you have to argue! Because they are in the wrong.

This is the day Arnold finally asks his secret crush out!
Or not as he suddenly finds himself chased by strange and crazy men through the city.
Now two questions are burning on his mind: "Why me and what the hell is a Whissie?"

Aurora

A Short Story by Rosemary

August 2020

I was born in the lower 48, back in the 1963. My dad was an engineer for an oil company, and my family moved around a lot.

When I was seven, something happened. I began to realize that I was looking at girls. My mom caught me one day, and told me it wasn't polite. Besides, I was too young to be checking out girls.

Free Fall. A Tale of Loss and Gain.
Part One – The loss.

La’an stared unseeingly at the screen. In her mind, she was back in Toronto, while her heart was ripped out by the Romulan, Sera.

There is a saying. Everyone has a twin somewhere in the world.

Like most people I laughed my butt off when I first heard it. Sure there is lots of "proof" of that being a real thing. I just never once thought I would meet someone anywhere like me.

{Written as a parody and with due homage to a host of SF Authors, Films and TV}

The bedside comunicator beeped.
I slowly opened my eyes. I'd only had a few hours of sleep in the past two days.
The alarm bleeped once again.

Nice
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

Dad and I were nice guys. The kind of men who just want to please the people they love. What is wrong with that?

Mom and older my sisters were strong women. Mom always said that she knew what she wanted and that was to marry a man who adored her and would do anything for her. That would be Dad. She said that I was a chip off the old block and just like Dad, but I think that disappointed her. She wanted me to be more like her.