You Are Fatally Invited

by Ande Pliego

Writing is a kind of beautiful madness. It is slitting yourself open, bleeding your soul onto the page in that paradoxical mask of vulnerability perhaps only a writer can achieve. And writing fear requires the greatest vulnerability of all: a willingness to face your demons, and set them free.

Funny how Alastor shelled out unthinkable amounts of cash just to stay anonymous, while I’d willingly made a deal with the devil so that you would remember my name.

Dramatic hair decisions were rarely without catalyst, and I couldn’t help but wonder what hers had been.

Creating written worlds ex nihilo—from nothing—is the closest we get to the divine. Perhaps, in writing, we are divine. But I wonder: what if the page wasn’t the only place we could control fate?

I hadn’t known that a sliver of guilt would live in the corner of my eye, every time I glanced in the mirror.

Mr. Alastor believes in consequences for poor effort.”

Irony wasn’t just misting across the dinner table—the entire island was soaked in it.

“Sometimes the art of fiction isn’t in how intellectual it is, but how well it makes you actually forget the world around you. Sometimes, binge reading to escape reality can save a person’s life.”

You stole that from me. You’d completely ripped away my ability to write, as if you’d sliced me open and scooped out the creative spark from beneath my rib cage and left me cold and dark. You’d stolen every word I could ever have put on the page, and that hurt most of all.

What a relief it would be if I didn’t.

The man seemed to carry conflict with him like a security blanket, unsure who he was without it.

“How delightful,” I said, melting into a chair. “I, too, stock my dining room with books on poison and murder. It makes guests feel right at home, don’t you think?”

“A decapitation a day keeps the family away,”

Forgive an old woman for enjoying her last days.

“Don’t blink,” Ashton commented.

Ashton backed up, his eyes glittering in the dark as they met mine, and I gave the tiniest nod.

This is precisely like one of our stories.”

Better to pin it on the young nobody with an axe to grind than risk going after a wolf with teeth.

“Sometimes wounds become scars, not because they’ve healed, but because they’re hiding what’s underneath from ourselves.”

“Hard pass.” Violet shoved her chair back and stood up. “We don’t even know if the cards are actually about us.”

“I think in everyone’s life,” I started slowly, “you get an event that cuts everything in two. Like an axe splitting wood. And there becomes a before and an after.”

Maybe fear wasn’t something you fought. Maybe it was something you armed yourself with.

Vengeance is a poison you consume alongside your victim; the only antidote is reconciliation. —A Deadly Invitation