Shallow Waters Vol. 3

Shallow Waters—where nothing stays buried.With twenty-one dark tales diving beneath the surface of life, death, and the pain between them.Shallow Waters is the official monthly flash fiction contest hosted by the award-winning Crystal Lake Publishing. Every month a new theme is posted online, with authors submitting via email. The best submissions are then posted on Crystal Lake's Patreon page, where patrons read daily entries and vote for the winner. What you'll find in these Shallow Waters anthologies include the most popular of our finalists.Stay tuned for more volumes in this series, or find Crystal Lake Publishing on Patreon to enter or vote on future contests.Volume three includes horror, thrillers, suspense, and stories of hauntings, monsters, clowns, twisted love, and the beauty beneath it all.Introduction by Joe MynhardtPiece Meal by Madeline Mora-SummonteThe Anonymous Dark by Jonathan WinnNumber Seventeen by Monique SnymanFor Her by Jo-Anne RussellSecond Chances by Rob SmalesMaker of Flight by Richard ThomasInertia by Joshua HairMalignant Roots by Red LagoeTwo to a Desk by Dani BrownThe Comb by Theresa DerwinEchoes by Megan HartHaunted Places by Mark Allan GunnellsHallways, Long and Dark by Dale ElsterThe Chance of a Lifetime by Pete MeslingGOGGINS by Stephen CrowleyCaoine by Jennifer LoringHacked By Mark Cassell & Patrick R. McDonoughGhosts of the Wood by Tim MeyerPaid in Full by Roberta CodemoThis Other Door by Dan Rabarts & Lee MurrayAlways and Forever by Jay FaulknerIn this volume…This Halloween, the girl might just get more than she bargained for.A gumball machine dispenses something far more sinister—and sweeter—than candy.Lessons don't always have to be taught in school.You never know what you'll find at the end of a dark hallway…A serial killer reminisces over his last victim.An Irish-American man come to terms with the legacy he leaves, thanks to the ancestral apparition that has haunted his family for centuries.Some relationships leave scars that linger even beyond death.When a Victorian actor's career comes to a sudden end due to a flare-up of gout during an opening-night performance at the Delphi Theatre, he is left with only one chance to exact revenge on the inflexible house manager.Stalked by shadows, a woman prowls the darkened halls of her longtime home.Her body found mutilated down the tin mines and pursued by her step sister, she scratches her hooks against the wall as her classmates disappear.Some curses are eternal and unbreakable.Inertia—a property of matter in which something moves at a set speed and direction until made to change by another force.After his dark soul took to the soil, evil plagued the roots of the family tree.Houses aren't the only places that can be haunted...A man hunches over a workbench, a basket of tiny birds chirping nearby, wondering if the sky is still blue.Charlie's luck turns around when a storm rolls in, but things aren't always as they seem when you find love on the sea.In the center of a once-beautiful, now derelict forest, the trees aren't the only things that are dead.Sometimes, till death do us part is just not enough.Proudly brought to you by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.