Room 618 & Other Short Stories
from My Bloody Valentine: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series
Howdy all, hope everyone is doing okay on this cold and slow Thursday.
It’s just gone 12:30 a.m. here in Japan and there’s still much for me to do (no rest for the wicked), so without further ado, please welcome to the stage 4 bad ass and twisted love stories written in under 100 words for Chapter 6 of My Bloody Valentine.
Cheers always,
– Stephen J. Golds, editor-in-chief
Room 618 by Lisa Wiley
It was always about complicity, you said.
Stealing away to our hotel with white sheets, white towels, white tiles and robes. Afternoon delight. We loved each other wrapped in our little cocoon — it didn’t seem wrong.
You started raising the stakes: kissing in public, walking with your arm around my waist, encouraging me to shoplift trinkets we could afford. Enter the bank with a loaded gun?
We can get away with it. I’ll buy you a ruby, you nibbled on my ear.
We never made it back to Room 618; my fingerprint on the trigger, the prosecutor declared.
Bio
Lisa Wiley teaches English at SUNY Erie Community College in Buffalo, NY. She is the author of four chapbooks including Eat Cake for Breakfast (Dancing Girl Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Fictive Dream, Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Frontier, and Thimble among others.
My Everything by P.J. McAvoy
I would do anything for her.
She knows it. I’ll watch her with a smile from the window as she leaves, ponytail bobbing in the sunlight.
She’s my whole world. But it’s a dangerous world.
Take last week. We were walking, and he stepped in. Too close. Like I wasn’t even there. She pulled back. A flash in his hand. I quickly moved between. He tried a kick. That’s when I bit. Hard. Blood down my chin. Inches of teeth locked in his thigh, indifferent to his screams.
“Good boy,” she said, later, patting my head. She’s my whole world.
Bio
P.J. McAvoy is an upstate New York crime fiction writer who has spent time working in graveyards, libraries, classrooms, and behind the keyboard. A short story of his is included in the forthcoming ADIRONDACK GHOST STORIES, North Country Books, May 2025.
Hybristophiliac by Eric Richer
I see him on TV. He’s the one.
I write to him. I say don’t worry, I will heal your soul.
I become his prison visitor. Just another hybristophiliac.
The first time I meet him he tells me I love you. We kiss.
The second time, when the guards aren’t looking, I take the mini cell phone he asked for out of my vagina and we fuck on the table.
The third time, I pull a beveled toothbrush handle out of me and I bleed him like a pig for killing my friend ten years ago.
Now I can sleep.
Bio
Eric Richer was born in France in 1971. He grew up with 7 dogs, read a lot, studied cinema, worked in movie theaters as a projectionist and went to Japan. There he made a documentary (Kamo River), came back, returned in the darkness of the projection booths and started writing. His first two novels, La Rouille (The Rust, 2018) and Tiger (2021) were published by L’Ogre Editions. He is currently working hard on the next ones.
Cupid by Erich von Hungen
I was sitting at the Orbit Room bar.
The drink half spilled. Blood running down. My vision blurring. She had hit me hard in the forehead with her red high heel shoe — pointed like a valentine. The pain was sharp, but not as sharp as hers, maybe. I had left her for her brother. She’d never get him back.
The lights flickered, casting shadows on the walls. Who was who? What was what? I wiped the blood away — tried to. But my mind — my mind fading. Still, the night was far from over.
Bio
Erich von Hungen is a writer from San Francisco, California. He lives under a giant Norfolk pine in a century old house between Golden Gate Park and the Pacific Ocean where he creates poetry that explores the darker side of life. His writing has appeared in The Write Launch, Dust Poetry Magazine, Green Ink Press, The Hyacinth Review, IceFloe Press, Punk Noir, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Fahmidan Journal, Broken Spine Press and others. He is the author of four poetry books. The most recent is “Bleeding Through: 72 Poems of Man in Nature”.
These stories appear as part of My Bloody Valentine, a PUNK NOIR Magazine series.
PUNK NOIR, the online literary and arts magazine that looks at the world at its most askew, casting a bloodshot eye over the written word, film, music, television and more.
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