I never thought I would write horror stories. I’m not that type (whatever that type is). I’m a mother whose children have never heard her say a swear-word. I’m a primary-school teacher who feels distinctly shaky if any child turns violent in my classroom. I’m a minister’s wife who tries her best to keep everyone happy. You would expect me, perhaps, to write about butterflies and flowers.
Well, I do, I promise. I write quite a lot of micro nature-themed creative nonfiction pieces. Summertime and bees; mosses and trees; rivers and caves; insects, food chains, bats and owls; roadkills and the faces you see in the trees when nothing’s there but the shadows inside your mind left over from the dreams that you tried to forget. 
The best way I know to shake off a bad dream is to write it into a story. Especially those sad recurring dreams that started deep down inside childhood. A nightmare shared is a nightmare spared. Or something like that.
There was a thunderstorm of Biblical proportions, and I needed to find a safe place to shelter, but the safe ground kept shifting and shrinking. My baby brother got hurt, or fell into deep water, or turned into a ladybug, cute but all-too-fragile and easy-to-lose. I had escaped from an abusive relative, but I was out of breath and couldn’t run fast enough. My teeth and hair were falling out, or I found a gap in my skin and discovered I was all hollow inside. There were nuclear bombs going off all over the world, and every breath I took was more poisoned than the last. I tried to hold a door closed against danger, but I wasn’t strong enough. A snake, thicker than my waist, pursued me round and round, moving ever closer. A big cat that I had trusted, or at least I had trusted I could control, would come after my blood at night. I stepped into water and it darkened with mud and slime or danger.
The thing I’m trying to capture in fiction is that swooping sense of elation in the running away, or the walking around naked, or the anticipation of swimming in clear blue water… and the way it gradually morphs into fear/shame/disappointment. It’s not splatterpunk; it’s more insidious, unsettling, undefined even. I can fly, and it’s amazing, but I need to keep it a secret, because I know other people won’t like it, and I’m fairly sure nobody’s seen me doing it, but what will they do to me if they have?
Do these stories have a purpose, other than shifting my nightmares out of my own head and into someone else’s? I like to think of speculative fiction as a kind of thought-experiment, exploring emotions in a way that might become self-enlightening, or running a mental simulation of imagined characters/worlds that might give warning of dangers disguised in the real one. As a writer, however, I don’t plan for a “moral of the story”. It tends to emerge as I go: Beware of technology you can’t control or Listen to your early instincts. Or maybe it’s merely illustrative. Here’s a little tale for you, first published by Friday Flash Fiction. Is it a horror story, a story about horror stories, or both?
Horror Writer
Shelley is a horror writer.
It’s not what she aimed to be. She always dreamed of writing poetry. She has notebooks scribbled full of pretty little fragments on blossom and summertime, songbirds and butterflies, and the visions of warmth and light that kept her alive during long dark years, promising her she could one day break free.
Shelley is safe now, life is gentler, and she feels ready at last to follow her dreams and to write. She opens her notebooks, picks up her pen, channels soul and memory through its thin black trail of ink.
Shelley writes horror stories.
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Fiona M Jones writes short-form and micro fiction, CNF and sometimes poetry. Her work is published everywhere except Antarctica, and most of it sits somewhere in here: https://fionamjones.wordpress.com/.