Half-Life

A woman’s old self is violently erased, leaving her altered and diminished in ways she can only later fully comprehend. When survival requires silencing one's voice, is choice just an illusion?

Half-Life was a recent finalist in the Writer's Playground Challenge. The story is rooted in the mythology of the Pontianak...a vengeful, vampiric female spirit in Indonesian folklore, believed to be the reanimated spirit of a woman who died during childbirth or while pregnant, but who can be transformed into a good wife in a most unusual manner. But while harrowing, this is no traditional horror story. It's a story about the fine line between safety and erasure and about becoming smaller in order to survive. Trigger warnings: Child loss, allusion to violence, exploration of grief. The story can be found published here on the Writer's Playground website: Half-Life — Writers' Playground