Two-Sentence Horror Stories: Bite-sized scares.

This is all dumb.

For the past several months, the sub has experienced a flood of intentionally poor quality stories in an effort to get onto parody subs and TikToks. We've historically hit you with a strike (🔴) and if you received three, you were permabanned (check out the wiki).

However, if you've submitted one of these stories in the recent past, you may have noticed that your account was permabanned from TwoSentenceHorror without going through the strike process. While we've made this current one-and-done rule known within each of our monthly announcements for forever, we felt it was only fair to have a separate post to lay out the approach.

If and when these posts chill out, the mod team will reconsider this rule. Until then, please continue to report these intentional poor quality stories, read the sub rules, and submit awesome, horrifying tales to maintain the quality of the sub!

Happy June!

Before we get into this month’s prompt, here's a few announcements for your pleasure and enjoyment:

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• Big thank you to those who helped flag rule breaking posts this month! We're still seeing troll posts and appreciate everyone's help keeping an eye out for posts that don't fit the sub.
• We are continuing to remove most posts about gratuitous sexual violence as per Rule 7: Overused Tropes.
• We're also removing stories that use spoiler tags, spoiler marks, or irrelevant NSFW tags, as these constitute formatting gimmicks, again as per Rule 7.
• Obvious💩-posters will be permabanned! Read more here.
• Lastly, be familiar with our Three Strikes and you're out rule-- trolling or sexualizing minors will typically get you a strike. If you earn a 🔴, it will take 60 days of chill to clean it up. Read more here.

For those in the Northern Hemisphere June holds the Summer Solstice, where the night is at its shortest. Dusk is pushed back and the dawn comes early-- all that daylight seems to invite every manner of celebration.

Weddings, reunions, and parties in general all see an uptick this time of year and of course: those who've completed their study programs celebrate their graduation.

And there's our theme and our prompt for this month's contest:

graduation

You may use reasonable variations of the word (ex: graduates, grads, graduated, etc). While the theme refers to graduation in the academic sense, we'll also accept definitions relating to metrics (graduated income tax, graduated cylinders, etc).

This theme is less flexible than last month's, so we anticipate a more difficult challenge and wish everyone the best of luck!

PS: Congrats and job well done to anyone graduating this month :)

Of course, entries will always be weighed against sub rules!

Properly formatted June 2024 examples:

[JUN24] I chose this month's prompt to brag about my upcoming graduation from murder school! By the end of this month I'll have a bachelors degree in killing!

[jun24] This is the first sentence. Please don't let that distract you from the fact that this month I'm graduating from murder school!

Improperly formatted examples:

[june2024] The 'e' in June and the '20' in 2024 make this a doubly incorrect tag. I'm afraid this shameful error will cast a negative light on my graduation from murder school.

[JUN24] This time the tag is right. But I forgot to include the prompt because I'm so overtired from all the hours I put into the lab practical in Killing 101.

June 2024 Contest Rules

• Submissions that are improperly formatted, do not fit the theme, or break any of the existing sub rules will be disqualified and removed.
• The top 10 highest-voted stories will be the winners!
• Winners can only place in the top 10 once. The highest of the entries will be their winner.
• Only net new stories will be allowed (no repurposing old stories you've previously submitted).
• Max three stories per day as a general rule, and all three can be used towards the contest.
• Winners will be decided by total community upvotes. In the unlikely event of a tie for the top spots, moderators will vote for a tiebreaker.

WINNERS WILL RECEIVE:

1st, 2nd, and 3rd Places: You receive a custom personal flair of your choosing to show off to the TSH community! (If you're a repeat winner, you can modify your flair.... but that's it.) And a cool fancy flair on your winning stories.

7 honorable mentions: you'll get visibility and bragging rights! Story links will be featured on next month’s announcement.

Contest ends on June 30, 2024 @ 11:59pm (GMT)

Any questions should be made below in the comments, within our discord, or a note on modmail.

Lots of great stories this month, congrats to May's winners in the comments below!

But now as countless children lay dying of thirst because they couldn't muster the care to get a drink of water, now dubbed 'terminal apathy', we realised the cause may be something else entirely.

As I slowly died of dehydration I just wish I had bought spare parts for the water filter rather than my second and third assault rifles.

But when we unlocked the door and walked in, we found him crying at his computer, wiping his harddrives frantically.

As the doctor told me there was nothing they could do, I realized why my mother never saved potatoes.

Dad: "Did you go down there? We don't go down there, baby."

Alongside a flag, I received a box with his little finger inside.

"What, there's a rule now against having hobbies?"

After sneaking in and seeing my best friend -- and many others -- laying still on the floor of the stage, I understood why no underclassmen were allowed invites to the graduations.

"Day you died," he replied nonchalantly, gesturing at the calendar hanging behind him with today's date circled in red.

It turns out the odds of 8 billion people all having a good day simultaneously are actually pretty low, so it doesn't look like tomorrow is going to be coming any time soon.

Twenty years later as she lay on her deathbed, her eyes full of fear, I leaned in close and whispered, "Thank you for showing a little boy how cruel the world could be, now let me show you all that I've learned since then."

I forget how long it's been since he had us start marching, but I just heard my metatarsal scraping on the pavement, so it can't be much longer until we can finally stop.

I promised I'd take care of his kitten when he died, a promise I regretted now standing in his living room, looking down on the dead and decaying human corpse in its cage, cat ears and a tail nailed to its bones, piles of rotting cat food placed at its side.

The ape took his feet off the table, scoffing, ‘they were a barbaric species before the rise, and human leather is a precious commodity.’

As the earth burned around us, humanity couldn't help but wonder when the aliens would return for us.

A year later, as our children pleaded and begged for their lives, many of us were too hungry to care what God thought of what we did next.

"Usually just out of the corner of my eye, or in between blinks"

I pushed my wife toward the light before I was plunged back into darkness with my lungs newly ablaze.

I’ve been having some difficulty swallowing lately, but it wasn’t until my mom went to the hospital for a stomach bug that I realized my mistake.

I never found who I'd invoked, but the childish laughter in the backyard stopped at the exact moment Tatum's game-winning three pointer rattled impossibly off the rim and went in.

Sonia's prayers became a wordless scream as she hauled Sid over the cliff edge, and realized his lower body was still in the driver's seat.

That's how I know no one will miss them.

It’s her fault for not telling him we live together

The gunshot I heard from inside made me think he didn't like the joke

Credit for this idea goes to u/DM_Me_For_Dog_Pics

i fight to get my diving suit off as i see the tiny insects inside my diving mask and feel them crawling around my lungs while my friends are screaming something about the bends.