Story Glory was a free-to-enter monthly writing contest. Each month set a prompt -- a phrase, a situation, a constraint -- and writers submitted short stories built around it. The best were collected into a booklet. There was a winner's prize each month. Entry cost nothing.
I entered Booklet 2's contest with a dark fable. The prompt was the inclusion of a specific line of dialogue:
The prompt
"I didn't hear a thing."
The line suggested concealment, complicity, wilful ignorance. I set my story in a Victorian milieu and built it around a woman whose charity was a mask for something considerably less charitable.
Mistress Grimshaw's Purse
A cursed purse punishes greed and cruelty. Mistress Grimshaw's manipulative charity is exposed as a tool for her own gain, and the purse's curse reveals her sins by forcing her to face her past deeds through a cycle of shame and retribution. A dark fable in the tradition of supernatural justice.
The story was selected for the booklet. It sat alongside the other entries in a collection that was available as a physical paperback and as a PDF download from the publisher.
Mistress Grimshaw's Purse has been republished on Edvane Stories, where you can read and listen to the full story.