Goodreads
Goodreads asked Paul Guernsey:

Can you tell us a two-sentence horror story?

Paul Guernsey I can—although you might think I'm cheating with the semicolon. ;)

So completely paralyzed that even blinking required a conscious effort, William lay for nearly a week on the dirt floor of the abandoned barn, helplessly staring toward the unseen top of the tall ladder from which he'd fallen after a swarm of insects—green, glowing, whining like electric drills—had plunged at him from among the rotten rafters to drive fiery stingers into the back of his neck. Some foreign kind of wasp, he guessed they were, some alien invasive species, although he'd never seen nor read about anything like them, and as soon as he regained consciousness he felt them crawling over his defenseless face, where after nearly an hour each one eventually paused to touch him with the sticky tip of her abdomen before flying off toward the ceiling; three days later, when he began to feel a renewed and even more horrifying sensation of wet crawling he understood that they had laid their eggs upon the stubble of his cheeks, and that those eggs had now hatched—and by the morning of his last day in the barn, just before his son found him lying there and called for an ambulance, the white larvae had all squirmed their way into his nose and his ears and his open mouth, and had wriggled deep inside his head, and if he listened carefully, he could hear them chewing.

More Answered Questions

About Goodreads Q&A

Ask and answer questions about books!

You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.

See Featured Authors Answering Questions

Learn more