Short Story Time: Paranormal Ingenue and Flee!

Sun. June 1, 2025
Hello lovely Friends and Substack Readers, Happy June!

May your summer be a delight. The RV, myself, and Sweet Pea are back up in our summer pastures at Brown’s Owens River Campground (yes, their website needs help in Firefox), right in the middle of my favorite Super Volcano - the Long Valley Caldera - along the banks of the Owens River.

Be ready for lots of photos of mountains, sky, big thunderclouds, and stars. Two of Bishop, California’s finest deer mice traveled up with us in the RV but were kindly relocated after the first week to a mesa five miles away after I borrowed a tin cat from Kelli Brown. I have photos of the mouse relocation but will save that for next time.

In the meantime, I have been wanting to post some recent stories I have written in response to a rhyming challenge that I have been participating in. I have, since 2018, been working on some paranormal genre short stories but I have been trying to work out what I want the backstories of my characters to be. Writing short shorts is a great way to do it, as I can test various origin stories without fully committing to one.

This is my version of what many fantasy authors do when they are trying to work up their magic system, for me, it is working up my paranormal / supernatural system.

Thus, today, I present to you Paranormal Ingenue and Flee! Yes, they are fics within the Pride and Prejudice Regency era umbrella but quite off piste from canon, but hopefully not out of canon character.

Tales Of Caroline Bingley, Vampire:
1. Flee!
2. Fae Adept
3. Sweet Cherry
4. Lousy Threat
5. It was a Dark and Stormy… - Coming Soon to a browser RSS feed, an app, or an email near you.

Paranormal Ingenue
By Jenifer Hanen

With small hat tips to Terri Windling and Susannah Clarke.

Tues. Nov 26, 1811
Netherfield Park
Meryton, Herts.

Mr. Darcy, his ears were still ringing from the exceptionally loud and decidedly not dulcet tones of Mrs. Bennet proclaiming the soon to be engagement of her daughter - who could not be so beautiful for nothing - to his young friend Bingely, was greatly alarmed. It was not just Mrs. Bennet's vulgar and uncommonly noisy pronouncements to M

Meryton's gossipy matrons, nor by Sir William Lucas' interrupting his dance with Miss Elizabeth to exclaim felicitations on the soon to be happiness of Miss Bennet and Mr. Bingely.

No, it was in the moment that he delivered Miss Elizabeth back to her friends after their dance set, when he espied the elusive and reclusive Mr. Bennet for the very first time after nearly two whole months of Darcy's residing in the vicinity of Netherfield Park and Longbourn. There he was unmistakable, tall, standing in the shadows along the edge of the ballroom speaking with his oldest daughter in whispered tones. The resemblance between them was eerie and weird, of the old definitions of said words.

Mr. Bennet, whose eyes were of an abnormal cobalt blue, had a shock of white hair that rather looked like a meadow of thistledown. A heavy stone of fear dropped into Mr. Darcy's gut, as he could see as plain as if this ball was outside in the noon hour at midsummer, that Bennet was a Gentleman with Thistledown Hair. Darcy had lived in the North long enough to know that there was much to fear. The two Bennets standing in the shadow with their blue, blue eyes and fair hair were not just gentry, but The Gentry. The Quality.