The History tells the story of the story of the world and of our lives. Sometimes that history goes bump in the night. Broadcasting from the center of Oddity and the supernatural in Central Florida,

it's the History Goes Bump Podcast. Podcast.

So, Merry Christmas Eve, everybody.

Well, we want to welcome everybody to our live stream, even though it's not streaming very well.

We are upkeeping the tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve around the fire.

If you tip that down a little bit, Denise, maybe they can see the

fire sitting here. I know on the audio you can probably hear it cracking in the background.

So what we have here are submissions to our Flash Fiction contest that we did for our anniversary

show.

These are the ones that weren't in the winners category, but they still were really good, and

so we wanted to share those with everybody, and so we thought we would carry those over to the Christmas Eve episode and do that. So our first submission we have here is from Katrina Ray Solis and it's entitled tomorrow's Queen. The

cracked paintings of former Queens were foreboding around the walls of the

Great Hall. Centuries of women who had run the country many for longer than

she had been alive. The wars, the famine, the disease, they'd all braved and fought and

and vanquished. We'd heavily in their confident gazes. Fear choked her throat.

She hadn't even been raised to do this. She could never be these women. A war she didn't believe

in was being waged in a country she couldn't always find on a map.

Soldiers were scattered to nearly every corner of the world.

She'd seen their photos.

She'd seen their photos. These old queens wouldn't have known their

soldiers. They lived in a different time, a different world. Not this world that

seemed to be both growing and shrinking simultaneously with each bit of new technology, but they had

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