✨ Flicker Series #24: Miss Carroway's Last Lesson (362 words)

A substitute teacher uncovers the truth behind a ghostly predecessor who never stopped teaching.

Welcome back to the Flicker Series—tiny tales born from chaos, constraint, and the thrill of a good prompt.
Each story in this series is completely randomized: I spin a genre and three emojis, then build a piece of flash fiction from whatever lands in my lap.

I’m challenging myself to keep these under 500 words—closer to the spirit of true flash fiction—without losing the spark that makes each one shine.

Today’s genre is Gothic, and the emojis I spun for inspiration were: 🤦🏻‍♂️🧟‍♀️👩🏻‍🏫.
The result? A substitute teacher uncovers the truth behind a ghostly predecessor who never stopped teaching.

Thank you for reading. Here’s Miss Carroway’s Last Lesson.

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"Miss Carroway’s Last Lesson"

I was only supposed to be here for the week.
One of those temporary teaching gigs you take when rent’s due and your inbox is empty. The kind of place that smells like chalk and privilege. Oaken halls, sour-faced portraits. Girls in plaid skirts who stare through you like you’re furniture.

The headmistress barely looked up when I arrived. Just slid me the key to Room 2B and muttered something about not disturbing the storage closet.

The first morning, I sat in the teacher’s chair.
A girl—round glasses, mouse voice—blanched.

“You shouldn’t,” she whispered. “That’s her chair.”

I laughed, because it felt like the thing to do. The other girls didn’t. Their gazes fixed on the far wall, where an old class photo hung crooked.

Miss Carroway, the nameplate read.
She wore a tight bun and a sharp smile. Her eyes didn’t follow you exactly—but they lingered.

By Wednesday, the chalk wrote without me.
Not full words—just fragments. Conjugation. Repetition. Punishment. I blamed the draft. Or maybe I didn’t. I just kept wiping the board clean.

On Thursday, the closet rattled. The one the headmistress said not to open. A girl yelped. The others didn’t blink.

“She’s still in there,” one muttered.

“Who?” I asked.

But they just stared at their textbooks.
Later, one of them left a folded note on my desk. They dragged her out screaming, it said. She wouldn’t stop teaching.

By Friday, I don’t know why I stayed after class.
Habit, maybe. Or ego. I wanted to finish grading their essays—essays that read like confessions, each one stranger than the last. Miss Carroway taught us to diagram our dreams. Miss Carroway says Latin holds the bones of the dead. Miss Carroway is very disappointed in me.

The closet creaked open around dusk.

She stepped out, as if she’d never left.
Dust clung to her blouse. Her smile was wrong in a way I didn’t have the words for. Her hand moved to the chalk. Today: The Subjunctive Mood.

I tried to speak. I don’t remember what I said.
She ignored me.

Miss Carroway has resumed her duties.

I teach in the library now.

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💬 Before you go:

Did you figure out the truth before the chalk wrote it out? What haunted you most—Miss Carroway’s silence, the locked closet, or the students who already knew?
If you like your fiction ghost-slicked and quietly rotting beneath the floorboards, subscribe to Inkspire for more Flickers every week.
A new genre, a new set of emojis, a new whispered secret—coming soon.