Latest Stories
Most recently published stories in Fiction.
The Man Who Couldn't Boil Water. AI-Generated.
Carlo Benedetti had exactly three culinary skills. He could boil water — usually. He could open a can of tomatoes without injuring himself — mostly. And he could, when the circumstances were sufficiently desperate, produce a plate of scrambled eggs that was edible in the same way that a Tuesday afternoon in February is technically a day: technically correct, bringing no one any particular joy.
By Cordelia Vance4 days ago in Fiction
The Phonograph of Hollow Souls. AI-Generated.
The dead, Edmund Voss had come to believe, were simply a matter of frequency. He arrived at this conclusion not through any mystical awakening or feverish religious crisis, but through the careful, methodical application of scientific reasoning — the same reasoning that had earned him a modest reputation among London's emerging class of acoustic engineers and a less modest reputation among its society gossips, who found a bachelor of forty-three with wax-stained fingers and an apartment full of recording cylinders somewhat difficult to seat at dinner parties.
By Alpha Cortex4 days ago in Fiction
The Last Ember. AI-Generated.
The last star was dying. Caelum-7 had known this was coming for approximately four hundred million years. That was the nature of being a Warden — you watched, you calculated, you prepared, and still, when the moment finally arrived, the numbers offered no insulation against the weight of it. The instruments aboard the Persistence hummed their soft confirmations: luminosity declining at 0.003% per century, core hydrogen reserves at 0.00017% of original mass, estimated time to final collapse somewhere between eighty and ninety million years. Give or take.
By Alpha Cortex4 days ago in Fiction
The Door at the End of the Hall. AI-Generated.
The dream always began the same way. Margaret would find herself standing at the end of a long hallway — walls the color of old teeth, carpet the deep burgundy of dried blood, and a single door at the far end that seemed to breathe. Not move. Breathe. The wood expanding and contracting in a rhythm that matched her own pulse, as if the door had swallowed something living and hadn't yet finished digesting it.
By Alpha Cortex4 days ago in Fiction
A Mouse In The House
Walking into the kitchen one morning, I could smell something burning. There was a mouse whose tail was caught in the burner. I hollered for my husband. He arrived, took the mouse out of the fire, hit it on the head with a hammer. Damn you, Paul.
By Denise E Lindquist4 days ago in Fiction
The Sly Donkey and the Burden of Cleverness: A Moral Tale
The Sly Donkey and the Burden of Cleverness: A Moral Tale Once, on the outskirts of a quiet village, lived a donkey. He was a bit simple-minded but incredibly hardworking. He worked for a local merchant, carrying heavy loads of sugar on his back to be sold at the distant market.
By Amir Husen4 days ago in Fiction
The Lesson of the Two Frogs in the Pit
The Lesson of the Two Frogs in the Pit One day, two frogs were hopping through a field, lost in conversation. Because they weren't paying attention to where they were going, they suddenly tumbled into a deep, dark pit. The hole was so deep that getting back out seemed impossible.
By Amir Husen4 days ago in Fiction
The Midnight Letter
It was a rainy night when Clara sat by her old oak desk, staring at the pile of unopened letters that had accumulated over the past month. Her small apartment smelled faintly of coffee and rain-soaked streets, a combination that reminded her of long-forgotten days spent in her childhood home. There was something strangely comforting about the routine of going through letters, even if most of them were bills, advertisements, or notifications she didn’t particularly care about.
By Fawad Ahmad4 days ago in Fiction
The Last Message
By the time she noticed the message, it was already too late to matter. It had come in at 2:17 a.m. She saw the timestamp first, a gray, indifferent number sitting above the unread bubble. The phone had been on silent, face down on the nightstand, where she’d left it after deciding—firmly, finally—that she wasn’t going to check it again.
By shallon gregerson4 days ago in Fiction
