Paper Lantern
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Paper Lantern is a creative publishing house devoted to discovering and amplifying bold, original voices one story at a time.
Stories (34)
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Episode 3: 24 Hours Earlier
So the bell rang. That’s how it started. Third period was just ending, and the scent of disinfectant and burnt popcorn clung to the air like a warning nobody read. Hallways buzzed with teenage nonsense, and the vending machine kept swallowing dollars like nothing was wrong. Then came the sound.
By Paper Lantern6 months ago in Fiction
Episode 2: The Lesson
So the sky was red again, and that meant someone had lied. The children were gathered in the Chapel Pit, lined up by height, boots in bone dust, faces scrubbed raw to look obedient. You didn’t breathe too loud in the Pit. You didn’t blink unless you had permission. And you definitely didn’t twitch — not even if the flies were treating your eyelids like landing strips.
By Paper Lantern7 months ago in Fiction
We All Drank Tea While The Cannibals Came
So everyone was drinking tea. That’s how it started. The lights were warm, the kitchen smelled like cinnamon and mother’s milk, and the apartment (floor seventeen of a twenty-five-story building in the only neighborhood in Seattle where the rats had unionized) felt perfectly safe. There was a baby. There was a father. There was a mother. There were still walls and power and hot water. And then the TV screamed.
By Paper Lantern7 months ago in Fiction
I Am The Gift
They never ask where I came from. They only ask if I come with batteries. I don’t. There was a time when I was ash, scattered beneath a black tree struck by lightning. Before that, I was a name spoken in a language no one remembers. Before that, I was just... waiting.
By Paper Lantern7 months ago in Fiction
We Are The Visitors
So we left Earth. Or maybe Earth left us. The timeline is fuzzy, like an old photograph smudged by too many fingers. There was water once, and grass. Birds, probably. A sky you could breathe. Then we made some really cool stuff like Netflix and nerve gas and a planet that smelled like melting plastic. So we said, “Hey, let’s go colonize something.”
By Paper Lantern7 months ago in Fiction
The Quiet Theft
It started, as these things always do, with a perfect mistake. He found her through a friend’s story — not tagged, just visible in the background. A flash of her face, caught mid-laugh, her hands covering her mouth like she was trying to keep something beautiful from escaping. She wore a threadbare sweatshirt and no jewelry, and something about her made him sit up straighter.
By Paper Lantern7 months ago in Fiction
The Girl in the Blue Dress
We didn’t know her name. Only that she lived in the third-floor flat, two windows across from the church bell that stopped chiming after the second raid. Her mother was quiet, always nodding politely in the stairwell, always carrying something—laundry, a loaf, a child half-asleep on her shoulder. We noticed them in the way we notice wallpaper or lamp posts or the sound of pigeons roosting in the attic. They were part of the backdrop, not the story.
By Paper Lantern7 months ago in Fiction
