Latest Stories
Most recently published stories in Fiction.
A Guide to Parenting During the Apocalypse . Top Story - June 2021.
1. Do not complain, you did not ask for this. The world is now full of children who live with their grandparents, aunts, uncles, distant cousins, friends of the family, or total strangers. You are not special because you are raising a friend's child. You have not been singled out. This is the way things are.
By Mikaela Bell5 years ago in Fiction
The Shapeshifter’s Seduction
The rhythmic ticking of the church clock in the tower above provided a strange sense of familiarity for Tara. The consistent reminder of time marching on proved hypnotic as it mingled with the utter exhaustion swirling through her body. It felt like a taunt… seducing her with the far-fetched idea of rest without consequence. She releases a deep sigh of aspiration as she leans against the wall of the chapel and slides down slowly until her legs are fully extended before her. She groans under her breath as she slides her backpack off, one shoulder at a time, then tosses it weakly beside her. Ominous slithers of red and blue light dance across her heavily bruised legs, and she shifts her attention to the relentless sun hammering down directly through the broken stained glass skylight. It must be around noon. She started walking as the sun came up, and this was the first break of the day. As reluctant as she was to rest now, her swollen ankles all but demanded it.
By Grace Baldwin5 years ago in Fiction
Three Child Minimum
Briella sat in her swing and stared at her neighborhood. She never thought about how the houses of her gated community looked kind of like a bee hive. All the units were connected and looked exactly the same. In front of each unit was the same model of a self driving vehicle. These streets are where she used to play with the other children, games of hopscotch, jumprope, and invaders. Soon her thirteenth birthday would arrive when her parents would begin to arrange her marriage. Before she knew it, she would be birthing and caring for the three children required by the state.
By Brian Schell5 years ago in Fiction
The Invasion
Their faces. All you had to do was look at their faces to see that they had taken the vaccine. They had that blank stare of a person who drank fluoride laced water for their entire life. They would smile and have small talk with their neighbors, sitting down in front of the TV to zone out mindlessly every night for hours; shells of the humans they had been before it all had gone to hell in a hand basket.
By Acacia Lawson5 years ago in Fiction
Surviving in an unsurvivable world.
Past, Present, Future. There’s no difference. Survival is all that matters now. Walking through a long forgotten town, where debris litters the streets and buildings a covered in the vines of the close by forest that reclaimed this area long ago. Wearing what could only be described as tattered rags and holding a rifle with a machete strapped to my back. It’s hard to think back to a time when this wasn’t my life.
By Lauren McGarvie5 years ago in Fiction
The Reversal
I am Ryan. I am writing this before I become too young to do it. See, mental faculties would not be affected by the reversal at first. If anything they would be improved, experiences and notions and memories now carving their way into younger brain cells, supple and thirsty like sea sponges. I am as wise as you might expect from someone my venerable age, 159. But the physical faculties, oh well, those would follow the biological clock to the minute since the moment the needle entered your arm, just in reverse. If you are a 5R-year-old, as I am, it won’t be long before you lose the ability to write. It’s not that you’ll forget; your hand will just not know how to coordinate its thirty-plus muscles into the holding of a pen, and eventually you’ll go back to scribbles and doodles, squiggling in your high chair to grab the pencil in front of you. By that time, the neural scaffolding supporting your thoughts and intentions will be a quarter of its original size and will be faltering and crumbling under the weight of too many firing synapses, mercifully returning you to its original blank slate. It is the most humiliating thing, I was told by those younger than me, and those final years are the ones everyone fears the most. But you know, by now I have seen so many people die helplessly wrapped in swaddling clothes --- not only family and friends but movie stars, presidents, and dictators --- that I don’t feel any fear or self-pity anymore.
By Serafina Spedetti5 years ago in Fiction
