Latest Stories
Most recently published stories in Fiction.
Expiration Date
The dawn chorus began its daily chime, slowly stirring the restless dreamers from their mournful sleep. Genevieve rose from the bed, every movement and breath painstakingly made. She fumbled about the kitchen, her shaky hands trying, failing, and trying again to pour herself a cup of morning brew. After the second broken mug, she remembered her mistake.
By Seth Skaggs5 years ago in Fiction
The Blood Alchemist, Chapter 1
Dusk was such a lovely time, the boundary between the tame day and the wild night. Not that the activities of the night didn't take place during the day, it's just no one cared to hide it anymore at night. The setting sun glistens off the river dividing Lautus from Azymus, shining as brightly as the polished white stones of Lautus in the distance.
By Katarzyna Crevan5 years ago in Fiction
A Husband and Wife
She was dead. Her face was blue and her body was rigid. Her heart shaped pendant hung around her neck like a noose. He sat across the room from her, whiskey in hand. It wouldn’t be long before the dogs would come. He knew his fate, he was reserved to it. He shouldn’t have done this. But to him, she deserved it. He’d given her the world. He’d Shown her the shining city. They’d dined above the stars. He’d given her a job at the ministry of money. He would have gone to hell and back for her. She would never have returned the favour. She didn't have a history. No date adorning her arm. He believed it to be a mistake. He was wrong. He peered down at his arm, and checked the clock. It was always going to end this way. He had five minutes. Five minutes of life left. As soon as the time came to be the same as his marking, he would stop. His life would end. He should have seen it coming. He knew now it was always coming. She was a lie. A pretty face in a red dress with the devil in her eyes. She’d lied to him for years. The anger built inside of him. She’d sold him out when the ministry found a data leak. She claimed innocence and pointed the finger. He dined alone whilst she toasted success. It was only invertible. Four minutes. He tried to calm himself. He didn’t want to waste the last four minutes of his life in anger. His thoughts turned to his mother. She was always wise and always there. And now she would bury her son, her only son. He didn’t have a will. It was redacted by the ministry. How would she pay the expense. There would be no holodeck for him. Just a hole in the ground. He chuckled slightly at the thought. His father had always told him the ministry would leave him in the mud. Seemed after all he was right. He always was a smug son of a bitch. Three minutes. He began to ponder how she had kept it from him. How did she hide her intentions? She was helping the worst people, yet came across like a saint. It baffled him. He knew what the machine was. They were taught about it from a young age. A group of hateful people, looking to bring the ministry down. They were told they could turn anyone into a weapon. He never thought it could be true though. She was sweet and innocent and full of life. Yet they twisted her into a monster, willing to hurt her own husband and destroy their life. For what? Revenge for the take over? Or was it just spite? He would never know now. Two minutes. A bittersweet feeling arose in him. She was evil. She had ruined him. Yet, he still held love for her, even now at the end. He wondered why that was. Maybe he was defective. Maybe he should have been sent down south. Or maybe it was just love. He didn’t know and nor did he have the time left to rationalize his feelings. They did not matter now. Nothing did. One minute. The sirens sounded like a deafening hiss. He could hear them now. They were at the door. He knew it was time. His final thought turned to his life. He had wasted it. He had spent all of his life doing what others told him to and now, it had gotten him killed. The dogs burst in. Their metallic guns shining from the spotlight. This was right, he knew it was right. He smiled one last time as the muzzle of a gun flashed. It was over.
By Connor Davidson5 years ago in Fiction
The Magpie
Damon calls Tini his little magpie, which made her cross until Neria told her what a magpie was. They sat together in the shadows of a crumbling shed as night settled over the valley below them and she closed her eyes to imagine birds in the darkening sky. The next time they risked going into a town, Neria ushered her into the shelter of a building she called a library, where the walls were lined with shelves of actual books, or had been before they gave way and their contents spilled across the floor. In the children's section they found guides to plants and animals and birds, and when they left Neria slipped one into her bag and promised not to tell Damon, so Tini could lie awake in the hours between dawn and the day starting, leafing through the pages and imagining. Sometimes she imagines she's a hare running through fields, or a deer in a woodland, but mostly she imagines she's a magpie, high in the sky and watching out for treasure.
By Lexy Needham5 years ago in Fiction
The Dream
This morning started like all the others. Tori got up and began to dream of the world she heard stories of growing up. The stories her mother would tell her each day she placed a heart shaped locket around her neck. The locket had an inscription of numbers around the inside edge. Tori's mother would never tell her what they meant. As time passed, Tori would go walking through the tunnels where they have lived for so many years. She explored miles of tunnels that seemed to go nowhere.
By Michael Maenle5 years ago in Fiction
My Dystopia
Dystopia is not some barren aftermath of a not-so-distant future. It is not the shattered remains of a civilization that once thrived or a fight for survival in a post-atomic wasteland. Dystopia is now. I thrive in dystopia. I thrive when the odds aren’t just against me but against everyone else just the same…when the world around me and everyone else is crumbling. I am alive when the sky is falling.
By Anton Chavez5 years ago in Fiction
Pieces of Selene
Glossary available below Though born long after any living eye could behold Selene’s glow in full, the Kid still remembered a time she hadn't been so dim. The desert today interred more of the Night’s Eye--already pale and broken when the Kid’s mother exchanged her life for his before a name had crossed her lips--than what still glimmered among the stars. The Kid was a stonebreaker, which was just another way of saying he wasn’t a farmer. In the vast and once-barren expanse formerly known as the Australian Outback--more than a century of rainfall following the cataclysm had in conjunction with lunar deposit produced flora unlike anything the ancient naturalists had recorded in their lost tomes--there were only two occupations; orphans with neither name nor kin typically fell into the more hazardous one. Their bodies--some buried, others scattered by four-legged beasts no villager had ever survived an encounter with to describe, much less taxonomize--covered the desert almost as densely as the lunar asteroids they mined for lignite. They were the hunt’s prize and the treasure every rustic marauder saw in his dreams, these luminous gems villagers across the frontier called shine and imagined were fallen stars. With enough lignite and luck--for without luck, no scavenger prevailed against the outback for long--a stonebreaker could trade his pan and pickaxe for a plot of shrub and grow elderberry.
By R. Phillip Mayer5 years ago in Fiction
Word Challenge #1
It's awkward to lift your chin off your chest and discover you're the only person in the bar besides the tapper and the piano man. One blankly wiping down glassware, the other absentmindedly smoking a cigarette in the half light of the room, staring into a distant nothing. This is the state of things in the days leading up to Carnival when every juke joint and eatery is gearing up for the mob of tourists. But now it's still possible to stumble in to a dimly lit place at two in the afternoon and find a little solitude. Solitude was what I was after, after all, given how things had been going in my day-to-day. I’d never been in this bar before, but from the outside it looked inviting, like a place I should go, a place that would welcome me or at least provide what I needed. What I needed was a drink and some peace and quiet to do some thinking.
By Clint Jones5 years ago in Fiction
Summer
It was a hazy late summer day. Leon stood in the field under the beating sun, the tall grasses brushing against his face. He felt the earth baked hard as rock under his feet. It was too hot to be out. All the grown-ups were inside, lounging lazily about, draping themselves over couches and chairs. Leon didn’t mind the heat, but he was alone outside, in a huge empty stillness that really wasn’t still because of the constant droning of the cicadas. He went back to the house, his feet padding lightly on the uneven ground. In front, the hounds lay in dusty depressions they had dug in the hard-packed earth. Up on the porch, the men sat drinking hot, black coffee in the shade of the sagging roof. Min sat on the front steps, drawing in a jade-colored notebook. She had nothing to do now that Jack was lying upstairs in a dark room with a bandage wrapped around his head. None of the other children were in sight.
By charlotte meilaender5 years ago in Fiction
The Nymph and the Satyr
It was not a natural awakening. Her prone body was stretched atop the soft peeling bark of a branch not far above the ground. Her bare foot, grass-stained and muddy from running among the trees, was being caressed in the lightest way as it dangled toward the forest floor. It tickled something dreadful. She flinched, tugging her leg up to her chest, but that just made the culprit grab her ankle.
By Saralyn Caine5 years ago in Fiction
Summer, '69
It was December, so the hills were on fire. Colomatta they were called once, those mountains that rose up from the plain. Myle had been told of eucalypt cathedrals, piled high into air so blue it seemed suffused with the very spirit of the gods. But fallen now, and swept away as ash they were remembered only as the hollows and ridges of some great buried monster, grown over with thin, greedy shrubs that spread out from half-yearly burnings, constant as a tide. While a scorched concrete wall kept the flames at bay the smoke spread up, and out, until all the air was a haze and the tendrils that were sucked inside the coach crept under the corners of Myle’s mask, burning his lungs with each breath. As he rattled through the Belt – crushed between the glittering towers standing sentry on the bay and the long, low barns of corrugated iron that stretched out into the firebreak, humming with machines – the night sky was a tie-dyed mass. Garish purples, greens and blues spilled out of floodlights at the tops of the towers that reared over, rising like chemical candles above the squat, blank tenements that lined the street. Though it was midnight the air baked, and most windows hung open, shrill voices tumbling out from television sets and radios. And the coughing, the spluttering, the heaving and the hacking. That was there too, and it never went away.
By Angus Chapman5 years ago in Fiction
