Series
The Day the Colors Fled
The Day the Colors Fled It started quietly, as if the city had taken a deep breath and let all color escape. I woke to gray skies and streets stripped of vibrancy. My walls, my clothes, the garden outside—everything was a shade of ash, steel, and stone. Even the sunlight seemed pallid, like paper left too long in the sun. I rubbed my eyes, convinced it was a trick of sleep. But the world outside my window confirmed my fear.
By waseem khan6 months ago in Fiction
The Café That Served Emotions
The Café That Served Emotions The café wasn’t on any map. Not in guidebooks, not on GPS, not even on the neon-lit streets of downtown. You stumbled upon it when you weren’t looking, through a narrow alley framed by ivy and flickering lanterns. The sign read simply: “Café Émotion”, its letters curling like smoke.
By waseem khan6 months ago in Fiction
Letters to the Future Me
Letters to the Future Me It started on a Tuesday. I was pouring cereal at my tiny kitchen table when I noticed the envelope lying beside my bowl. Brown paper, neatly folded, with my name written in cursive I didn’t recognize. I opened it with cautious curiosity.
By waseem khan6 months ago in Fiction
Endurance
It’s the early edge of happy hour at Shelly’s Pub, which means two dozen people all talking over each other, four TV screens tuned to games no one’s really watching, and an undercurrent of beer-fueled anticipation that thickens the air. The lights have been adjusted for “golden hour” according to Shelly’s careful ritual: low enough to hide flaws, bright enough to make everyone think they’re in on something. The tap lines hiss and the lowball glasses clink and, somewhere at the end of the bar, Michael slips in with the anxiety of someone who both belongs and very much does not.
By Endurance Stories6 months ago in Fiction
Endurance
The next morning at Shelly's apartment, just above her pub. Morning is a joke, and Abby is the punchline. There’s a high C ringing through her skull, so sharp it could slice through drywall. She opens one eye, then the other, then immediately regrets it; even the filtered light slanting through the sheer curtains feels like a laser pointer aimed at her brainstem. Her tongue tastes like old pennies and the inside of a dead Duracell. The room, her room, is an archaeological dig: empty water bottles, bobby pins, one high heel wedged in the radiator, and glitter. So much glitter. It catches on the curve of her arm and pools in the bedsheets, the aftermath of a war fought entirely with craft supplies and bad decisions.
By Endurance Stories6 months ago in Fiction
Endurance. Content Warning.
Club Euphoria smells like sugar and ozone, like a birthday cake left out in the rain and then struck by lightning. The club’s double-doors open and shut like a humidifier set to maximum, belching chemical fog into River North’s damp summer air. Inside, everything is backlit by bruised purple and electric blue, a visual conspiracy of LEDs designed to convince you that time, and possibly dignity, have been suspended for the duration.
By Endurance Stories6 months ago in Fiction
Endurance
Doug’s apartment smells like a cross between a locker room and a brewery, which is to say: exactly as he wanted. There are five kinds of chips on the coffee table, arranged with the military precision of someone who has watched too many Food Network marathons. The walls are a riot of Cubs memorabilia, dorm-era posters, and one gigantic, ironically naked calendar girl that has clearly been hanging since before Doug started working at Cadabra. The sectional is a hand-me-down from Doug’s cousin, the cushions permanently molded into the ass-prints of everyone who’s ever watched a game here.
By Endurance Stories6 months ago in Fiction
The Final Card: Alice in Borderland Season 3’s Descent into the Joker’s Labyrinth
"Alice in borderline line season 3 upcoming " **Netflix’s record-breaking Japanese survival thriller returns for its most audacious and emotionally charged season yet, abandoning the manga’s roadmap to forge a terrifying new game.**
By Danyal Hashmi6 months ago in Fiction
Endurance
There’s a particular shade of light in Shelly’s Pub, the kind that never shows up in photos, only in memory—liquid, dense, somewhere between amber and the last hour before sunset. The woodwork wears a patina of a hundred thousand spilled drinks and the bar stools tilt at odd, familiar angles, already half-mapped to the regulars’ hips. On a Thursday at half-past seven, the crowd is local: a few construction guys with cement still under their nails, a pack of grad students orbiting the trivia screen, and in the southeast corner, a round table commandeered by five women who look like they’ve come for a meeting but will not, under any circumstances, refer to it as such.
By Endurance Stories6 months ago in Fiction
Endurance
"Lenny’s Lanes" exists in the kind of suburban time warp where it is always ten years too late for irony and five years too soon for nostalgia. Every Tuesday is league night, but tonight it’s not. The oil-slicked lanes gleam under the migraine of fluorescent lights, and the aroma of scorched nacho cheese and gym-sock rental shoes hits you as soon as the automatic door shoves you inside. Pop music from two presidents ago pulses through speakers patched with masking tape, the volume set to “deafen children.” At the far end, a retirement-age man with two championship patches on his polo shirt throws a strike with balletic grace. His ball hits the pins with a sound like a car crash in miniature, but no one claps.
By Endurance Stories6 months ago in Fiction
Endurance
The Beeks residence in Kenilworth glows, as always, under the relentless discipline of maintenance crews and Melanie’s weekly conscription of neighborhood teens to pull weeds or touch up the trim. The white of the siding is so clean it hurts to look at in direct sunlight; the shutters a mathematically precise navy, not quite black, matching the flag that flies stoically beside the front door. Even the boxwoods flanking the porch are squared off at crisp right angles, daring the unkempt oaks of the neighbors’ lots to spill over with so much as a single leaf.
By Endurance Stories6 months ago in Fiction
