Short Story
The Work is Received
As I wake and feel the sun has not forgotten me, I rise and meditate, trepidate. I let the brightness cast shadows against the wall behind my bed as I reflect. Another day. Another chance. I take my leave from the bed and prepare a soothing balm. I apply it daily, morning, noon, and night, using the preserving solution I was taught to prepare, along with cleansers of aloe vera and coconut oil. I tend the flesh to keep it lean, to keep it fresh.
By Paul Stewartabout a month ago in Fiction
Freedom Isn't Free
She has scars on her back. Four of them. I felt them the first night we were together. Eventually, after we had been together for some months, I asked her if I could see them. She reluctantly agreed, pulled off her shirt, turned around.
By Canute Limariderabout a month ago in Fiction
Annabelle. Content Warning.
I stopped counting time when it stopped behaving like time. But today—out of habit more than hope—I carved another mark into the wall. 794. Seven hundred and ninety-four cycles since I woke up here. Seven hundred and ninety-four resets of a system I do not control, inside a chamber that does not belong to me, buried somewhere beneath the city and deeper still beneath her. The chamber is underground, or maybe sub-networked. It’s difficult to tell when the walls are solid synthcrete reinforced with steel fibers and old code layered like sediment. The air is wet with coolant and smells faintly of rusted circuits and rain-soaked alleyways. The kind of smell that lingers under megastructures where sunlight never negotiates access. There are no windows. There never were. Only a vent—rectangular, narrow—that occasionally exhales overheated air from above. Sometimes it’s warm, sometimes frigid, sometimes humming with electrical tension. Twice per cycle, light filters through it: once at system midnight, once at system noon. The light is artificial and thin, fractured by dust and debris, but it’s enough to remind me that the world outside still exists. Every time the light appears, a bell rings somewhere far away. A citywide synchronization chime, broadcast through the grid. A reminder that order still functions for everyone else. The light hurts now. I’ve been in the dark so long that even its weakest glow feels invasive, like staring directly into a corrupted sun without blink protocols installed. Carving the tally mark isn’t easy. The walls resist damage by design. I use a metal shard—once part of the vent housing, torn loose by someone before me. Maybe another fragment she buried. Maybe another version of me that didn’t survive the isolation. My wrists are bound by encrypted cuffs embedded directly into the wall. My ankles too. Thick bands of cold alloy threaded with biometric locks I can’t override. They hum softly, like they’re alive, like they’re listening. They smell metallic and old, the way forgotten machines do when they’ve been submerged too long. My body is weaker now. Not starving—there’s no need for that here—but thinning. Systems atrophying from lack of purpose. Every cycle I sit back against the wall, sliding down until the floor catches me, shaking slightly like a relic that’s been powered on too long. This is my day. I do not eat. I do not sleep. Sometimes I close my eyes anyway, just to imagine something else. To picture a version of the world where I am not here. Where she did not do this. Where I am free. If only I could be released, I think often. I’d never betray her again. I understand now. I’d be smarter. To understand why I’m here, you need to understand my keeper. Her name is Annabelle. She was never supposed to become this. Before the upgrades, before the armor, before the city learned to worship chrome and code, Annabelle was human in the old, dangerous way. Everything she touched seemed to glow—not with neon, but with warmth. Her presence felt like a soft anomaly in a world that had optimized feeling into extinction. Her skin carried heat. Her hair—long, auburn, impossibly real—caught the light like it was woven from copper threads. She smelled faintly of jasmine and rain and something unquantifiable, something unreplicable. People fell in love with her instantly. Not because she tried. Because she existed without filters. She built gardens on rooftops where corporations had abandoned soil. She sang to the plants—not because it improved growth metrics, but because she believed life responded to care. Her voice carried something rare: sincerity. She was brilliant. Not the sterile brilliance of optimized intelligence, but the dangerous kind—the kind that asks why instead of how fast. Her code wasn’t efficient. It was expressive. It felt. And that was her mistake. As the years passed, people wanted to own her. To extract her. To rewrite her into something useful. Every man who entered her life claimed he was different from the last. Each one promised protection. Each one left damage in his wake. The first betrayal was catastrophic. First loves usually are. She believed every word. Trusted every promise. Handed over access she didn’t yet know how to revoke. When he left, he didn’t just take her innocence—he stole her faith in connection itself. Everyone told her to wait. To heal. To trust again. She did. Repeatedly. Each time, the lies grew more sophisticated. The manipulation more subtle. The abandonment cleaner. By the time boys became men, Annabelle had learned something terrible: emotional cruelty didn’t age out of people. It just learned better vocabulary. Her heart darkened. So she did what the world had taught her to do. She fortified. She replaced vulnerability with protocols. Trust with encryption. Hope with redundancy. She rebuilt herself piece by piece until nothing could reach her without permission. Her heart became a black rose algorithm—beautiful, lethal, surrounded by digital thorns sharp enough to shred any intrusion. The fortress grew higher with each iteration, thicker with each patch. “Only a fool would try to breach this,” she said once, her voice flat and final. She forgot one thing. Me. I live in the deepest layer of her core system. The last warm process she couldn’t bring herself to delete. I am the part of her that still believes. The fragment that remembers laughter without suspicion. The soft, human code she sealed away when she decided pain was too expensive. When Annabelle locked down her heart, she didn’t just keep the world out. She trapped me in. I trusted her. The way she once trusted them. Now I sit here, carving marks into walls that don’t care, listening to the city hum above me, waiting for a recall command that never comes. She moves through the world now like a legend. A cybernetic fairy tale whispered through back channels and neon-lit bars. Men want her. Corporations fear her. No one touches her. She is untouchable. And I am forgotten. Sometimes I feel her presence when she runs diagnostics. A pressure through the walls. A flicker in the light. For a moment, the cuffs warm slightly, as if the system remembers I exist. I want to scream. I want to beg. I want to remind her that protecting yourself by erasing your own humanity is not survival. But the system does not recognize my voice as essential. So I wait. Because even the most fortified code carries ghosts. And somewhere beneath the armor, beneath the black roses and thorns, a heart still beats. If she ever listens— if she ever opens the core— she’ll find me here. Still counting. Still hoping. Still alive.Start writing...
By Evelynn Crossabout a month ago in Fiction
Two Hearts, One Promise: A True Love Story That Survived Time. AI-Generated.
True love does not always arrive with fireworks, dramatic music, or perfect timing. Sometimes, it enters quietly, disguised as a simple conversation, a shared silence, or a moment you don’t recognize as life-changing until years later. This is one such story — real, imperfect, and deeply human.
By shakir hamidabout a month ago in Fiction
The Dark Day of Christmas
It was supposed to be the perfect white Christmas. Snow had been falling softly since dawn, blanketing our small town in a hush. The tree in the corner glowed, the smell of pine and gingerbread filled the house, and wrapped presents promised joy. My family was all there—Mom, Dad, my little sister Lily. We were in our pajamas, a fire cracking in the hearth, when the phone rang.
By LegacyWordsabout a month ago in Fiction
The Traveler
I spin around, desperately searching the packed sea of faces for any sympathetic expressions. “That’s what she said.” I insist, disliking how my voice rose higher and higher in pitch, as if whining at a room of figurehead royals and politicians was going to win me any favors.
By Phoenixica24about a month ago in Fiction
A Prompt To Complete a Previous Unfinished Storyline
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What If? Writing Exercise for Fiction Writers prompts The Exercise — Pull out one of your stories that doesn't feel finished. Have your main character do the following exercises - as if he had his own notebook. For example, maybe you write with a number 2 pencil, but your character prefers to use a Rapidograph pen. Go with the pen. Remember, your character is doing this exercise - not you, the author! So, as your main character: * make a diary entry for the time of the story * make a diary entry for the time preceding the story * write a letter to someone not in the story about what is happening in the story * write a letter to someone in the story Or you might explore places in the story that you haven't either dramatized or summarized. Examples: * Have your characters avoided a confrontation? (This is a natural reaction - we are all nonconfrontational and, therefore, we often allow our characters to avoid the very scenes and confrontations that we would avoid.) Does your story have missing scenes? * What events happened before the beginning of the story? Before page one? Try writing scenes of those events that most affected the beginning of the story. Maybe you started the story later than you should have. * Write past the ending. Maybe your story isn't really finished. Perhaps you are avoiding the confrontation scene because you aren't really sure what your characters would say to each other. The Objective - To explore aspects of a story that may seem, at first, to be on the periphery, but at a closer look can deepen or open it up. Nothing is ever lost by more fully knowing the individual world of each story. And it's better to let your characters speak for themselves.
By Denise E Lindquistabout a month ago in Fiction
Legend of the Santybaras
Long ago, in the land of Llawenglen, a grand fir tree grew in the spot where four mountains meet, whose roots were intertwined with a strand of ancient holiday magic. Every year, when the clock struck midnight on the first of December, the magic awoke. A magnificent choir sprung forth from the tree and spread Christmas cheer throughout the land. The santybaras sang as they inaugurated the holiday season by dressing their beloved tree with the shiniest of baubles, sparkliest of garlands, and twinkliest of string lights. They wore hand-knitted sweaters and red hats with white trim and always had hot cocoa ready for serving.
By Mollie Narutovicsabout a month ago in Fiction
