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Submitted to Contest #329
It was a dark and stormy night, which was frankly mortifying. I hate that line. It’s the literary equivalent of turning up to a funeral in a novelty tie. But there it was anyway: rain lashing the gothic windows of D-Wing, thunder grumbling over the university like an elderly professor with opinions about commas. I tightened my cloak and muttered at the sky, “We get it. Atmosphere.” The sky responded with a particularly theatrical crack of lightning. Show-off. I, Dr Lucian Graves (PhD, undead, underpaid), had been assigned proctor duty for No...
CW: Psychological horror and implied childhood trauma. People say archives are silent places — mausoleums for paper, shrines to quietude.Marin Hart knows better.Silence has shape here. Silence has teeth.It begins each night around two in the morning, when the city finally exhales and the electricity hums in a slightly different register. The world above sleeps; the world below stirs. The fluorescent lights tremble as if they’re afraid of the dark, and the stacks begin to murmur — tiny shifts of paper, sighs of old glue, whispers of knowledge...
Submitted to Contest #328
The Funeral and the Voicemail The bells had been ringing all morning, a slow metallic heartbeat drifting over Ljubljana. Mira Kralj stood beside the open grave, coat collar turned up against the drizzle, and wondered if the sound would ever stop. The priest’s voice blurred with the rain; words fell like small stones into the mud. Her mother’s name — Marija Kralj, 1954–2025 — shone briefly on the wet marble before the first shovelful of earth dulled it. Someone touched her arm; she nodded without seeing who. The scent of candle wax and damp w...
1. Study in Light 15 October 1924 I am writing by the last gasp of the lamp, its flame fluttering like a tired thought. The fog presses against the windowpanes, smearing the world into grey watercolour. The studio smells of linseed, turpentine, and a little of coal smoke drifting in from the street. My fingers ache from holding the brush too long, yet I cannot sleep. If I do, she will return. Last night’s dream lingers more sharply than waking. A woman stood on a shoreline beneath lightning, her hair swept across her face, her eyes pale as s...
Submitted to Contest #314
It was the hottest day of the year.This fact was confirmed via five push notifications, two flashing news tickers, a chalk sign outside the post office that simply read “HOT AS SIN,” and an orange government flyer dropped through every letterbox: ⚠ STAY INDOORS. STAY HYDRATED. AVOID COMPLICATED EMOTIONS. ⚠At 10:17 a.m., Colin Turner (semi-retired, patio obsessive, widely considered to be the spiritual leader of Hightree Gardens) burned his palm on the front door handle and accused the sun of “a targeted psychological campaign.”He spent twent...
I can’t sleep.The heat sits on you like a second body. It presses into the mattress, into your hairline, into the hollow behind your knees, and when you turn your pillow, the other side is already warm with the memory of your head. The fan above turns, pushing the same air around in slow, lazy arcs. It hums like a patient too far gone to complain.The red digits on the clock read 2:11. Outside, the street has the hushed, suspended quality of a photograph—no cars, no voices, only the long, metallic rattle of insects in the plane trees. Somewhe...
Submitted to Contest #307
Nina arrived at Bellwether Hall four days before term began, her suitcase wheels stuttering across the gravel like a warning. The campus was quiet, except for the sound of crows and the wind whispering through old iron gates. She paused at the base of the main staircase, staring up at the building with its Gothic spires and narrow arched windows. Everything here seemed to tilt slightly upward, as if the world inside had never considered looking down. She had been admitted on a full academic scholarship — a miracle, according to her mother —...
Wren arrived at St. Hesper's for her final year with two suitcases, a battered paperback, and the quiet certainty that no one would remember her. She was a scholarship girl — quiet, neat, and the kind of student teachers liked, but her peers never noticed. Her mother called the place a golden ticket; Wren called it a greenhouse for well-bred girls who bloomed on cue.She had grown up in a flat behind her mother's flower shop, her nights filled with the scent of carnations and buckets of cold water. Her mother taught her to prune precisely, ta...
The bell over the shop door jingled, soft and flat. Mara ducked inside, the July heat clinging to her neck like cellophane. Her aunt’s antique store smelled like old wood and varnished regret — all lace doilies, rusted birdcages, and chipped saints. She was supposed to be dusting the shelves, but she liked the forgotten corners best — the ones no one ever asked about. It was in one of these corners, behind a stack of brittle sheet music and a cracked porcelain cherub, that she found it. A small velvet box. Black. Tied shut with red string. T...
The letter arrived in the final week of the final term of autumn. Thick cream envelope. Crimson wax seal. No return address. Inside: a single card, printed in fine black ink. _You have been selected for The Annotated Oral._ The handwriting below was not printed. It was too angular. Too exact. _Tonight. South Archives. Third Vault._ Julian Raye had heard rumours. Whispers passed between exhausted students at midnight in library corners. “The Annotated Oral,” they said, with a shrug or a shudder. One student each year. No syllabus. No wi...
The Ink-Eaters The first time I tasted ink, it was warm. Not the metallic bite of fountain pen ink, nor the bitter slick of toner on your fingers—this was older. Richer. It clung to my teeth like wine, bloomed behind my eyes like a headache, and whispered a word I shouldn’t have known in a language no one should still speak. Welcome, it said. I hadn’t meant to eat the page, not really. It was a late November night—the kind where fog paws at the dormitory windows like something with fingers—and I was behind on three essays. The library was cl...
Submitted to Contest #287
I don’t like tea. I never have. But my father did, and when I made him a cup that afternoon, I could almost pretend everything was normal. He’d asked me to make it, as he often did when he was at home. So, I filled the kettle, added the tea bags, and waited for it to boil, listening to the quiet hum of the house. The smell of the tea, warm and comforting, filled the kitchen as I poured it into his mug. It wasn’t much. But it was one of those simple things that kept us both grounded. “I’ll pick you up from rehearsal later, yeah?” he...
The tiny bell above the café door jingled as Milo Samaras stepped inside. His long white hair framed a gaunt face that had once commanded attention but now drew mostly curious glances or, at best, polite indifference. Dressed in flowing garments that could loosely be described as inspired by a sari, Milo deliberately projected an air of intellectual mystique. Yet, to most onlookers, his attempt to exude sophistication only highlighted his eccentricity, his theatrical presence falling short of the gravitas he so desperately sought. Toda...
Submitted to Contest #286
The room was always too quiet, the hum of fluorescent lights filling the spaces between every word, every breath. The mismatched chairs, arranged in a half-circle around a coffee table, seemed out of place in a room meant to heal. The walls were bare, save for the occasional poster with uplifting phrases like "Hope is the first step" and "You are not alone." The women who gathered there each week were survivors—of violence, betrayal, emotional trauma. Each of them bore scars, some visible, most invisible. But they were survivors, and Clara w...
Submitted to Contest #285
You could say I’ve got a front-row seat to the drama of modern life. The faint hum of the fridge keeps me company, joined by the occasional buzz of a fruit fly orbiting an overripe banana in the fruit bowl. Perched here on the kitchen counter, nestled between a stained kettle and a pile of takeaway menus, I see and hear it all—every hurried breakfast, every muttered complaint about the weather, every clatter of misplaced keys. It’s a modest existence, but not without its perks. I get to witness the rhythm of this household, th...
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