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Submitted to Contest #336
“Okay. So, status check. Zara, you are not dead. Theo, you are also not dead. That is objectively good news.”“Yet. Emphasis on yet. We are not dead yet. Put it on a motivational poster.”“I am not making posters. I am monitoring fifteen critical failures and one reality leak that looks personal.”“Can you both stop? We literally just crawled out of a collapsing datastream. I can still feel the lag in my bones.”“Correction. You crawled. I was flung. Aggressively. Like a very sarcastic frisbee with unresolved trauma.”“Theo, Zara, focus. The Core...
Submitted to Contest #335
Mr Percival Hemsley took quiet pride in rules, order, and correct procedure, which was unfortunate, as none of them had ever met Rose Cottage. Mr Hemsley arrived at Rose Cottage four minutes early, because punctuality was a moral stance and also because it gave him time to brace himself for other people. He stood at the gate, straightened his tie, clipboard tucked beneath his arm, and listened. Thump. Thump. A steady, rhythmic knocking that suggested enthusiasm rather than restraint. Mr Hemsley frowned. The cottage frowned back. It had bee...
Submitted to Contest #333
The email subject line read Re: Christmas Dinner, which was how Marianne knew her life was about to be audited. Eight confirmations sat beneath it, decisive and unflinching, belonging to professionals who owned good coats, strong opinions, and at least one friend who made sourdough recreationally. These were people who read menus before choosing restaurants, who asked questions about provenance, who could tell when wine had been opened too long before it reached the table. At some point, she had said, “Christmas at mine,” like it was a casua...
Submitted to Contest #332
Rain chewed at the windows as if the night wanted to be a fly on the wall. Lena stood by the sink, watching the glass shiver with every gust. The bulbs over the counter flickered, turning her reflection in the window into a jumpy ghost. Somewhere beneath the howl of the wind, a song crackled from the radio, soft at first, then louder as the storm shifted. “I want you, I need you…” the singer crooned in a voice dragged out of the seventies. Lena’s jaw tightened. Her fingers, damp from washing dishes, slipped on the dial as she twisted it. The...
Submitted to Contest #331
Sophie Hale stood on the frozen lake watching the snowflakes fall. Her breath smeared the surface in cloudy ovals that vanished almost as soon as they formed. Half a metre down, frozen in place lay the wreath: dull plastic pine and a red ribbon caught mid-flick. She did not remember when it first appeared. It felt like something that had always been here, the way the lake and mountain had always been. “You’re doing that thing again,” her dad called from the pier. “Staring at it like it's going to wave.”“Maybe it will.”“It won’t.”His voice wa...
Submitted to Contest #330
The train station had always been loud, but that morning it felt louder, like every wheel scrape and suitcase clatter was determined to underline the fact that the world was shifting beneath Nora’s feet. Winter clung to the air: crisp, metallic, smelling faintly of burnt coffee and cold steel. She pushed through a cluster of commuters and scanned the platform with frantic eyes. There. Platform Nine.And him. Cal sat perched on his dark blue suitcase, swinging one leg idly like a kid waiting for recess instead of an international departure. A ...
Submitted to Contest #329
Lionel paced the hallway, as he had been for the past half hour, muttering and glaring at the walls as though he could shame them into behaving. Where is that blasted knocking coming from? It had started again about midnight , a steady, maddening tap-tap-tap, as if someone were politely but insistently rapping from inside the plaster. He had checked all the doors. All the windows. The cupboards, the airing closet, even the old laundry chute Hazel had always said was “haunted in a charming, historical way.” But nothing. Just the same narrow,...
Submitted to Contest #327
Ayla looked down. How, in all the purring galaxies, had she climbed this high? The tree hadn’t seemed that tall from the window, more of a polite shrub, really. But from her current perch, the garden stretched below like an alien planet, and the lawn ornaments looked suspiciously like distant asteroids. The ground was far, far away. Too far for a dignified leap. She dug her claws into the bark, tail twitching in what she would later describe as “contemplative stillness” (and the humans would call “mild panic”). Below her stood the female hum...
Submitted to Contest #326
Ha-ha-ha, someone snorts, and the room erupts. “YES! There it is!” chirps the facilitator, a woman with a headset mic and a name tag that reads SUNNY in bubble letters. “Follow the joy! Let your bodies remember how to laugh!” Forty of us in a windowless conference suite clap on the off-beat like schoolchildren. We’re here because HR said “Team Renewal Day” and the calendar invite said “Mandatory.” I work in Risk Analytics, which means I’m professionally suspicious of joy. I’m also hungover from the networking drinks I didn’t want to attend...
Hawthorn End had always been a respectable sort of strange. The hedges trimmed themselves into polite shapes, the bins rolled home without complaint, and the fog occasionally stopped to check its reflection in the shop windows. We were used to oddness, the manageable kind you can discuss at the parish meeting without losing your parking space. Then Aurelia moved into Number Thirteen. The house had been empty for years, a tall, narrow thing with a chimney that looked like an accusatory finger. When she arrived, the weather lost its manners. ...
Submitted to Contest #325
So, this is it. The end. I looked up at the house, and it couldn’t be any creepier. My aunt had always been an eccentric old kook, and this place fit her perfectly. The mansion loomed like something stolen from The Addams Family, its towers leaning down as though judging my worth before I even set foot inside.On the right, a glass structure clung to the house — a greenhouse, maybe? Hard to tell through the grime and ivy. Whatever it was, it was mine now.The wind shifted, a cold push at my back, urging me forward. I shivered. It felt less lik...
Submitted to Contest #320
I have worn this forest like a second skin longer than your bones. I alone remember their names. Roots braid through my ribs. Moss pads the places the wind chews. Stones tilt when I step to listen. The water knows me too, iron-tongued and cold, sluicing through hollows that smell of rot and lightning. Here, the mountains crush the horizon into fists, and the trees stitch a sky so tight you forget the stars. You call it wild and pass through in bright jackets and clean boots, breath steaming white. You say, West Virginia—almost heaven. You ha...
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