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Discover weekly, the best short stories

Looking for a steady supply of speculative short stories? Every week thousands of writers submit stories to our writing contest.

150+ Speculative Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest. Looking to explore terrains beyond Earth and stretch the limits of your imagination? Welcome to the Internet’s best source of speculative fiction stories.

Speculative Short Stories – Page 10 of 10

Love Loved Loves

T Marshall

Weekly Contest #337

Love, Loved, LovesYou remember the soft touch of her hand. You reach for it. There is nothing, no warmth, just a haunting cold, which curls its dead fingers around your heart. You sigh; the pain loosens but only slightly. The bed which once held you both like a podium now only holds you. You can’t win a competition if you’re the only one playing. The ceiling fan ticks round and round. You count the spins, yet they are just a blur in front of you. You hear her voice from the fan asking you if she was a worm would you still love her. Always. ...

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The Passing Image of a Panic Attack

Weekly Contest #337

PrefaceA PreludeBy way of preparatory exercises Notes from the Corner of a Euclidean Space The Mirror (In various postures) Reclining Look there. Where? There. But it is nowhere. No, not nowhere. Nay, that is reflection. Which reflection? Where? There. Straight ahead. Simply, though, how can a reflection be there? Sitting Look up. Look straight. Rather, don’t look at all, don’t even shut your eyes, for you would still be looking. Rather, just not. Notting is incredibly tough. To spring out of the void, in instantaneous ill-continuity. Not, ...

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Sixty Seconds to Spare

Aleta Bryant

Weekly Contest #337

Content warning: This story contains themes of death, serious illness, and life-threatening accidents. Sixty Seconds to Spare The first time Cindy rewound time, she did it by accident—more reflex than choice. A toddler toppled from the top rung of a shopping cart, arms windmilling, the kind of slow-motion fall you can’t unsee. Cindy’s hand shot out. Stop. The world hiccupped. The child hung in midair like a puppet whose strings had been yanked tight. A spoonful of yogurt floated off his chin, suspended. The fluorescent lights above the d...

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Next Time? Florida

Needs Chocolate

Weekly Contest #337

Kicking my boots off, I left them on the mat in a puddle of melting snow. Winter...my favorite; cooped up indoors twenty-four/seven, shoveling mounds of snow in below zero temperatures, digging the car out from under the latest pounding, and feeling like the world is closing in on me. You get the picture. If not, send me your address and I'll ship you some white stuff.I boiled water for tea and flicked through channels for something to keep me from committing hari-kari with my snow shovel tonight. Ah, reruns of Friends or I Love Lucy? Lucy w...

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Stop

Hannah Shakeshaft

Weekly Contest #337

Salt.That’s all I can smell. I thought, surely, my body would have blocked the scent by now. After four months, day in and day out, should I not have acclimated? Should it not be as familiar to me as the smell of the boat, as my own scent?But somehow I don’t notice those things. I am sure that the waterlogged sailboat smells like mildew, like wood rot, like deep saturation. I am sure that my skin smells stale, sour, acrid.But then again, maybe it doesn’t.Maybe everything smells like salt. I look to the sky and close my eyes. Despite this, I ...

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Spare

Weekly Contest #337

Glossy pink lips spoke into the microphone. “Everyone’s scared of losing what makes us human. But you know what? No one can take that from us. All technology can do is fix humanity, not replace it. And God knows we could use a little fixing.” Seconds later, screams erupted in waves through the crowd. People surged toward the exits, trampling over one another before the stampede took them too. The lights cut out, but sparks still burst from the stage rig above, casting quick flashes over the wreckage. For an instant, Lia Vox’s blood shone red...

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The Window

Terry Gilton

Weekly Contest #337

Discovery The black square appeared at exactly 7:05 AM Pacific Time, visible from my window seat at 37,000 feet. From my window in the Embraer 175, it looked like a shadow on the hillside. Maybe it was nothing more than an optical illusion cast by the early morning sun across the Nevada desert. But shadows aren’t as precise as what I saw and the shape didn’t really change if it was overcast. It appeared in the same place for six consecutive Monday commutes between Boise and San Jose. I started taking notes on my seventh sighting. GPS coordin...

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Still at 11:57

Ivana Radić

Weekly Contest #337

She was looking through the kitchen window. Her eyes were resting on the garden, and yet she felt like she did not really see any of it. Her vision narrowed down, and everything in front of her became blurred. Her body remained in the room, while her presence flew somewhere else. It was the familiar state in which she slipped — halfway between the outer and the inner world. Her gaze passed straight through the solid matter and she was no longer looking at anything specific.In those moments her reality loosened, her surroundings faded, and sh...

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Under Shifting Shadows

Debra Tillar

Weekly Contest #337

The strange creatures seemed unconcerned as Jones reached into the glass-clear water to steal their eggs. Barefoot, her pants rolled to her knees, she stepped carefully, slipping her fingers into the sand where the eggs were just half-buried and easy to pluck. She was wary and worked quickly, but the creatures merely blinked their rows of tiny eyes and shuffled their turtle-shell bodies out of her way. There were dozens of the large eggs but she took only six. Two each would be plenty. Over her shoulder the swollen red sun began to dip towar...

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My Time At The Oasis

Raymound O'h

Weekly Contest #336

Nestled in the center of a small New England town stands a three-story nondescript brick building. Once home to a community hospital, it now serves as a Mental Health/Rehab/Medical Detox Facility. Privately owned and appropriately licensed.New vinyl floors line the halls, adorned with Wayfair furniture and obligatory generic slogans of: Resilience, Mind Over Matter, and Endless Possibilities Start Here, found in modernized rustic frames on the walls. Advertised as Low Patient Ratio, Medically Assisted Detox, Patient Centered Care with Inner ...

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Outgrown

L.B. Cisar

Weekly Contest #337

I coughed, heaving into my arm as dust entered my lungs. It lingered always. Billowing around me like a lurking monster. Never far away, watching from the corner of my eye. The dust was bad, and the darkness was worse, but the loneliness—that would be my ending. It crawled into my chest slowly, wrapping its arms around me and encompassing me until I was just a remnant of myself, guided only by a measure of hope that one day—no, I couldn’t think of that.I used to count the hours, then the days, until it didn’t matter anymore. No one was comin...

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MLS Property Listing: 195 NE Gregory Rd | Condemned

Jennilee Tangpuz

Weekly Contest #336

4:53 p.m. “Griffin, there’s a child.”“What?”“There’s a child sitting on the front porch.”“Let me see.”“Don’t push—”“...Hm...”“Well?”“...There’s a child.”“Yes. Okay. So, since we’re agreed to there being a child, can we move on to the next question?”“What question?”“What are we going to do with said child on said front porch?”“Hm.”“We’ve done this part already, Griffin!”“Let me think a minute.”“Oh no, the child is moving. It’s standing up. Griffin, it’s looking right at us.”“Impossible.”“It’s saying something. Can you hear?”“No, it’s muffled....

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A Listening Ear

Garrett Carroll

Weekly Contest #337

Zarcon tilted his chin up and looked around at the immense fields of wheat. Planetary systems were compartmentalized by industry, and wheat fields seemed to grow best from the light of blue star systems. The Frazan Sector had five planets producing massive amounts of wheat for distribution across each planetary system. The urban systems functioned the most chaotically yet also demanded the most control among the Unified Federation of Systems (UFS), including the establishment of predefined planetary resource zoning. The Frazan Sector was the...

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The Statues Cry

Lark -

Weekly Contest #337

The Statues CryLark The church had sat upon the hill, wilting in sweet summer heat; its crumbling foundation like chalk beneath our feet. Fractured stained glass windows hanging proudly towards the sun in limp frames. Great vines sweeping across a veiled entrance to a world unknown. It had once been a place of great pride, the Founding Fathers consecrating the very grounds they would bleed on in holy water and prayer.Perhaps it was the dwindling funds, the rise of alternate religion, or simply- just a dead church. Some say it was a ritual go...

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Almost Counts in Nothing But Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

Weekly Contest #337

The quantum probability field flickered at 99.97%—which, in any reasonable universe (one where effort correlated with outcome, where the laws of physics acknowledged the concept of "trying really hard"), would be close enough. But Marissa Chen had been doing this job for six years—Temporal Adjustment Specialist II, Grade 7, benefits-eligible—and she knew that the universe was not, in fact, reasonable, and that 99.97% meant absolutely nothing when the threshold was 99.98%. Almost is never enough. The phrase appeared on every rejection notice ...

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