Latest Stories
Most recently published stories in Fiction.
A Guest at 10:17
Every night at precisely 10:17, Marianne set the table for two. The ritual was simple. A chipped ceramic plate beside a slightly smaller one, two spoons of sugar heaped into matching crystal bowls, and a single pale lavender candle placed between them just so. It had begun the night Calvin first asked her to stay, to make dinner together before he went back to the city. A momentary thing, she’d said. A simple meal. But something about that first night had felt like the hinge of an old door. Once it closed, she could still feel the vibration in the frame.
By Christine Nelson9 days ago in Fiction
The Box
"I'm telling you, Man: it's real, and it's worth a fortune!" Duke had that look in his eyes again. Somewhere between a kid on Christmas morning, and a crackhead looking for his next fix. The last time Ronny had seen it, he spent two months in the hospital recovering from a weird, tropical fever nobody still could tell him the name of. The time before that, he'd spent three weeks rotting in a Mexican prison. Which he vowed never to speak of again.
By Natalie Gray9 days ago in Fiction
The Third Knock
Every year on the night they met, Mara and Julian knocked three times on a stranger’s door. They did not speak about why three. They did not remember deciding it. The number had arrived the way habits sometimes do—half joke, half dare—then calcified into something that felt older than both of them.
By Lawrence Lease9 days ago in Fiction
The Light She Tends
The stone steps of the Veli Rat lighthouse were worn smooth in the centre, a shallow groove carved by a century of keepers’ boots. Petra knew each one by heart—the twelfth step that chirped like a cricket, the twenty-eighth where a seam of quartz caught the sunset and glowed like a vein of gold.
By Anna Soldenhoff9 days ago in Fiction
The Friday Ritual
The routine was a loop, the same silent ceremony every Friday at 7:00 PM sharp. It had been going on for three long years. Marko would stand at the heavy oak table, his shoulders tight, and begin to slice the sourdough. Skritch. Skritch. The sound of the blade biting through the hard crust was the only clock that ticked in that house. He cut each slice with the focus of a surgeon, terrified that if a single crumb fell outside some imaginary line on the dark wood, the fragile peace he’d spent years building would just snap.
By Feliks Karić9 days ago in Fiction
