Fable
Roots and branches
My roots formed in uncelebrated places — In kitchens heavy with silence, In prayers said without witnesses, In hands that learned endurance Before they ever learned rest. They grew quietly, gripping soil That knew both hunger and hope, Teaching me early that survival Is a kind of wisdom.
By Awa Nyassi2 months ago in Fiction
Alice in Reality
As Alice staggered to the back, she couldn’t help but feel everyone was glancing at her and whispering about her. She saw odd sideways glances and a low murmur of secret voices throughout the bus. She didn’t recognize anyone on the bus and had no idea what all the whispering could be about. Alice huddled herself into a small ball in the back of the bus and proceeded to look out the window and ignore her fellow passengers. She pulled out the cookie in her hand and wondered if it would even work in his land. Perhaps it was worth a try if it would keep everyone from looking at her so suspiciously. She popped the cookie in her mouth and chewed slowly. As she did the glances and whispers started to fade, as if she faded from view of all the other passengers.
By Leah Suzanne Dewey2 months ago in Fiction
THE TEAPOT THAT KNEW MY NAME
Willowfen was the kind of village that forgot the meaning of hurry long before I was born. It sat between a river that sang softly to itself and a meadow that smelled of honey even in winter, stitched together by cobblestone lanes worn smooth by centuries of unimportant footsteps. Nothing legendary had ever happened there—no dragons, no chosen heroes, no prophecies scribbled in fading ink. Instead, Willowfen specialized in the ordinary miracles: bread that rose perfectly every morning, lamplight that glowed a little warmer when someone walked home alone, and gossip that traveled faster than the wind but never meant any harm. It was the sort of place where people waved even if they didn’t know your name, and somehow, by the end of the week, they did.
By Alisher Jumayev2 months ago in Fiction
Rise of the Machines
I am sitting in the dirt inside a cave on the hiking trail up the street from my old house. I look next to me to see my dog and my little brother still sleeping peacefully. It’s easier to forget how horrific real life is when we are asleep. I am glad they have an escape. I sigh and roll my eyes now to think about everything that’s happened and how it all started. It is so cliché, but in the end, the machines turned against us. The creations we made out of arrogance for convenience grew to overpower us. Though I think the first mistake was thinking we could control them in the first place. Once we gave them intelligence, we should have known better. Pretending like we could give life to these machines and they wouldn’t eventually realize we were using and abusing them. I mean, we had countless movies explaining why that was a bad idea before we even had the technology for AI, but the pompousness of humans of science and “progress” is wondrous and endless.
By Leah Suzanne Dewey2 months ago in Fiction
Sea Changes
In our world, there’s really no such thing as a pair of people who are exactly alike. Even identical twins, formed from the same snarl of cells and genetically identical at their origins, have small differences between them. They possess different fingerprints. They can come to be unlike one another in many ways given the chance to grow in differing directions. They are their own people — individuals in every way that truly matters.
By Shannon Hilson2 months ago in Fiction
The Color of Venus
They say it’s always dark at the end, but the same can almost always be said of beginnings. Starts and finishes are, after all, like mismatched twins that don’t quite get along and hate hearing how similar they are to one another. But hating something never makes it any less true, no matter how much we may wish otherwise.
By Shannon Hilson2 months ago in Fiction
The House at the End of the World
The sound the ocean makes as it cascades over the edge of the actual world into nothingness is impossible to fathom — simultaneously too loud because of the ocean’s immeasurable volume and not loud enough, as there’s nowhere for the water to land below. If you’ve been to the house at the end of the world, then you know what that sounds like. You also know that it’s impossible to describe to another living soul with any accuracy.
By Shannon Hilson2 months ago in Fiction
