by submission | Jun 30, 2025 | Story |
Author: Ashwini Shenoy
The first time, I think it’s a dream.
You and I are holding hands. The night-blooming jasmine spreads its fragrance, sweet and soothing. The fruit trees sway in the twilight. The birds chirp and butterflies swirl. Our garden, our labor of love, built plant by plant, stands witness.
But you’re serious, anxious. I can tell.
“I leave tomorrow,” you say.
The war’s calling you. The country’s calling you. Duty’s calling you. But what about me?
I grip the coin in my palm, the edges digging into my skin. The wishing well stands behind me, ancient and quiet. Nana once told me it grants only the truest desire. I close my eyes, my heart hammering.
I wish for time to freeze.
I flick the coin into the well. But when I hear the soft splash, I know it wasn’t just the coin.
My engagement ring is gone. A gasp escapes my lips. Without thinking, I lunge forward, gripping the cold stone edge, and I jump. The water drowns me, swallowing my breath, my fear, my existence.
Then—
I am standing in the garden again, waiting for you.
*
The second time, my heart swells.
I watch you from across our garden, your silhouette dark against the dying light. The wind carries the scent of rain, the fragrance of the jasmine is heady. The trees lull into stillness. The butterflies are gone but the birds stay.
When I step closer, you turn around, but your stern eyes don’t meet mine when you speak.
Your grip is strong. Too strong. I know you’re scared. Your fingers press into my skin as if anchoring yourself to something unseen. Your eyes are fixed on the distance. You inhale deeply.
“I leave tomorrow.” Your eyes are sad.
I know what to do. I clutch the coin tighter. Make sure the ring is intact.
I flick the coin into the well.
Again, the coin remains. Again, the ring is gone.
Once more, I jump.
The water is cold. An ounce of regret.
Then darkness.
I’m standing in the garden again, waiting for you to turn.
*
The third time, my smile fades.
I don’t reach for your hand this time. But the ring commands me to stay.
The jasmine-scent feels heavier, suffocating. It is drizzling. I sense a storm brewing somewhere. The birds are now gone.
You speak. I mouth the words with you.
“I leave tomorrow…” It’s a plea.
I turn before you finish. The well waits for me. I’m tired.
I don’t bother checking the coin in my palm. I know what’s awaiting. I flick it, hear the splash, and jump.
For a split second, before the darkness claims me, I wonder if I’m the one who’s leaving now.
*
The fourth time, panic settles.
I don’t wait for you to speak.
I count as I walk to the well. Five steps. A breeze. The stench of jasmine. I could map the entire scene in my sleep.
Maybe I’m asleep. Maybe I will never wake.
The coin drops. My ring falls.
I jump before I hear the splash.
*
The fifth time, I know I’m trapped.
I’m scared.
Not of losing you. Not of you leaving.
But because I don’t care anymore.
Your voice is noise now, part of the wind, of the garden that is neither alive nor dead. You are speaking, but I am already moving, reaching for the well.
Not to stop myself. Not to change anything.
Just to let it finish.
The well glistens.
The coin flicks.
The ring falls.
You watch.
I jump.
The darkness welcomes me home.
by submission | Jun 29, 2025 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
“OK everybody up and let’s get the blood flowing.”
Marcy Partridge rolled her eyes. Yet another impossibly annoying corporate team building exercise. She had no idea why all of a sudden the company was inflicting these motivational morons upon them. Wasn’t it enough to just do the job and go home?
“Let’s swing our arms in great big circles…good…now gradually get them smaller, and smaller…and down. Super!”
“Super?” Marcy thought. It’s not like it was such a big challenge. Why did they let such overly cheerful people in this place? Did they have any idea what this corporation did? An HMO for people of special needs? Did they have to be treated like they had special needs as well?
“OK, OK. As we all know I’m Darla or from our icebreaker from yesterday, Darla who likes Pistachio Ice cream.” Darla giggled. “Darla Pistachio.”
Marcy felt her BP come up just a bit.
“I’m going to turn the next exercise over to Timothy (not Tim or Timmy) who likes, not ice cream, but Frozen Yogurt, any kind, for our icebreaker today.”
Timothy-frozen-Yogurt bounded to the front of the room. Already Marcy felt her nerves get on edge. He had an old school power point thrown up and projected was the word ‘blouse’ arranged in a semi-circle with the letter “C” running through the entire word. Timothy chuckled a little bit. “Get it? C through blouse? Still after all this time this one cracks me up. And there are more, so get with your teams and will give you five minutes and-.”
Marcy could not take it anymore, she stood and started for the door.
“Hey Marcy-Maple Walnut where are ya going?”
Marcy froze. “Butter Pecan,” she said with her teeth clenched. All of a sudden Marcy got lightheaded. She felt feint and the room started to darken. Marcy’s spine got stiff she turned slowly like in a trance. Her eyes rolled back in her head and Marcy lifted her arms up in the air. As she did so, papers, pens, cups of coffee, rose slowly as well. Her co-workers and fellow sufferers started to rise. Everything slowed down.
Except for Darla and Timmy. Darla pushed her hands out as if shoving Marcy away while Timothy went into what could only be described as ‘whooping crane form.’ Together they moved their arms down. All at once the entire room fell gently back into its place, with only Darla and Timothy remaining conscious.
Timothy exhaled. He tapped his ‘hearing aid’ and spoke aloud “Team Nine reporting. Adept identified. White female, 26 years old, most likely unaware of her talent. We’ll need a full team up here. Suggest we go with the standard HVAC carbon dioxide cover story.” Timothy smiled and shook his head. “Good catch Darla. I thought for sure it was the man sitting next to her.”
Darla nodded. “Yeah but when she went for the door I saw a small shift in her Kirlian field.”
Timothy shook his head. “Three full days of this annoying bullshit! Man, If she didn’t pop I would have.”
Darla nodded “Know what you mean. Good thing the icebreakers worked. You know what was on the agenda for today?”
Timothy sighed “Role playing?”
Darla nodded sternly “Yup. Don’t think we could have dialed her back from that one.”
by submission | Jun 28, 2025 | Story |
Author: David Barber
McMurdo Station’s a rough town.
It had ambitions to be a city one day, with law and order, and schools and churches and such, but meanwhile bullets were cheaper than bread.
Hucksters still sold snow shoes to climate rats fresh off the boat, like the Melt never happened, before we headed south with the promise of gold so common you just tossed the silver away.
The Polar railway began with a fanfare, pushing civilisation southwards, but as they blasted a route through the Queen Alexandra Mountains, they hit that famous mother lode and the rails halted.
Watch your step beyond the Pass, old McMurdo hands warned; remember, there’s no law south of south, where crews of robots drill for oil and cyborg killers prowl the range.
Seb Travis was an Aussie, the only experienced miner amongst us. He was looking for plucky fellows to prospect gold at the Pole. There was safety in numbers, he said, though too many meant less profit for each.
To buy into the group, I put my hard-saved money on the table, but he eyed me up and down and shook his head.
“Find yourself a job here in McMurdo, mate.” he advised, not unkindly.
I bristled and glared round the tent at the half-dozen impassive faces and angrily offered to arm-wrestle any one of them.
“Except for that giant of a fellow there.”
So I found myself sat opposite a tall smiling black man, perhaps ten years my senior and for an age strained with all my might. I had the satisfaction of seeing the smile slip from his face and his jaw clench, but slowly he forced my arm flat.
I would have fled in humiliation, but Seb Travis clapped my aching shoulder.
“You’ll do, mate. We need a gamecock.”
The Polar highlands are a jumble of exposed glacier-gouged rock, where we panned ice-cold meltwaters. I remember the whoop I gave when gold specks first gleamed amongst the dirt, but Travis tossed it away, wading upstream until he pounced on a broad vein of gold.
There was a company town near the Pole, where huge autonomic machinery chewed ore from an open-cast mine day and night, but when we went to register our claim, the works were silent. Antarctic Mining Co. had closed down, the business not economic after all. But the company’s security tinheads has seen their chance and stayed behind.
That’s how it was. No hope for honest miners when the mechs toured each claim telling us we worked for them now.
My friend Chet, the black man who bested me, swung a shovel at one and they shot him down.
Even if we refused to dig, there were always more migrants fresh in from McMurdo. Seeing the writing on the wall, Seb Travis slipped away one night, hoping to avoid the tinheads patrolling the road. Who knows, perhaps he made it.
It was about then the cyborg rode into town on a motorbike, all gleaming alloy and packing twin gatlings. He didn’t give a name.
“Just passin’ through,” he said.
But the tinheads who wanted him out of their town forgot there’s some that can’t be bullied. Reflexes like you never saw left the wrecks of ex-military custom-builds holed and smoking in the street.
We offered him gold to stay, to keep us safe from the killer mechs out there.
“Arm yourselves and organise your own law and order,” he replied. “If you think gold’s worth fighting over.”
Then the nameless stranger rode off into the Midnight Sun.
by submission | Jun 27, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alice Rayworth
Every morning, at 9am, the same moving truck pulls up and the same family gets out.
They are untouched by weather; even as the world turns grey and cold around them, they remain in the same summer clothes they first arrived in.
People who live next door, and those who can excuse lingering, have listened in and reported back: the children, three, are Meredith, shortened to Mer, Cassandra, shortened to Cassie, and Jonathon, who is only referred to by his full name. No one has heard the parents’ names, they are Mum and Dad to the children, and a variety of pet names to each other.
They wave at those people who still dare to wander past, too busy unpacking to stop and talk. Every day, the same boxes, the same gestures, and yet the truck never empties. Those same people have reported hearing a discussion, between the adults, an agreement that they will introduce themselves to the neighbourhood tomorrow. They seem unaware that, for them, tomorrow never comes.
Mr McCauley is the only one to ever speak to them, interrupting their frenzied movements a few weeks in. He said afterward that they had moved because Dad had gotten a new job, only a few miles away from their new house, and that he was excited to start the following week. The children, he said, had been enrolled at the local school.
And despite never starting that job, no one ever came looking for him. No concerned managers, no welfare checks from the police, not even a family member – grandmother, or uncle, or a sibling of one of the parents – ever came to check on them.
Mr McCauley hadn’t quite been the same since.
In the town hall, some unknown person put up a year calendar, marking the year anniversary of their first arrival, and everyone else has been dutifully crossing off the days ever since. The anniversary approaches, steady, like a tide that cannot be turned.
There’s no celebration planned, after all, what would they celebrate? Instead, people have begun to whisper, in lowered voices and behind drawn curtains, about what might happen when the final day is crossed off. Whether the truck will keep coming. Whether something might change. Whether it should have changed long ago.
No one has touched the family. Not by accident, not on purpose. It is not a spoken rule, but one everyone seems to know: you can wave, you can watch, but you must not get too close. The mailman, once, tried to deliver a letter. He rang the doorbell. When no one answered, he slid the envelope through the slot. The next day, the letter was gone. So was the mailman. A new one came the following morning, and no one questioned it.
The final week dawns. It’s an arbitrary day, really, and yet it seems to hold such weight. By quarter to the hour, everyone is out on the street, silent. They line the windows, they linger on sidewalks. Coffee cools in trembling hands.
The pattern repeats, seven more times.
And then it arrives.
The calendar in the town hall is full. Every day neatly crossed off. The red marker lies beside it, cap off, dried out. No one touches it.
9am comes and goes. The truck arrives. The boxes appear. The family steps out.
Across the street, the silence holds. Only the children’s voices cut through, the same phrases as always, looping like birdsong no one listens to anymore.
Unbothered by their audience, the family waves. They unpack. The sun sets.
And the people retreat to the town hall, to ask the only question they have left:
What happened?
by submission | Jun 26, 2025 | Story |
Author: Ken Saunders
Another coughing spasm tore through him, sending waves of pain to every corner of his being. He wiped his mouth with the hospital blanket they’d draped over him, and when he lowered it, he saw that it was wet with his blood.
His eyes went to the dark little tablet sitting on the tray in front of him. It was perfectly black. Not even light seemed to affect it. He’d never seen a pill so completely devoid of color before. Was it intentional? Maybe to remind people of its potentially deadly nature, or perhaps just the natural result of the miraculous compound within.
As he stared at it, it was as if the pill was staring back, beckoning him.
No more stalling, he told himself. Heads I win, tails I lose.
He’d already said his goodbyes to Maya and the kids before being moved into this isolated wing. The “Final Treatment Center,” they called it, though the sterile name couldn’t mask what everyone knew.
This was where desperate people came to gamble with death.
There was a fifty percent chance that this little pill would not only cure his lung, bone, and brain cancer, but everything else wrong in his body. High cholesterol? Gone. High blood pressure? Gone. Eyesight? Perfect. Hearing? So long, tinnitus.
The other fifty percent of the time, it resulted in instant death.
Time to roll the dice. He steeled himself as his fingers wrapped around the little black speck.
“Good luck,” came the wet and raspy voice from the bed next to him.
He glanced over at his roommate, a Senator whose decades of heavy smoking had finally caught up with her.
Without responding, he popped the pill in his mouth and took a sip of water.
The moment he swallowed, the door opened. The nurse returned, this time walking to his companion’s bed. Just as before, she didn’t speak. She placed the water and pill in front of the Senator and exited as swiftly as she had entered.
Thoughts raced through his head as he waited for whatever effects the pill was about to have. Most people thought this discovery was proof of God’s existence. How else could such a thing come to be? The Pope himself had officially deemed it a miracle.
Others, himself included, thought it more likely proved the opposite. Once again, the universe had revealed its true nature of pure chaos. How else could the power of both life and death be found in such a small vessel?
He glanced back at his roommate’s bedside table, wondering if she would have the same hesitation, but there was none. Her hand instantly shot out toward the life-or-death substance.
As he watched the Senator quickly place the pill on her tongue and swallow it, his heart seized up.
As he clutched his chest and fought to breathe, he kept staring at the Senator in horror. His subconscious mind was screaming at him, but it wasn’t concerned about his fast-approaching end. It was desperately trying to tell him something far more important. Something that he denied with all his being because it was almost too terrible to consider.
When the notion finally forced its way into his conscious mind, he opened his mouth in one final effort to speak. He wanted to deny out loud the frightening thought, but he had already drawn his last breath.
As the blackness fell over him and he slowly slipped into oblivion, one horrifying question kept repeating over and over in his mind…
Why was her pill white?
by submission | Jun 25, 2025 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
The hot, dusty wind shrouded the desert Burj in a choir of howls.
Mazoomy flinched and ground his Miswak into fibres, as hot sand sprayed off his tactical leg guards. His visor display lit-up with the drop-off pin: the Burj – every delivery rider’s worst nightmare.
Coasting his sun-baked e-scooter onto the sidewalk, Maz looked upward at the pock-marked façade, strewn with hessian shade cloth, pillowing in the silent heat. Stepping closer, he began to see through its translucent structure and catch glimpses of formidable tessellated forms wriggling deep inside.
As marketing strategies go, the Burj’s hit the bullseye. Every apartment sold off-plan in under ten minutes.
The promotion catchline was sublime:
Security so cryptic, even promises get lost.
The Burj’s main attraction was its ever-shifting apartments. Each one moving unpredictably throughout the tower like the end game of Nokia Snake. It’s hard to be found when no one knows where you are.
Maz gripped the delivery bag and smelt kataifi and pistachio, and his tummy rumbled. Casting the delivery code at the entrance, he suddenly remembered a Thai red curry and baked Alaska he delivered here before. His lips pursed, remembering how long it took to traverse the Burj’s labyrinthian madness. Long enough to wet the bag through with chilli oil. Way too long for a tip.
Burj’s AI holographically floated in the entrance mist-gate like a ghoulish concierge, fading from view as the vapour disappeared. Maz entered, and directions to meet the wandering apartment loaded into his cache. Maz scanned the waypoints, sighing at the journey length that included four lifts, seven stairwells and a nature valley waterpark. Worst game of snakes and ladders ever. He sucked his Zynjooz tube hard, spitting out hot grape-flavoured air and sand.
After navigating a chamber of aquariums, Maz ascended a wadi filled with what looked like water-filled octopus suction caps, up to the third floor. Black and yellow holographs heralded the border of the Fetch, a titanium framework, operating as the playground for the wandering apartments. Looking up, Maz watched the domicile’s caterpillar-like form twisting through space and for a moment, a gap appeared, allowing a sunlit column to pierce the Burj’s cavernous core, where its micro-climate rained mist high from above. The sheer scale made him giddy and stumble.
Pushing onward through a structural forest of bats and bots, he passed shady residents, One, who sneered, then scent-shielded herself in a cloud of Cinnabon Oud.
A gleeful ping sounded, telling him he’d reached another waypoint achievement and received five more Microsoft Fuckalls™ – a reward system with less value than a hologram wank.
At journey’s end, he approached a doorway against a glass cube signposted Station Node Sublime. This was where visitors and apartments met. The node sparkled as a monstrous mass of quivering dark silver and black triangles, larger than a train, slithered in. Antigravity skids barking at the outrage of stillness.
The doors opened to a lifeless lobby, lit in pulsing red light. Maz walked toward a white door which suddenly opened. Inside were chunks of meat and bone. The entire room was stained red with dripping blood, like the inside of a butcher’s blender.
Maz stepped back, audibly stuttering the word ‘what’ followed closely by ‘the fuck’.
At which, the apartment AI calmly responded with something along the lines of ‘Yeah’, and ‘Nah’, followed closely by ‘It certainly wasn’t me….. zigzagging downtown’ and then some obscure reference to a motorcycle race in an old movie called Tron.
And with that, the apartment lurched forward to deliver Maz.
