by Julian Miles | Sep 7, 2026 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
We live in a car park. It’s a really nice one. There are swings and toilets with locking doors and the showers are wooshy and warm every time. Dad says we can stay here until me and my sister Eliana go to big school. He says we can move to a car park nearer to wherever that is if we need to. When he talks about that Mum looks sad, but that’s alright because we hug her and sing the silly song until she laughs.
I like it here. There’s lots of trees and stuff. Our last car park only had buildings and railway yards. People there were mean to Dad. Some of the kids at the school picked on my sister but after I hit a couple the playground monitor called me up in front of the classes to explain myself, so I told them all off.
A teacher told me I should apologise. I asked them why I should do that when we did nothing wrong? The proper jobs went away. Mum and Dad did lots of different jobs after that. That’s when they decided to take us on a super road trip instead of living in one place. Like a long holiday with jobs in-between. It was fun most of the time, but jobs got less and less. The car parks and other places we stayed had big fires and lots of shouting. It scared us.
One night, Dad and Mum had an argument, one of their bad ones – the ones they try to hide from us, but we know because they’ve both been crying and are being super nice. The day after that, Dad sat us down before teatime and said he’d done something to stop Mum crying every night. He said the company that owned the country were paying people to be nice, and since we always were, it was only fair we got paid too. I wasn’t sure but Mum was sort-of smiling so me and my sister clapped and cheered. That made Mum smile properly. I heard Dad tell her later that the money would let us choose our car parks. I thought we always did that, but it’s adult stuff so I won’t understand until I’m older.
This is our third car park since then. It’s the nicest. I hope we get sent to a big school near here so we don’t have to move again.
by submission | Sep 6, 2026 | Story |
Author: Matthew Joseph Cafiero, Sr.
Winston sat on a bare mattress on the floor, her back to the wall, a shoebox in her hands. She set it beside her. Woke her tablet with a finger flick.
The room held little else. Folded jeans, a charcoal hoodie, and boots set heel to heel at the end of the mattress. No furnishings. Nothing with her name on it.
The lease belonged to a woman who had never been born.
She checked the contract.
The target was easy. Not famous. Famous people had redundancies. Reporters or lawyers. Enemies with files. Institutions with marble steps.
This woman had transcripts and a nursing license. Marriage license, engagement announcement. Divorce decree. An obituary honoring her beloved mother.
A life, but not a fortified one.
She spiked first.
Three biographies bloomed before dawn. Winston studied the transcripts, then invented a second ex-husband. She stared at the beige ceiling a moment before coolly giving him a bench warrant. DUI, resisting arrest. Her personal touch. The other two took less: an invented dissertation, a donation to a cause with screenshots already circulating.
Her bots began their quieter work. Mara Venn became Maira Venn, then Mira Venn, then Mara Vann of a nearby county the same year.
Then pruned.
She did not delete the records. Deletion left a wound people could point to. She broke the paths between them. The nursing license no longer matched the transcripts. The “beloved” mother’s obituary linked to an empty comments page. The marriage license differed from the engagement announcement by a month and two middle names. Search still found the woman, but never twice the same way.
No one vanished anymore. They became insufficiently connected.
Un-provenancing, the old-timers called it.
By 3:11 a.m., the dashboard read: public confidence below threshold.
The client released payment.
She set the tablet facedown on the mattress.
Winston had learned the work searching for herself. Paper files lost. Digital copies trapped in obsolete formats. A clerk in Tulsa, puzzling over merged records from closed placement agencies, had told her there were fourteen possible girls. None of them was likely enough.
That was her word: likely.
She had bought the shoebox because she thought she’d need somewhere to put what she recovered. A bracelet. A photograph. A birthday card. One bad drawing with her name in crooked crayon. Proof that she had begun somewhere, with someone.
She lifted the lid. Empty.
It had always been empty.
by submission | Sep 5, 2026 | Story |
Author: Brooke MacDonald
COMMS SENDER: David Richard Greene
SUBJECT: Please use your space technology to put my neighbor out of his misery
COORDINATES: 37°38′09″N 113°02′20″W
Dear Aliens,
I’m sure you have some important political business to handle with our world’s governments (which I am not at all affiliated with, by the way), but I was hoping that you might be able to swing by and obliterate my neighbor for me.
His name is Gerald and he is ancient. No teeth, paper skin, and eyes glazed over like those of the little white rat dogs that only grow more hostile as they age. Despite this, he can hear a pin drop from five miles away and will not tolerate what he deems to be “excessive noise” which seems to include doors shutting, turning my TV on, and doing anything at all with my windows open. I hosted a dinner party once and he called the police on us three separate times. The first time was because the chatter was too loud. The second was due to the light classical music we had playing in the background (which you’d think he’d enjoy). The third was apparently because he could hear our cutlery clinking on our plates while we ate dinner, or at least that is what the exhausted officer who was called to my house each time told me.
Before you ask why I haven’t resolved this myself, trust me, I’ve tried. He has the most wonderful home care aide who I have spoken with quite a few times, but it seems he is just as nasty to her as he is to me. She only comes to his house twice a week and those are the only days of peace I get. I think she actively prevents him from harassing me, possibly at her own expense.
I know that we are supposed to respect our elders, but I am at the end of my rope and at this point obliterating him might be the humane thing to do. I mean, he is over 100 years old. Most humans don’t make it past eighty-five. I’d say he has lived a pretty fulfilling life but now he is clearly ready to pass on. I think that whatever alien weaponry of mass destruction you have would make his death quick and painless as opposed to the slow, agonizing, dying-of-old-age death that seems to be coming for him. It would be a mercy, really.
If you’re worried about starting some sort of all-out war, I can personally guarantee this won’t happen. My ex-wife’s brother works down at the courthouse and I’m sure that if anything were to pop off, I could throw some of his weight around. Either way, you’d be doing me, and the world, and Gerald now that I’m at it, a favor.
All I ask is that you use a weapon that will only impact his property. I really can’t afford to repair any external damage to my siding or roofing, and our houses are incredibly close together. Perhaps a laser? I’m not trying to micromanage how you go about annihilating people, but please just keep that in mind.
Thanks!
David Greene
by submission | Sep 4, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Joseph Kevlock
A woman gave birth to two versions of herself.
She called them her daughters.
One was kind.
One was not.
In time they grew, as things will, into themselves.
The mean one she sent out to conquer the world in her name.
The nice one she kept close to home, to share in the beauty of existence.
The woman was never sure if her daughters were separate beings or merely extensions of herself.
She decided it didn’t matter.
“There’s only one man who can destroy you,” she told her daughters. “Stay away from him.”
The two daughters, of course, sought him out immediately.
The man lived on a hill at the edge of town. The two daughters recognized the house next to his as the place where their mother had grown up.
The man was her boy next door.
He knew secrets about their mother that no one else could.
He understood her, utterly.
“Tell us who she is,” they pleaded.
He spoke a single line of dialogue from her lips:
“I don’t mind if people disagree with me… as long as they know that I’m right.”
“That’s her!” the two daughters shouted.
They could hardly stop there.
“But… who are we?”
The man, once tall, draped his form over the fence that stood between the two yards. He hesitated, then spoke.
“Just a dream,” he whispered. “Your mother’s dream.”
After his statement he withdrew from the moment. He travelled to inner places, while they stood with patience.
“I tried to get close to her,” he said, “each night, as we stood on this very spot. I thought this fence… just a fence. But I never made it across.”
The man who was the boy next door shook his head, sadly.
Both daughters spoke their disappointment.
“Then… you’re not our father.”
The man who was the boy next door climbed ever so slowly off the fence, as if extricating himself from impalement.
“The choices your mother made left her with only two things in this world: willpower… and imagination.”
The two daughters began to feel unsettled deep within.
The man who was the boy next door turned his gaze upon them, upon where they were… and where they weren’t.
“You are the children who were never born,” the man said.
“But… we exist!”
“Only until her illusion is shattered,” the man said.
The two daughters left him and ran at once to their mother.
They could see the truth before even a single word was spoken.
The one who was not kind asked, “Why, Mother? Why couldn’t you have simply made us… real?”
The woman was reluctant to answer, until she realized this was the only chance she’d ever get.
“I wanted a life like everyone else. But I was afraid.”
Again the one who was not kind questioned in anger.
“Why did you create me so mean, Mother?”
“To protect myself,” the woman said. “To be strong is to be safe. The more you control, the less there is to hurt you.”
The one who was kind finally spoke.
“Then why… am I so nice?”
“Some part of me had to be,” the woman said.
Both daughters grew afraid.
The mean one grew angrier.
“Why couldn’t you have the courage to live your own life? Why did we have to live it for you?”
The woman had no answer.
Suddenly it no longer mattered.
Knowing they didn’t truly exist, the two daughters simply faded away.
The woman wept immediately over her loss.
She’d put a lot of herself into those girls.
by submission | Sep 3, 2026 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
She’d had to dismantle the gear in a hurry when the hail started–the holographic zoom lenses to capture the launch, the tripods, all the paraphernalia of recording the end of a phase of her life.
In a way, she understood. His family had played the big lottery and won an option to emigrate to Mars, to escape from the hellscape that Earth was becoming as its climate became more and more unstable. Weather like this week’s, with temperatures plummeting after a fortnight of unbearable heat, had become commonplace, and was hard to deal with month after month. So who could blame him for wanting to get away? But the terms were ‘family only’, or as his mother had put it, “no riff-raff or hangers on”, and she hadn’t been willing to commit to the joint risks of marriage, instant emigration, and isolation with a cadre she hardly knew. She’d always wonder whether that was the right choice, but it was done.
The hailstones were the size of her fist, and if she hadn’t invested in storm-hardened glazing a few years previously, her windows would have been in shards by now. Lightning zigzagged down the sky like the spears of a drunken god, piercing her heart as she tried without success not to worry about him. Her county seemed to be ground zero for the storm, but surely the shielded space complex, just ten miles away, would be fine? Lift-off might be delayed, but the ship would be on its way soon enough, taking him away–to a safety she was glad he’d have, however much she hated the idea of being apart.
Eventually the icy bombardment gave way to heavy rain, pounding at the roof as if determined to find a way in where its frozen brethren had failed. The mains electricity had failed, like it always did, but her solar batteries would pick up the slack for a while yet. No doubt the emergency crews were out already, clearing fallen trees, checking on residents, tending the wounded, covering damage with heavy tarps, all their usual underappreciated heroics.
As if in reply to her thoughts, there came a thunderous banging on her front door, and words she couldn’t make out over the noise from above. Someone in trouble, a neighbour maybe? She picked up her gun just in case, and made her way to the little lobby. The spyhole was useless—all she could make out was a vague shape in the darkness. She opened the door carefully, and her jaw dropped: he was standing there, his storm cape dripping wet, with strange look of both defiance and hope in his eyes.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I couldn’t leave you to face this alone, and there’s nobody else I want to spend my future with. Will you have me back?”
She threw the door wide, her heart lifted, and she let the chaos in.
by submission | Sep 2, 2026 | Story |
Author: Denise Diehl
‘Is the new guy up for his first run?’ asked Greg, the Metro manager, not bothering to look up from his paperwork as he addressed his roster assistant, Roy. Greg rubbed his stubby chin and shifted his considerable weight in his creaking chair, not wanting to hear the word ‘No.’
‘Yup, seems good to go. Been out twice with Charles on the day run, and I took him out for an evening run last night.’ Roy glanced out the grubby windows, watching the creeping darkness of the evening close in.
‘Yeah, but the last bus is a bit different… You know what I mean.’ Greg licked his lips and swallowed.
Roy waved his hands about and spoke with an edge to his voice. ‘He’ll do fine. He’s from Quantum Services—’
‘You’re kidding me. He’s one of them.’ Greg blinked furiously. He knew Quantum produced good labourers, but it would still be a first for Metro to employ one.
‘Yes. He’s our answer to the last-bus-run problem—’
‘Problem? Is that what we’re calling it now? We’ve had five guys quit in the past month. Ever since the fire at the Museum and the building’s collapse, that stop has had strange passengers board and scare the crap out of our drivers. It’s cursed, if you ask me. The company’s still picking up the tab for our former drivers’ counselling. First it was Richard, who found dead passengers in the back seat, all crispy-looking, every night for a week—’
Roy interrupted. ‘Police reviewed each death and found they were all due to natural causes. They said it was like what you get on cruise ships—oldies taking their last ride, all very normal.’
Greg gaped at Roy. ‘Crispy is the new normal?’ He paused, then pressed his point. ‘Then it was the others—which David, two drivers ago, described as freakin’ exhibits who escaped the fire and are now catching the last bus through town, boarding at the museum stop and disembarking at the cemetery stop. Now that’s not normal folk. David said they floated on like ghosts, and he felt extreme heat emanating from the Egyptian pharaoh as the pharaoh made eye contact. Same with Pete, our latest loss, who had the same group board at the same stop, but it was the Viking with his massive blade he felt threatened by. It goes on and on—old hags, witches, and cave men, even zombies for goodness’ sake …’
‘What do you want me to do? I’ve got our new driver. He’s keen, and I’ve briefed him to wait at the Museum stop for two and a half minutes with the doors open, then close them and repeat the same at the cemetery stop. He won’t see the others, of course, because he’s a Quantum tear-one labourer with no special features, just a physical body capable of driving a bus.’
Greg sighed and asked, ‘Are the Quantum guys reliable? I mean … ’
‘Definitely. They do as they’re instructed. Quantum has never had any failures. After all, you’re looking at one.’ With that, Roy spun on his heel and walked out.
