0 Comments
0 Shares
0 Views
0 Reviews
Directory
Discover new ideas, create new connections and make new friends
-
Please log in to like, share and comment!
-
The Golden Greenhouse"Sign here. The pension is contingent on the death being classified as duty, not desertion." I sign. The pen scratches against the paper like a rat chewing through a wire. My name, Johannes Visser, appears in the margin. I am fifty-two. My hands shake. The clock on the wall ticks. It is the sound of a guillotine blade falling, over and over, the tobacco cutter in the corner clicking dry. I need...0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Faded SutraThe ink is dry, but the page is wet. That is the problem, and the only problem that matters in the damp belly of the Monastery of St. Jude, which sits like a bruise on the Kenyan Rift. Vladimir Grigoryan, a forty-year-old scholar whose tenure hangs by a thread thinner than his patience, holds the crumbling sutra. It whispers his dead mother’s voice, a sound that only manifests when his body is...0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Faded GuestThe iron badge in your hand is cold, the metal worn smooth by twenty years of thumbs and worry, and you are pressing it into the velvet tray of the Mayor’s desk with a force that feels less like resignation and more like an offering. The candle on the desk flickers, casting long, jagged shadows that do not quite match the shape of the room, stretching toward the window where the night presses...0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Pale DanceNikola Javakhishvili lived at fifty-eight of the Rope Walk, a place where the damp seeped through the floorboards and into the bone, and he wanted only to keep his job. The municipal office in Tbilisi was a stone box of iron and dust, and the heat from the central grate was a living thing that pressed against his chest like a hot hand. He was twenty-four, a clerk with a fever that rose when he...0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Golden DowntownMargaret Ashworth had walked the same four blocks of Kettering's downtown every Tuesday and Thursday for seventeen years, never deviating, never rushing, her hands folded neatly over the strap of a canvas tote bag that had once belonged to her mother and before that to her grandmother. The routine was not a choice so much as a gravity—a pull she could no more resist as breathing. She passed the...0 Comments 0 Shares 1 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Distant CartographThe ink in the well had turned to black blood again, and you woke with the taste of copper on your tongue, the sheets twisted around your legs in the cold of the chamber. You are Elias, thirty-four years old, a cartographer to the King, and your hands are already shaking before you have risen from the bed. The decree came down three days ago, a slip of parchment sealed with wax the color of a...0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Wistful SagaThe brass key in Clara’s hand was cold, heavier than it looked, its teeth worn smooth by decades of use. She turned it twice, the mechanism grinding with a sound like a dry throat clearing, before the heavy oak door of the Whitmore estate finally gave way. The air inside was thick, stagnant, and smelled faintly of salt and old paper. She had come to sell. That was the only thing that mattered....0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Golden CircuitThe terraced hills of the Cypriot interior burned under a sun that whitened the stone, the kilns in the lower quarter puffing grey smoke into the stagnant air while the market’s tarp snapped and thrashed in the wind like a drying sail. Thanasis Chrysos, thirty-two, stood at the edge of the exchange, his hand trembling on the iron door, watching the Guild Master’s clerk stamp a denial onto his...0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Golden ScarThe notice was pinned to the corkboard in the breakroom, its paper yellowed and brittle at the edges. It bore the seal of the Ministry of Civic Debt, a stark red circle that looked like a wound on the beige wall. You read it twice, your fingers hovering over the ink, afraid that touching it might make the words disappear. The date was three days ago. The name at the bottom was yours, or rather,...0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews
Arabic
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Deutsch
Turkish
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Greek