Recent Updates
  • The Rust and the Vine
    The trailer sat at the edge of a town that used to have a name but had forgotten it, somewhere between the factory closing and the bank taking the bank and the main street becoming a row of boarded windows and a Dollar General that sold everything except hope. Ray Kowalski lived in the trailer, which was not much bigger than a bus that had given up on being a bus. He was forty-five, Polish, and...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 1 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Cold Between Stars
    ## Act I: The Check (Beginning) The machine made a low humming sound, the kind of sound you noticed only after you'd stopped noticing it. It was the sound of sleep—or the close approximation of sleep that technology could manage in 2075. Maria Santos adjusted the IV line on James O'Brien's arm and checked the monitor one more time. Heart rate: stable. Oxygen saturation: stable. Brain wave...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Unraveling of M.W. Thorne
    The Unraveling of M.W. Thorne I. The case notes sat on Maggie's desk in her Edinburgh clinic, spread out like a hand of cards she did not want to play. Lady Catherine Vane—née Thorne after her marriage to a mild-mannered MP named Reginald Thorne of Norfolk—had been Maggie's patient for six weeks. Six weeks of systematic interview, journal analysis, and guided recollection. Six weeks of...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 1 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Anvil of Pi
    Act One: The Discovery The rain in Derbyshire had a way of getting into your bones that no wool sweater could keep out. Thomas Whitmore knew this better than most. At fifty-two, his joints ached with the damp, and the doctor had suggested London. London, where the fog was so thick you could spread it on bread. But Thomas had refused. There was work to be done here, in the dales, in the oldé“…...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 6 Views 0 Reviews
  • Cold Coffee
    Act I: The Transaction The factory closure notice arrived on a Monday. Sarah Miller read it at the kitchen table, the paper trembling in her hands. Eight hundred jobs, gone. Eight hundred families, suddenly adrift in a rust belt town where the only things growing were weeds and despair. But it wasn't Sarah's job that terrified her. It was her daughter's medical bills. Lily had asthma, severe...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Bridge of Sighs (Epic Narrative)
    In a world divided by an impassable chasm known as the Void-Rift, two civilizations lived in a state of perpetual, ancestral war: the Solar Empire, a society of golden spires and rigid hierarchies, and the Lunar Republic, a collection of silver cities floating in a sea of iridescent mist. The chasm was not merely a physical gap, but a metaphysical barrier that separated two fundamentally...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 1 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Last Schoolmaster
    The schoolhouse stood on a hill outside Philadelphia, visible from the road as a small stone building with a single bell and a flagpole that held no flag. Inside, Aodhan MacAllister was teaching Euclid's Proposition 47 to three children who were too young to understand why it mattered. "Listen," he said, tapping the chalkboard. "When the square is constructed on the hypotenuse of a right...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 8 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Proteus Dance
    Act I I came home that evening and found her playing the piano. The Steinway sat in the corner of the sunroom, where the afternoon light fell through the east-facing windows in long golden blades. The instrument had been there for five years, a piece of furniture we'd never gotten around to using. My mother had given it to us on our wedding anniversary—she believed that silence in a house was a...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 8 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Shadow Substitute
    The fox lay dead on the gravel path, its pale belly rising and falling once, twice, then still. Margaret had said to do it. She had stood in the kitchen doorway, her hands folded in her apron, and said, It is only right, Edward. It stole from us. It will steal again. And so Edward had raised the rifle, aimed carefully, and ended it. The fox was heavy with young. He had seen that too, in the way...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 8 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Rust Plate
    Raymond Kowalski got up at five in the morning, drank coffee from a chipped mug, and walked to his job at the waste processing plant. He had been doing this for two years. Before that, he was unemployed for four. Before that, he was a steelworker at the mill that once employed three thousand men and now employed nothing but rust and the memory of rust that flaked off the walls like dead skin....
    0 Comments 0 Shares 11 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Museum of Lost Worlds
    The Museum of Lost Worlds Act I: The House on Conti The house stood on Conti Street in New Orleans like a woman who had refused to leave after the funeral—dressed in its Sunday best, curtains drawn tight against the humidity, stubborn as only a building built in 1842 could be. Clara Delacroix was twenty-four years old, born in New Orleans, raised by her grandmother who had died three weeks...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 11 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Patient from Below
    The asylum had been closed for twenty years before the Sleep came, but the children of Boston knew it by reputation the way children know about forbidden places: through whispers and warnings and the peculiar silence that falls over a room when someone mentions the Holloway Asylum in a voice that suggests they have been told not to speak of it at all. Theo Ashworth had never been inside. He was...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 12 Views 0 Reviews
More Stories