Betty Howard

Betty Howard added blog Literature
2026-06-16 11:38:18 -

The Obsession of Symmetry
The city of Aethelgard was a masterpiece of sterile perfection. There were no curves in Aethelgard, no accidents, no randomness. Every building was a perfect cube, every street a precise right angle, and every citizen a mirror image of their neighbor. At the center of this clockwork society was the High Architect, Valentine. He was a man of porcelain skin and obsidian eyes, possessed by a...

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Betty Howard added blog Games
2026-06-14 04:42:19 -

The Weekend Tyrant
I. The sandwich was cold. It always was by the time I got to eat it. I was sitting on a milk crate in the basement of the abandoned Packard plant, eating a ham sandwich that had been made three hours earlier, when a man in a beige suit sat down next to me and told me I was a hero. "I don't understand," I said. I was Ray O'Malley. I was thirty-four years old, unemployed for eleven months, and...

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Betty Howard added blog Games
2026-06-09 23:24:42 -

The Patient from Below
Dr. Helen Cross's begins, as all should, with a lie. The first entry reads: Patient presents with episodic memory loss. Episodes last approximately four to six hours. Frequency: weekly. Patient reports no pain, no convulsions, no loss of consciousness during episodes. She is simply—absent. I wrote that entry. I am Helen Cross. And the entry is a lie, because I know exactly what happens during...

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Betty Howard added blog Games
2026-06-05 10:25:34 -

THE STARS OF EVELYN MARCHETTI
The funeral was over on a Thursday in November. Chicago was cold in a way that felt deliberate—as if the city itself wanted to remind us that winter was coming and nothing in your life mattered to it. I stood at the graveside in a black suit that had been my father's first and now was mine by necessity, and I watched them lower him into the ground. My father was dead. He had been dead for...

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Betty Howard added blog Literature
2026-06-07 17:06:38 -

The Red Circle Paradox
The office was a void of beige and grey, located on the 42nd floor of a building that looked like a giant, glass filing cabinet. Dr. Aris was a man of silence. He spoke in measured tones, his expressions as neutral as the walls of his consulting room. He specialized in "Perceptual Realignment." His patient, a man named Elias, sat across from him, trembling. Elias was a high-functioning...

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Betty Howard added blog Literature
2026-06-06 18:35:26 -

The Grifter's Grace
The rain in Los Angeles didn't wash anything away; it just turned the dust into a grey slurry that coated the neon signs of Sunset Boulevard. I sat in my car, a 1941 Buick that smelled of stale tobacco and old regrets, watching Big Sal. Sal was a loan shark with a heart like a piece of dried leather and a bank account that could buy half the city. He liked to play god with the desperate. I'd...

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Betty Howard added blog Dance
2026-06-05 01:43:38 -

The snow started at dawn and did not stop. By noon the parking lot at the QuickStop was already half-full, the snow compressed into a surface that was neither ice nor ground but something in between,
The Chevy pulled in at two. It was covered in mud from the bumper to the roof, the kind of mud that only exists on roads that haven't been plowed in three weeks and don't intend to be. The driver got out slowly, the way people do when they're not in a hurry because they've already run out of things to hurry toward. He was middle-aged. Maybe early forties. Maybe late. The face was the wrong...

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Betty Howard added blog Dance
2026-06-14 09:26:29 -

5_The_Mirror_Chamber_clean
The theater was empty except for Seraphina and the moon. Not literally empty—there were security guards in the lobby, a janitor in the wing, the night manager somewhere in the offices—but empty in the way that matters. Empty of eyes. Empty of judgment. Empty of the weight of being watched and measured and found wanting. Seraphina Blackwood Ashworth stood center stage in a white silk dress that...

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Betty Howard added blog Games
2026-06-13 21:40:19 -

The shoe sat on the kitchen table next to a bowl of cold coffee and a stack of unpaid bills. It was a baby shoe — or what passed for a baby shoe these days. Four millimeters of polymer and fabric, ...
Cal looked at the shoe. He looked at the bills. He looked at the coffee, which had gone cold two hours ago and now had a thin film on the surface that reflected the kitchen light like oil on water. "We're gonna need a new house," Sarah-Mae said. She was standing at the sink, washing a pot they didn't need to wash because it was clean but the act of washing it gave her something to do with her...

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Betty Howard added blog Games
2026-06-01 18:17:00 -

THE DARK CIRCUIT
The radio in the break room had been broken for three weeks and Jack Murdock kept meaning to fix it and kept not meaning to fix it, which was typical of Jack Murdock—he kept meaning to do things and kept not doing them, which was how you ended up thirty-four years old, drafted into a war you didn't understand, fixing electrical equipment in a hole beneath the earth. "Come on, you old bitch," he...

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Betty Howard added blog Games
2026-06-05 15:02:21 -

The pattern appeared on a Tuesday. Marcus knew it was a Tuesday because the office coffee was the particular brand they only served on weekdays, and Tuesday was the day they got the slightly-better blend that tasted like burnt nuts instead of burnt rope.
He was sitting in his cubicle on the sub-basement level of Meridian Dynamics, the floor they called "the Docks" because it was where the data ships that nobody cared about went to rot. His job was simple: look at rows of combat simulation data and flag any entries that looked anomalous. Anomalous meant "weird." Weird meant "someone needs to look at this later." It was not a job that required...

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Betty Howard added blog Dance
2026-06-05 11:51:37 -

The House at Mount Vernon
The House at Mount Vernon The heat in June was a living thing. It moved through the cotton fields like a slow animal, pressing down on every blade of grass, every leaf, every person who dared to walk outside without shade. Eleanor Blackwell arrived at the Blackwood house on a Thursday in 1893, carrying a single valise and a recommendation from a missionary society that had taken pity on an...

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