Melissa James

Melissa James added blog Literature
2026-06-08 16:37:46 -

The Mirror of Lord Waverly
I. The mirror stood in the corner of the library at Waverly Hall, and Julian Ashford looked into it every night before he went to sleep. He could not explain why he did this. He could not explain why the reflection that looked back at him sometimes seemed to be someone else—someone older, with harder eyes and a mouth that was set in a way Julian's mouth was not set. He was twenty-seven years...

0 Comments 0 Shares 1 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Literature
2026-06-15 03:54:35 -

The House of Hargrave
The House of Hargrave The house sat on a hill above Oakhaven like a wounded animal, its white paint peeling, its columns cracked, its veranda sagging under the weight of wisteria that had grown wild and thick as hair. Once, thirty years ago, it had been the grandest plantation house in the county. Now it was a monument to something that had died and refused to rot. Mamie Hargrave stood on the...

0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Literature
2026-06-10 10:44:00 -

The Golden Fox of Highland Moor
The storm came in on a Tuesday, as storms always do on the moor. Angus MacLeod felt it before he saw it—a pressure in the air, a taste of iron on the wind. He was seventy years old that year, though he felt a hundred. His wife had been gone eight years, buried in the small churchyard above the village. His son Calum was twenty-eight, reckless as a spring lamb, and gone every day into the hills...

0 Comments 0 Shares 1 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Food
2026-06-16 02:29:15 -

A Thousand Small Choices
The first thing Jack Novotny did that he would later count as the beginning of the slide was so small that, at the time, he did not count it at all. It was March 1987. The Writers Guild strike was a month old and the town had split into sharp camps — strikers on the picket lines outside Paramount, scabs inside writing dialogue for shows they had no business touching, everyone else caught...

0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Games
2026-06-09 23:11:49 -

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 4 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Games
2026-06-09 01:21:17 -

The jazz played from the gramophone in the corner of the room, a lonely saxophone weaving through smoke and amber light. Jonathan Whitmore sat at his desk in the Waldorf-Astoria's diplomatic suite, staring at the telegram on his blotter.
"ACCEPTED FOR PROMETHEUS PROGRAM. REPORT TO NAVY DEPARTMENT IMMEDIATELY." He picked up his fountain pen and signed his name with the steady hand of a man who had made his decision long before the ink touched paper. Richard Whitmore—West Point class of 1912, decorated captain in the Great War, survivor of the Aden incident that had taken Callahan and forty-seven other souls. David Callahan. His...

0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Literature
2026-06-05 19:05:50 -

The Unshrunk
The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash anything clean. It just makes the dirt wetter. I sat in my office on Sunset Boulevard and watched it hit the window, the way it always did, in diagonal sheets that turned the neon signs across the street into smeared watercolors. On my desk, a man the size of a matchbox was pacing back and forth. He had to shout to be heard, and even then I had to lean down...

0 Comments 0 Shares 3 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Games
2026-06-09 06:20:18 -

The Seventh Man
The Seventh Man The job offer came on a Tuesday. Lane Hartfield was eating ramen in his Oakland apartment—noodles from a packet, hot water from a kettle that had seen better decades—when his phone rang. It was Maya Chen, his former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, the one person who had defended him when everyone else called him a traitor for writing about mask mandates during the...

0 Comments 0 Shares 4 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Literature
2026-06-15 06:09:10 -

V-05: The Wall of Ice
(Hard-Boiled Perspective) I’ve spent ten years at St. Jude’s, and in ten years, I’ve learned one thing: the only way to survive a place like this is to build a wall. My wall was made of silence, strict schedules, and a complete lack of sentiment. I was the Master of Discipline, the man who kept the "Ferals" from tearing the school apart. Then came Maya. She walked in like a burst of sunlight in...

0 Comments 0 Shares 1 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Literature
2026-06-09 11:26:56 -

The Giant
ACT ONE Caleb woke up the way he always woke up: slowly, like a building settling. His body took up most of the trailer, and when he moved, the floorboards complained in a language he had learned to understand over forty years of listening to them complain. Outside, the world was the world it had been for the past three years since Everything Happened. Nobody called it by name. The news had...

0 Comments 0 Shares 3 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Food
2026-06-09 13:19:10 -

The Bell Without Its Ringer
ONE: SHEILA BRIGGS The kettle's gone cold again. I keep putting it on and then I forget, stand there at the window looking out at Roman Road like I'm waiting for a bus that's been cancelled, like there's something coming up the street that I need to see before it gets here. The social come round Tuesday, woman with a clipboard and a face like she's been sucking lemons for a fortnight, wanted to...

0 Comments 0 Shares 10 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Melissa James added blog Food
2026-06-05 22:53:35 -

[The Existentialist Fragment Perspective]
The Man Who Wasn't There The rain in Chicago does not wash things clean. It makes everything worse. It turns coal dust into sludge, sludge into a kind of black paste that sticks to your shoes and follows you home, and home is usually a bar or a apartment with peeling wallpaper and a radiator that clicks like a dying metronome. Silas Mercer knew this. He had lived in Chicago long enough to know...

0 Comments 0 Shares 9 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!