Microfiction
The Lantern of Silent Valley
Far beyond the edge of crowded cities, where maps begin to fade into blank paper, there was a place called Silent Valley. No one agreed on whether it was real or just a story people told to feel less alone at night. But everyone who had ever heard of it knew one thing: if you entered Silent Valley with a heavy heart, you never came out the same.
By Vincent Hale6 months ago in Fiction
The Confession Booth
The father had been hearing confessions for twenty-two years and had learned to hold them loosely. You took in what people offered, you offered back what you could, and you let the weight of it pass through you rather than settle. It was the only way to stay standing.
By Justin Buzzard6 months ago in Fiction
The Last Cartographer
She’d been making maps since she was nine years old. She started with the rooms of her grandmother's house, measuring each one with a length of string and a ruler borrowed from the kitchen drawer. The proportions were wrong, and the hallway bent where it shouldn't have, but her grandmother kept it pinned to the wall in the parlor until the day she died.
By Justin Buzzard6 months ago in Fiction
Ping
She’d been on the station for two years and four months when the signal came through. The station sat at a point of a planet no one had bothered to name yet. There was nothing out here except the listening arrays and the six people who ran them, and most of what the arrays listened to was debris. Micrometeors. Thermal expansion in the superstructure. The low hum of the planet below them, which she had long since stopped hearing as anything separate from silence.
By Justin Buzzard6 months ago in Fiction
The Brave Sheep and the Mighty Lion
In the heart of a vast green valley, surrounded by tall mountains and thick forests, lived a small white sheep named Snowy. Unlike the other sheep in the flock, Snowy was curious, brave, and always eager to explore the world beyond the grassy hills.
By Vincent Hale6 months ago in Fiction
Return Address
The first letter arrived on a cold day in February with his own handwriting on the envelope and no return address. He opened it assuming it was something he'd mailed to himself and forgotten, the kind of thing he did sometimes, a reminder or a document. Instead, it was two paragraphs.
By Justin Buzzard6 months ago in Fiction
Night Shift
He had been a night nurse for eight years and he prided himself on his memory for faces. It was practically useful, more useful than people realized. In a busy emergency department at two in the morning, when things moved fast and the light was hard and everyone was tired and some of the patients were not in a state to give clear information about themselves, a good memory was a clinical tool. He knew who had been through before. He knew the regulars and their histories. He knew the face of someone who was hiding something and the different face of someone who simply didn't know what was wrong with them.
By Justin Buzzard6 months ago in Fiction
The Log Entry
He had worked the lighthouse for eleven years and he knew every vessel on the local registry. Fishing boats, survey craft, and the coast guard tender that came through weekly. He knew their lights, their silhouettes and the sounds their engines made in fog. He knew them the way you know things when your whole job is watching and your world is water.
By Justin Buzzard6 months ago in Fiction
Master Key
She had been a locksmith for twenty years and she could open anything given enough time. She found the key in a box of estate hardware she bought at auction, a lot of two hundred miscellaneous pieces. Old skeleton keys, padlock keys, car keys from the eighties, a few she couldn't identify at all. She sorted through them over an evening and set aside anything interesting, and the key she found at the bottom of the box was interesting.
By Justin Buzzard6 months ago in Fiction
The Tell
She was eight years old when she realized not everyone could see it. She thought of it as a shimmer, though that wasn't quite right. It was more like the air around a person went slightly wrong when they said something that wasn't true. A wobble. A brief doubling of the space behind their eyes.
By Justin Buzzard6 months ago in Fiction
