Psychological

The Night the Stars Fell Into the Sea. AI-Generated.
On the edge of Miraan Coast, where the sea hummed like an ancient lullaby, lived a quiet fisherman named Arav. Every evening he pushed his small blue boat into the water, following the same rhythm, the same routine, the same tired hope that tomorrow might be better than today.
By shakir hamid12 months ago in Fiction
Halloween House Party (10). Content Warning.
Chapter 10: Slowly I’m pulled from whatever dark abyss I was dropped into, my head throbbing with each shift of movement, even blinking is likely to have me passing out.
By 𝓗. 𝓒. 𝓡𝓾𝓫𝔂12 months ago in Fiction
Spare Change
First payback—coins to me. I figured I miscounted. By the door: a ceramic bowl—keys, coins—a grown-up junk drawer. Pennies, dimes, and one stray token from a laundromat that quit before my lease did. I dump pockets there at night so tomorrow I don’t swear at a washing machine with hands full. Practical. Ugly. Normal.
By Milan Milic12 months ago in Fiction
Catechism Schism. Content Warning.
The twisted fibers cut his skin. Wincing, Alexander pulls his hand to his mouth, cleaning the blood from his fingers. The rope is rough, and it hurts to grasp. It hurts more than he had been used to. He doesn’t let go.
By Roman Hale12 months ago in Fiction
Countdown. AI-Generated.
Part One: The Plan The city streets were quiet as the four men gathered in a cramped apartment above a laundromat. Outside, the hum of streetlights and distant traffic was the only sound. Inside, the table in the center was covered with maps, printed schedules, and diagrams of a large suburban house.
By William Ebden.12 months ago in Fiction
Shadows of the City. AI-Generated.
The streets were wet from a light evening rain, the kind that made the neon lights shine brighter but also made the whole city feel colder and more empty. Ren walked slowly with his hands in his pockets, his coat collar pulled up against the mist hanging around the streetlamps. He didn’t know why he was wandering like this, only that something was pulling him forward. Maybe it was habit. Maybe it was guilt. Either way, his feet kept taking him deeper into alleys he didn’t remember ever walking through.
By William Ebden.12 months ago in Fiction
Lines of death.. AI-Generated.
It was a rainy Thursday when Haruto found it. The sky hung heavy and gray, the streets smelled of wet asphalt, and his shoes squelched with every step. On a park bench, half-hidden under a soaked newspaper, lay a black notebook. No title, nothing marking it as special, but something about it drew him in. He picked it up, turning it over in his hands, noticing the weight. He opened it and found blank pages except for a first page that contained rules. Rules that made little sense, at first, about writing names and consequences.
By William Ebden.12 months ago in Fiction
Ashes of Tomorrow. AI-Generated.
Mara Whitman crouched behind a crumbling wall, the ash-coated wind stinging her face. The city, once alive and vibrant, now lay in twisted ruin. Rusted cars leaned into cracked sidewalks, and buildings rose like jagged scars against the gray sky. She pulled her jacket tighter, the fabric damp from mist that carried the faint, metallic scent of decay. The streets were eerily silent except for the occasional gust of wind that rattled broken windows and sent litter skittering across the pavement.
By William Ebden.12 months ago in Fiction
THE COMMUNITY
“I said I didn’t break the TV, Awura did!” I screamed, tears streaming down my cheeks. “You are the eldest! You will take responsibility for any wrongdoing in this household,” he retorted angrily. He ordered me to go to my room and think about what I had done wrong – not preventing my brother from destroying the brand-new TV he had bought last month.
By Michelle Ewenam Akakpo12 months ago in Fiction
The Clockmaker’s Promise
M Mehran Everyone in the quiet town of Eldenbrook knew Elias Thorn, the old clockmaker whose shop stood at the corner of Willow Street. The windows were always fogged with dust and time, and the shelves were filled with clocks—grandfather clocks, pocket watches, delicate sand timers, and curious contraptions no one had names for. But the most mysterious thing about Elias was not his clocks. It was his secret: He could fix time. Some said he once repaired a moment of regret for a grieving widow. Others whispered he restored a lost memory for a child who had forgotten her mother’s face. No one knew how he did it. They only knew the price was never money. And so people came, quietly, secretly, leaving with lighter hearts—or heavier ones, depending on the moment they chose to change. But none of that mattered the night fifteen-year-old Rowan Carter walked into the shop with a shaking hand and a broken watch. It had belonged to his father. The man who never came home. --- The door chimed softly as Rowan stepped inside. The hum of ticking clocks filled the air like thousands of tiny heartbeats. Elias Thorn, with silver-thread hair and warm, unreadable eyes, looked up from a clock he was polishing. “You’ve been outside my door for three days,” Elias said. “Come in, child.” Rowan swallowed. “I… I wasn’t sure.” “You are sure now.” Elias nodded. “What do you want fixed?” Rowan opened his hand. The pocket watch lay cracked, its glass shattered, its hands frozen at 7:12 PM—the exact minute his father’s car went off the old Briarwood Bridge. “I want to go back,” Rowan whispered. “Before it happened. I want to stop him.” Elias didn’t take the watch. Not at first. “Time is not a toy,” he warned. “It doesn’t like being moved. It resists. It demands sacrifice.” Rowan’s voice broke. “I’d give anything.” Elias’s expression softened with a grief that seemed older than the town itself. “Many have said that,” he murmured. “Few understood what it meant.” Still, he held out his hand. “Let me see it.” Rowan placed the broken watch in Elias’s palm. The moment the clockmaker touched it, the shop grew cold. The ticking of the other clocks slowed until the whole room held its breath. Elias closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they glowed faintly with a golden light. “This watch is tied to a moment you wish to rewrite,” he said quietly. “I can open the door. But remember—every changed moment steals something from another.” “What do you mean?” “If you return to the past,” Elias said, “you must leave something behind.” “Like what?” Rowan whispered. “A memory,” the clockmaker said. “A piece of your life. Something time will take as payment.” Rowan hesitated only a moment. “My father is worth more than any memory.” Elias nodded. “Then hold the watch. And do not let go.” --- The shop dissolved. Rowan felt himself falling through light, through ticking, through moments stretching and snapping like threads. Then his feet hit solid ground. He stood on Briarwood Bridge. Wind brushed against his face, cold and familiar. The wooden planks creaked beneath him. And there—just ahead—stood his father, leaning over the railing, staring down at the rushing river below. Rowan’s breath caught in his throat. “Dad!” His father turned, surprised. “Rowan? What are you—” “Don’t drive tonight,” Rowan gasped. “Please. The bridge… your brakes—” Before he could finish, headlights glowed on the road behind them. A car swerved, tires screeching on wet wood. Rowan lunged. He shoved his father out of the way. The car hit Rowan instead. Everything went black. --- When Rowan opened his eyes, he was lying on the ground, rain hitting his face. His father hovered over him, frantic. “Rowan! Rowan, stay with me!” “I’m… okay,” Rowan murmured. But he wasn’t. Something inside his mind felt hollow, missing. Elias Thorn stepped out of the shadows of the bridge as if he had always been there. “It is done,” the clockmaker said quietly. Rowan’s father looked up, confused. “Who—?” “You don’t remember me,” Elias said gently. “That is how it should be.” He held the restored pocket watch in his hand. The glass was whole, the hands moving again. Rowan sat up slowly. “Did I save him?” “Yes,” Elias said. “Your father will live. The accident will never happen.” Rowan exhaled in relief. “Then… what did I lose?” Elias hesitated. Then he handed Rowan the watch. Rowan looked at it, waiting for memory to rise. But nothing came. “What… what is this?” Rowan asked. “It belonged to your father,” Elias said softly. “It was your favorite birthday gift. He saved for months to buy it for you.” Rowan blinked. “I don’t remember any of that.” “That was the price,” Elias said. “To save your father, time took the memories you had of him.” Rowan’s chest tightened. All the laughter. All the stories. All the moments they shared—gone. His father knelt beside him, tears in his eyes. “Rowan? Do you know who I am?” Rowan looked into his father’s face. It felt warm… familiar… but distant, like a name he once read long ago. “I don’t remember,” Rowan whispered. “But… I want to learn.” His father pulled him close, holding him like something precious returned from the brink. Elias watched them silently. Sometimes saving someone meant losing the part of yourself that loved them. Sometimes love meant choosing the loss anyway. When Rowan looked up, the clockmaker was gone. Only the steady ticking of the pocket watch remained.
By Muhammad Mehranabout a year ago in Fiction
The Postcard Man
The Postcard Man When a lonely postman receives a letter no living soul should have written… Harold Linton had spent thirty-four years delivering other people’s words birthday wishes, overdue bills, postcards from places he had never seen. But since his wife, Eleanor, passed away two winters ago, the world had grown unbearably silent. His small cottage felt like a hallway that no longer led anywhere. Even the radio, once Eleanor’s constant companion, crackled now with an emptiness he couldn’t stand.
By Farooq Hashmiabout a year ago in Fiction
THE SKIN WE SHARE (PART 1)
Start writing...The Donor The advertisement wasn't just a classified listing; it was a ghost of data clinging to the deepest recess of the dark web, a whisper in the digital graveyard of broken dreams. Its text was simple, yet offered a staggering promise: "Tired of your broken shell? A new vessel awaits. The Samsara Procedure." For Eli Croft, whose existence had devolved into a slow, systematic dismantling at the hands of Huntington's disease, the message wasn't an ad. It was a direct answer to a prayer he’d been too cynical to voice. His body was a foreign country, a treacherous cage where his muscles spasmed and failed with violent, humiliating autonomy, betraying the sharp, screaming consciousness trapped inside. His life was an agonizing countdown to suffocation. The man he met, who insisted on the title Dr. Silas, did not possess the comforting aura of a savior. He looked like a coroner who had been interrupted midway through his work and had forgotten his corpse. His skin was unnaturally pale, stretched tight over sharp bones, and his eyes were a flat, depthless grey that seemed to absorb all light and emotion. His voice was toneless, almost mechanical, yet it carried an unsettling authority that demanded attention. Despite his macabre appearance, his credentials—at least the digital ones presented in the sterile files—were impeccable. "The mind, Mr. Croft, is nothing more than a signal," Silas explained in that chillingly flat tone, gesturing to a sleek, silent monitoring console. "It is pure energy. The body, conversely, is merely the receiver—a machine built of carbon and water, subject to the inevitable decay of entropy. Your receiver is failing, systematically shutting down. We will perform the signal transfer: migrating your core identity to a new, fully functional machine." The "new machine" was the catch, the terrifying compromise. It wasn't a synthetic body. It wasn't an artificially grown clone. It was a donor. A living, breathing, perfectly healthy donor who had, according to Silas's chillingly dry delivery, "volunteered their physical form as an act of ultimate spiritual altruism." Eli, grasping at the last, thinnest thread of hope and desperate to escape the biological nightmare of his own failing flesh, chose to believe that grotesque lie. The room where the procedure took place was a blinding white, sterile chamber, utterly devoid of comforting human warmth. There were no flashing lights, no complex surgical rigs, and no scalpels. Only two heavy, slate-grey stone slabs lay separated by a short expanse of polished floor. Eli was gently, carefully, helped onto one slab. He struggled to turn his head, his gaze immediately locking onto the other slab. Lying there was the donor: a young man named Alex. He was built lean, strong, and effortlessly healthy, his face unblemished save for an intriguing, faded scar above his left brow. His eyes were closed in a deep, drug-induced slumber. This was the vessel. The prize. Silas began the ritual. He simply paced, his shadow flickering unnaturally on the white walls, chanting in a language that sounded ancient and profoundly alien—a sound like dry bone grinding against marble, or maybe the whisper of static electricity given dark form. The air pressure in the room grew heavy and cold, a cold that felt internal, pressing directly onto the fragile dome of Eli’s skull. Then came the pain. It was not a pain derived from physical injury; it was a horrific, raw, tearing sensation inside his mind, as if his very consciousness—the 'I' of him, his accumulated soul and memories—was being brutally pried loose from the soft, fleshy moorings of his brain. It was like tearing a root system from the earth. The sound in his head was a high-pitched, electric scream, accompanied by a dizzying, nauseating sense of movement in total, suffocating stillness. His vision blurred, then terrifyingly doubled. For a single, agonizing second, he was looking at the cold white ceiling from two distinct sets of eyes. He saw his own withered, slack-jawed, twitching body on the slab opposite him, a thing of ruin. And simultaneously, he saw the ceiling through Alex's eyes, clear, focused, and unblinking. He was pure signal, vibrating between two receivers. Then, the world was swallowed by total, crushing, merciful darkness. He woke up screaming. But the voice that tore from his throat was not the weak, reedy sound of a dying man. It was strong, resonant, masculine, and young. His new body hummed with a startling, almost painful surge of vitality he hadn't known in over a decade. He pushed up, sitting bolt upright, his movements fluid, precise, and devoid of the tremors that had been his constant companion. He looked at his hands—they were large, the knuckles thick, the wrists strong and unmarked. They were Alex's hands. Driven by a desperate, terrifying urge to confirm his existence, he stumbled to a mirrored wall, his newly powerful heart pounding a healthy, rhythmic drum against the inside of Alex's ribs. The face staring back was Alex's. The sharp jawline, the dark, intense eyes, the faint scar above the brow—the perfect vessel. But the expression—the wide-eyed, disbelieving, utterly terrified expression staring out from that young, perfect face—was undeniably, completely, agonizingly Eli. He had done it. He was free of his dying cage. A slow, giddy, triumphant laugh bubbled up from his healthy lungs, a sound of intoxicating freedom. The laugh died instantly in his throat. In the reflection, just for a flicker, the face in the mirror—Alex's perfect, strong face—moved independently of Eli's own muscle command. It curved, just slightly, into a small, secret, knowing smile. It was a smile that never touched Eli's own horrified lips. And as quickly as it came, the smile was gone, leaving only Eli's paralyzed, disbelieving visage staring back. The first thought, alien and chillingly unwelcome, slithered into his newly acquired mind, uninvited, in a voice that was perfectly clear, calm, and utterly not his own: "My turn." Continue the terror! Wait for Part 2: The First Demand to discover what The Co-Pilot truly wants.
By Wellova about a year ago in Fiction