Psychological
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 Buzzard7 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 Buzzard7 months ago in Fiction
Renewed. Runner-Up in They Shouldn’t Have Come Here Challenge.
Renewed was a place most people were still leery about, even those who arrived at its doors seeking help. James had worked there for the last 12 years of his life and there wasn't a single work day that felt the same as the day before. James had worked with many different kinds of people with many different kinds of problems. He had swept the minds of cheaters, thieves, and even over eaters. His job was to clean up the brains of people who were struggling with urges they claimed they were unable to control.
By Sara Wilson7 months ago in Fiction
YNs— Tyvek. Content Warning.
2008 At the end of the day, Symeer Mare had sipped some cognac, straight. The brown liquor warmed his throat and abdomen. He was not drunk, however. His mind trained on his task. He looked over to the woman who held a glass in her hand. She went with the white. Gin on the rocks.
By Skyler Saunders7 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 Buzzard7 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 Buzzard7 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 Buzzard7 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 Buzzard7 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 Buzzard7 months ago in Fiction
