Short Story
Marshall's Observations. Runner-Up in Craft Over Catharsis Challenge.
Marshall watched seagulls and crows playing in the wind among pink-tinted cloud beds that slowly turned gray as the sun hung at the sea's horizon. He used his iPhone to focus on the reflections in the water and snapped a photo. He liked the result; it showed a butterscotch sun sitting on the water below a pink cloud, with the ferry in the foreground.
By Andrea Corwin 8 months ago in Fiction
Born To Run
He watched the embers waltz skyward with the campfire tendrils, mixing and twisting until they all faded to black. Despite the warmth of the evening, he felt a shiver run through his shoulders that felt so much older than the candles at last weekend's birthday party indicated. While he appreciated everyone’s attendance, he stole every glance at the clock, counting down the moments until they left and he could depart.
By Matthew J. Fromm8 months ago in Fiction
Tuesday at Six . Honorable Mention in Rituals of Affection Challenge.
Insults were her only amusement. If I were to bring anything now, it is the beauty inside me. Within. No? Don’t I bring enough? For a man, it seems not. Yet, still, there’s a bucket in my hand. No toilet that I could flush; yet, without security, I don’t bring enough.
By Caitlin Charlton8 months ago in Fiction
Joseph, Doom bringer. . Content Warning.
Joseph stirred awake in a dark stone cell. He felt an eerie sense of betrayal and anguish. His memory felt hazy, and his bones ached as he moved his sore, stiff joints. He raked his mind, trying to make sense of the strange situation he’d found himself in. Why was he here? What had he done?
By Olivia Stephenson8 months ago in Fiction
Wake Up. Winner in Craft Over Catharsis Challenge.
Today is December 4th, the year 2006 I am parked on the covered bridge. It’s nighttime, the bridge lights are out. My car lights fail to come on. In the blackness, I can barely see. Only a few feet ahead and behind. Billie Holiday’s voice crackles through the radio.
By Bride of Sound8 months ago in Fiction
Myth No More
Wilmington, Delaware in winter always marveled the mind of Pollard Hedrich. Wrapped in brown skin that rivaled the inside of matchbooks, his mind had always been afire. He walked with his friend Tyrell Frankman, the color of charcoal, along a field with a clear path, snow surrounding them.
By Skyler Saunders8 months ago in Fiction
The Inverse Calculus of Us
"The clock has struck three, the coffee is cold, and the shadows are beginning to speak. Welcome back to the desk of The Night Writer, where the stories are brewed in the dark." Accumulation ​The initial state was one of additive growth. It followed a linear progression: x + y = z, where z represented a totalizing preoccupation. ​In the first year, the focus was granular. I memorized the exact frequency of your laughter, a steady 440 Hz that resonated in the center of my chest. I cataloged the three distinct ways you held a pen—based on the urgency of the task—and the precise distance of 2.4 centimeters between your brow and your hairline when you were confused. ​This was the period of Saturation. ​The love was not a feeling so much as a structural takeover. It behaved like a vine in a greenhouse. Every cognitive resource was diverted to the maintenance of your image. I stopped reading the news because the geopolitical landscape did not contain your name. I stopped sleeping in cycles, preferring instead the intermittent naps that allowed me to watch the REM state manifest in the twitching of your eyelids. ​The distractive obsession was absolute. My career, once a sturdy architecture of ambition, began to sag under the weight of my redirected gaze. Deadlines were missed not because of sloth, but because I was too busy calculating the exact volume of water you displaced in the bath. I was a scientist, you were my subject, and the lab was always open. ​Equilibrium ​At the midpoint, the system achieved a state of perfect, terrifying stasis. This was the moment of 1:1 ratio, where the observer and the observed became indistinguishable. ​We sat in a restaurant in the fifth year. I did not look at the menu. I did not need to. I knew the caloric intake you required and the flavor profile your palate currently craved based on the humidity in the air and the time of your last meal. ​"You're staring again," you said. ​The statement was a factual observation of a technical fault. My staring was no longer an act of affection; it was a byproduct of a system that had no other output. I had optimized my entire internal world to serve a single variable: You. The obsession had reached its logical conclusion. I no longer existed as an independent agent. I was a satellite locked in a geosynchronous orbit, tethered by a gravity so strong it had begun to warp my own frame. The love had become a form of sensory deprivation. I could hear nothing but your breath; I could see nothing but your shadow. ​Subtraction ​The shift occurred not through an event, but through a mathematical necessity. A system that only adds must eventually collapse or invert. The vine had run out of greenhouse room. ​The focus remained, but the polarity reversed. The data points were the same, but the value assigned to them flipped from positive to negative. ​The 440 Hz frequency of your laughter did not change. But where it once produced resonance, it now produced Friction. I began to count the number of times you laughed in an hour, not to cherish them, but to measure the rising level of my own irritation. ​The 2.4 centimeters of your brow? It became a measurement of your predictable inadequacy. I watched the skin knit together and felt a cold, precise pulse of loathing. The distraction remained total. I was still obsessed with your every move, but now the obsession was fueled by the desire for your disappearance. ​I hated you with the same rigor I had used to love you. ​I sat across from you and calculated the exact amount of oxygen you consumed in a room, begrudging you every liter. I watched the way you chewed—the same three-beat rhythm I had once found rhythmic—and I mapped the physiological path of my disgust as it traveled from my stomach to my throat. ​Entropy ​The final stage was the heat death of the system. The obsession had not lessened; it had simply become a cage of infinite, sharp detail. ​I knew the precise moment you would speak before you opened your mouth. I knew the sound your keys would make against the wood of the table. I knew the smell of your skin as it aged, a slow oxidation that I documented with the cold eye of a coroner. ​There was no emotional release there. There was no shouting, no breaking of plates, no cathartic sobbing in the rain. Those things require a loss of control. ​Instead, there was only the Persistence of the Pattern. ​I stayed because the distractive obsession was too complete to allow for an exit. To leave you would have been to delete the entire database of my life, and the system fears a vacuum more than it fears the hate. Now, we exist in a state of perfect, mutual revulsion, held together by the very expertise we developed when we were trying to be one. ​The calculus is finished. The result is a null set. We are two points on a graph that have been plotted so closely together that we have erased the space where a life used to be. ​​"Daylight is coming to claim the quiet, but these words stay with you. If you enjoyed this journey into the midnight hours, leave a heart or a tip to keep the candles burning. Sleep well—if you can. — The Night Writer."
By The Night Writer 🌙 8 months ago in Fiction
Tea Time
Like every morning, Ester watched as trembling hands lifted the robin’s egg blue teapot and poured the amber liquid into a matching teacup. Louis’ hands were wrinkled, weathered, calloused from years of work. She still loved holding those hands across the small kitchen table as they talked. She remembered doing it for fifty years, the hands had changed but they felt the same. It was a good day when she could think back over the years. It was better in the mornings. The fog of sleep when she woke up lifted and she remembered his name, but in a couple hours it wasn’t guaranteed.
By Raine Fielder8 months ago in Fiction
