Short Story
The Hag Stone. Top Story - November 2025.
The beach was chilly, the wind blew sand and an icy spray on shore. Maggie pulled her scarf up to partially cover her face. It seemed like a crazy day for a beach walk, but she knew it was excellent sea glass weather. Her coat pockets were jingling with bits of polished glass.
By Mary Haynes11 months ago in Fiction
Double Life. Winner in Through the Keyhole Challenge.
I kneel with my eye pressed to the little circle of light, watching. On the old formica countertop there are two glasses of wine, a couple of paper plates on which cold pizza sits, congealing. There's low music playing from a record player. It's out of sight, but from the way it skips, making that whispering, slithering sound every third turn, I know it's the old one you used to have in your office, the one you said you sold to a work friend. To think it was here all this time, regaling the nights you spent without me! Didn't your mother ever teach you not to lie?
By Raistlin Allen11 months ago in Fiction
The Talking Dollar
A surreal and haunting reflection on greed, ownership, and awakening. A man discovers a hundred-dollar bill that can speak — and what begins as a simple temptation becomes a journey through the “Market of Souls,” where value, desire, and conscience are all for sale.
By Ebrahim Parsa11 months ago in Fiction
Laundry
The sun was about halfway down the afternoon sky, and the late-summer mugginess was nearly visible. The vague hum of suburban noise lingered here and there on this hazy late July day. Susan pointed the nozzle of the hose at a withering hydrangea, fuming, absolutely certain that something was going on with Sam and Lila. She nearly tripped over the cedar stump when she put the hose back. She and Sam had the tree cut when they bought the house; it had been almost completely choked with wisteria and was a threat to the house. Susan had been more upset about losing the wisteria than the tree. The purple blossoms looked like grapes to her, so pretty in the spring sky.
By Harper Lewis 11 months ago in Fiction
The Willowbrook Home for Foundlings. Honorable Mention in Through the Keyhole Challenge.
Cecil pressed his eye against the pupil-sized hole in the wall as he hunched down in the shadows of the west hall at The Willowbrook Home for Foundlings, which had been his home for the past month or so.
By Aaron Morrison11 months ago in Fiction
Through the keyhole
Although I first heard rumors of the tunnels when I was nine, it was Jamie Weitz, my first girlfriend in the seventh grade, and what she told a group of us at her Halloween party. We were too old to trick or treat, but still young enough to enjoy scaring each other. Most of the stories were lame until Jamie shared one about her father. Ned, now head of a big security firm, had once ventured into the tunnels while he was a student at City University in the 1970s. Not only was he amazed at the vast size of the tunnels, easily big enough to drive a truck through, he presumably saw rats as big as cats.
By Mindy Reed11 months ago in Fiction
Am I awakened now.... Content Warning.
Frozen, unable to step back and break away from the view Lera begins to feel this familiarity as if this very scene has played out once before. She begins to realize it was another moment of Deja vu happening after peering into the keyhole of her parents' bedroom. There the mother sat with a displeased sorrow filled expression while the father stood on the side of the bed fussing with disgust and anguish. In the center of the heavy emotional crossfire was a baby just lying there in stiffness as if it were a stillborn, but that just presumed to be her nature because her eyes were shifting from one side to the other. Maybe she was too frightened to even wiggle a finger, so she chose stillness to keep her safe, possibly even to become invincible. A sudden jolt shot through Lera's body causing her to lose balance and fall backwards hitting her head on a ledge. Few moments after she went into a deeper unconscious state.
By Azrie'l Johnson11 months ago in Fiction
Halloween House Party (3). Content Warning.
Chapter 3: “Like Hell!” I scream through gritted teeth, my black nails clawing behind me, catching the skin on his cheek as he stumbles back, blood from my wounds spilling down the side of my neck. Putting pressure on the fang marks I spin to face my attacker grabbing one of the bottles off the counter with my nondominant hand, smacking him in the head as hard as I can manage. “Don’t you ever fucking touch me again! Don’t look at me” I hit him again, “don’t talk to me, don’t have anything to fucking do with me!” He slides back towards the sink, blood pooling from his head to match the sticky substance staining my skin and leotard.
By 𝓗. 𝓒. 𝓡𝓾𝓫𝔂11 months ago in Fiction
Through the cellar
Never before had he seen this door cracked open. Clark had always assumed the cracked rotting wooden door hiding in the back of the wine cellar led nowhere and was just there for decoration, it's what he had been told after all. When he'd first started just over a year back, he'd asked Jerry, his boss, about the oddly placed door and he'd said the whole time he'd been working here at The Hecate Inn it had been locked with no living memory of a key.
By Liam Storm11 months ago in Fiction
