Stories & shorter fiction
Fiction
Historical, speculative, strange, and alternate histories.
Browse fiction by category
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Behind the Water
Approx. 26 min read
In Megadon, the Priests of Syrinx provide everything, and he has never once wanted more. Then a dropped crust of bread leads him behind the waterfall, to a box no one was meant to find and a sound no one has made in fifty years. He knows exactly what to do with it: give it to the priests.
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Show and Tell
Approx. 19 min read
In a school built among the remains of civilization, a teacher's weekly salvage lesson uncovers an object that knows more about her past than she does.
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Open Channel
Approx. 18 min read
After years alone in an Arctic seed vault, a survivor hears a welcoming community on the radio and must decide whether solitude has become her refuge or her nature.
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The Cistern
Approx. 12 min read
Thallos found the rope ladder still fixed to the siege ramp when the sun was two hands above the ridge, and he did not want to climb it. At the top the wind came off the desert flat and dry, carrying nothing. That was the first thing he noticed and could not place until later, no smoke.
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The Stocktaker
Approx. 18 min read
A teenager’s forbidden inventory exposes the true cost of the supply room that has sustained an underground community for forty years.
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The Apologies
Approx. 16 min read
Strangers approach Peter Haines to confess injuries he cannot remember suffering, while records begin supporting lives he never lived. One apology finally leads him to an offense whose true direction he knows.
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Proof of Life
Approx. 29 min read
A clerk who processes reincarnation debt claims opens a routine file and finds her own name listed as the deceased. What she does about it costs more than she expects.
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What Won’t Take Paint
Approx. 16 min read
Four bodies have come through Croy & Son with the same mark on them, and Dinah is the only one in Cawley who has ever gotten out a tape measure. The town has nine years left before the ground takes it.
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The Only Stranger
Approx. 16 min read
Ruthann Prosser weighs gravel trucks at a quarry outside Mitchell, Indiana, and six days ago something came back that everybody else gets to lose. The trouble isn't what she finds in there. It's what she can't find.
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The Registry Number
Approx. 21 min read
An East Berlin records clerk encounters her own name inside the surveillance system she has served for years. The discovery changes how she reads both its files and the people around her.