Stories & shorter fiction
Fiction
Historical, speculative, strange, and alternate histories.
Browse fiction by category
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Lives Here Too
Approx. 16 min read
A collision-shop estimator takes a call at work from a man who uses his full name and then says he's Kelvin. Forty years earlier, a fifth-grade classroom made Roy say out loud that Kelvin had never existed.
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Dunruan
Approx. 16 min read
A Dublin trading-estate dealer takes in a strange boy who knows things he shouldn't, and discovers that the books being balanced aren't only his own.
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The Negative
Approx. 31 min read
A man born without any official documentation struggles to survive in a world that treats his empty record as a threat, until a journalist discovers him and offers a way to finally be seen.
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Corrections
Approx. 26 min read
An office worker receives a senderless weekly digest that predicts her routine, then learns its corrections and reader complaints can alter more than the wording.
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The Last Call
Approx. 26 min read
A county records worker follows ringing landlines through abandoned buildings and learns that answering for a place can become a kind of custody.
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Soft Launch
Approx. 28 min read
A library facilities worker is marked unnecessary by a quiet notification and learns which parts of a life still hold when systems and strangers stop acknowledging him.
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Backup Parents
Approx. 24 min read
A twelve-year-old boy begins cataloging his parents' identical daily routines, leaving hidden notes to test the boundaries of their strange repetition, until a warning arrives that makes him question whether he should keep looking for answers or learn to live inside the questions.
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Standard Candle
Approx. 26 min read
An archivist at a struggling Maine maritime museum hears the star everyone's talking about, the one pulsing in prime numbers, and isn't interested. Then a Cold War numbers station in her own collection drops out for eleven seconds, and she recognizes the count before she makes it.
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The Off Season
Approx. 24 min read
Russ Meacham takes a winter caretaker job in a lake resort town that empties out after Labor Day. The population sign says 8,412. Out of habit, he starts keeping a count in the back of his maintenance log, and the count refuses to grow. A quiet story about small towns, work, and the difference between an empty place and a place that only looks full.
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One Night Before the Pyre
Approx. 28 min read
On the eve of her execution, Joan of Arc receives a final visit from the voices that have guided her since childhood and learns the truth about their origin, forcing a choice between survival and the meaning she has built her life around.