Stories & shorter fiction
Fiction
Historical, speculative, strange, and alternate histories.
Browse fiction by category
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Read Receipt
Approx. 29 min read
A grieving woman becomes fixated on her late father’s old phone when an obsolete messaging app begins showing him as typing, though no message ever arrives.
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The Obscura Spore
Approx. 28 min read
A woman comes north to empty her dead mother's hoarder house, expecting a month of sacks and a skip. On the fourth day she reaches for the wall of newspapers that has stood in the front room since 1991 and her arm goes into it up to the wrist. What's underneath is cold, translucent, and sweating a fluid that smells of her mother's perfume and the back of a hot television. It doesn't fight when she cuts it. It takes something else instead, and she only notices what's missing when her sister mentions a summer she can no longer find.
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The Cost of One
Approx. 19 min read
A couple visits a fertility clinic where prospective parents interview personality simulations of their viable embryos before making a selection. The process is polished, the staff are professional, and the first six sessions are stranger and more affecting than either of them expected. The seventh is different.
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The Vacancy Rate
Approx. 27 min read
A municipal data analyst notices that a city's predictive welfare system has written off an entire apartment building during a lethal heat wave. What she does to fix it sets off a cascade she didn't anticipate — and raises a question she can't stop thinking about: what happens to people whose lives are too quiet for an algorithm to see.
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Weather Permitting
Approx. 28 min read
In a city that runs on the flawless forecasts of its digital model, a variance analyst discovers who keeps the predictions true, and learns what one act of ordinary kindness costs when tomorrow has already been sold.
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The Conscience Shift
Approx. 18 min read
A neural service lets the wealthy offload their fatigue, pain, anxiety, and grief onto paid workers who carry it by the hour. A grieving widower, financially ruined, discovers he can bear more sorrow than almost anyone and takes the shifts that break other carriers. Then a long-term client's burden arrives feeling wrong, and beneath the grief he finds something with a will in it, something that wants an action from him he cannot understand until it is nearly too late.
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The Weight and the Lever
Approx. 22 min read
Eleven years ago, Sylvie received a letter from her insurer's actuarial contractor: she was legally prohibited from entering a specific grocery store. No explanation was given for why, or what might happen, or to whom. She obeyed. Then her estranged son took a job there, and the prohibition, which had never been anything she understood, became something she had to decide about.
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Hold Still
Approx. 22 min read
A countdown appears in the sky over every person on Earth, and a night-shift street sweeper in Erie keeps working his route while the world spends two months deciding what to do with the time.
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The Four-Second Rule
Approx. 23 min read
In a city gripped by a strange phenomenon where four seconds of eye contact fuses two strangers into one body, a records clerk navigates his daily commute by never looking up. When the lights fail inside a crowded subway car, he must survive the terror in the dark and discovers that connection can be found in the most unexpected, and unlikely, of places.
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The Instrument
Approx. 25 min read
Alma Sorrell gets her own body Monday through Wednesday. A stranger has it Thursday through Saturday. Sunday goes to the highest bidder. From receipts, bruises, and messages she never sent, she starts working out what her tenant does with her hands.