Stories & shorter fiction
Fiction
Historical, speculative, strange, and alternate histories.
Browse fiction by category
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Well Calibrated
Approx. 15 min read
An insurance statistician notices her own premium jump for no reason she can explain, and using her insider access to the pricing model, she reverse-engineers the signal into a date. Telling no one, she quietly restructures her entire life around it. When the date comes and goes, she goes back to the data and discovers she misread what the number was actually measuring.
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Custer’s Luck
Approx. 17 min read
A cavalry general who chose caution finds himself on the ridge where the other version of him chose otherwise. He knows how it ends. He can't stop it, and he isn't sure he wants to.
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The Undeliverable
Approx. 17 min read
A dead-letter office clerk begins finding mail with no postmark, addressed to people who haven't been born yet. As she quietly investigates against every regulation, she uncovers a decades-spanning exchange between two of the intended recipients and must decide what a person is supposed to do when she stumbles onto a door that shouldn't exist.
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The Accountability Sink
Approx. 15 min read
Wend Osei's job is to be the human face of blame. When an algorithmic system harms someone, he signs the report, apologizes on camera, and absorbs the penalty, and he is very, very good at contrition. Over the years the line between performing responsibility and believing it begins to blur. Then a case crosses his desk in which a real person, with a license and a choice, actually caused a death, and he discovers the courts no longer have any language for anyone but him.
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The Pockets of Babel
Approx. 29 min read
A vintage coat from an estate sale hides impossible spaces within its pockets. What begins as a careful investigation soon becomes a dangerous encounter with places, objects, and warnings that should not exist.
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The Prophet and the Poison
Approx. 7 min read
The room smelled of figs and something bitter underneath them, a smell Iras had stopped noticing after the third day. Cleopatra sat on the low couch with her feet bare, watching a slave girl drink from a small clay cup.
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Household Gods
Approx. 20 min read
Three months of transport had done what three months of transport always did. The wax on half the tablets had cracked in the cold, and someone in Gaul had let rain into the wagon, so the wood underneath had swollen and split along the grain. His orders were simple. Sort what could be saved, note what couldn’t, and burn the rest before the damp bred mold that would ruin the good tablets stacked beside them.
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The Gentleman Bandit’s Last Ride
Approx. 7 min read
The sack smelled faintly of flour and mice. Charles Boles held it open between his hands and considered, for perhaps the hundredth time, the foolishness of the whole business. A grown man in a good wool coat, standing behind an oak tree with a flour sack over his head.
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What the Jury Carries
Approx. 16 min read
In a near-future justice system, a drug called Witness lets jurors feel a person's remembered emotional state from the inside. The law requires that they experience the victim's account before deliberating, and after verdicts turn severe, defense attorneys win the right to make jurors feel the defendant too. Juror number nine draws a case where both accounts are unendurable, and no verdict will let her set either one down.
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The Beak and the Dark
Approx. 8 min read
Being the private notebook of Dr. Amброise Verrin, physician of the parish of Saint-Roch, kept against the express instruction of the magistrate