Stories & shorter fiction
Fiction
Historical, speculative, strange, and alternate histories.
Browse fiction by category
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The Door Beneath Jerusalem
Approx. 8 min read
By then the village had stopped expecting him. His mother was dead. His father’s fields had gone to bramble. The boy who used to run after his horse with a willow switch in his hand was now a broad-backed man with two daughters and a bald place showing under his cap.
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Measured Ground
Approx. 7 min read
The villa had been known for decades. A few test trenches in the 1970s, another survey in the nineties, and now a proper excavation before a housing development claimed the field. It was respectable work, the sort that filled journals but rarely newspapers. Roman pottery. Animal bone. Coins worn almost smooth. Fragments of painted plaster that hinted at rooms grander than the low hills around them deserved.
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One More
Approx. 15 min read
A meticulous government census taker, known for never losing count, arrives in a narrow, closed-off valley to tally its residents. His two required counts refuse to agree by exactly one person. Every recount and every method reproduces the same stubborn discrepancy, and the extra person is never found in any house or any part of the valley. As he hunts for the one that shouldn't be there, the ground beneath his entire profession begins to shift.
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The Empty Voyage
Approx. 6 min read
The fishing boat found them at sunrise. Old Håkon, who had spent forty years working the waters outside Trondheimsfjorden, noticed the sail first. It hung loose against the mast, catching just enough wind to push the vessel toward shore.
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The Man Who Turned East
Approx. 7 min read
The grass rolled over gentle hills, greener than Iceland in summer and richer than anything he'd seen in Greenland. Forests stood beyond the shore, taller than any timber he had known. Rivers emptied into broad inlets where seals floated without much concern for the longship easing toward land.
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The Kitchen of Bright Meadow
Approx. 14 min read
A linguist who has spent her career documenting the last speakers of dying languages takes a modest grant to record a tongue spoken only by eleven residents of a single nursing home. The speakers share no common background, yet they agree, precisely and without metaphor, on words for objects that do not exist, and every one of those objects belongs in a kitchen. As she builds the lexicon, the frame she has always used to understand her work begins to come apart.
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The Star in the Margin
Approx. 6 min read
It was the spring of 978, and the observatory outside Rayy had become his second home. Most nights ended with cramped fingers, sore eyes, and another page added to tables that had occupied scholars for generations. The work demanded patience more than brilliance. The heavens rewarded neither haste nor imagination.
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The Cold Sun
Approx. 14 min read
The first thing Nikolaos noticed was the bread. His mother took it from the oven before dawn and set it on the board with a slap of her palm. It should have cracked at the crust. It should have given off the good smell of wheat and heat and smoke from the little oven behind the house. Instead it sat there pale and flat, steaming weakly, like a thing pulled from water.
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The Ledger Man
Approx. 16 min read
Vardry Oakes kept the names in a brown church ledger. He did not ride every night. Men liked to tell it afterward as if the whole county had gone out together, white cloth over every face, horses stepping through fog, torches smoking in the dark. It was not like that most nights. Most nights were small. Three men. Five. A knock at a freedman’s cabin. A rope shown but not used. A schoolhouse window broken. A warning folded into the crack of a door.
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The Man From the Hold
Approx. 17 min read
By the time the hatch opened, Thomas Bell had stopped praying. Not because he had lost faith. He had simply run out of words. The ship had gone quiet in the night. Quiet was worse than shouting, worse than the crack of timber and the scream of rope. Quiet meant the sea had finished arguing. Quiet meant the men above had either saved themselves or been taken.