Browse the archive
Strange & Unexplained
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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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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 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.
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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 Endless Loop
Approx. 21 min read
Ethan Carter can predict everything that will happen to him on a Thursday, and nothing supernatural is going on. That's the problem. Eleven years of identical mornings, a promotion that would buy him twenty-one more, and a painter who tells him that quitting his job would be the same cowardice wearing a different coat.