The blank page stares at me. I have to write something. Anything! I promised myself that I would do it. Maybe someday the things I write will be coherent again. For now, they're just something to make sure I hold myself to my promise to write again.

…

Story is marked as mature

I kept looking at my cell phone, but it lay silent and black. Let her make the first move. It was always me before, texting, finding the right ice-breaker comment or picture to share. It was a show of love, but it was beginning to feel one-sided. Was I a …

I watched in horror as the smoke billowed high. I followed the plume to the leaping flames high above the roof. Flames and smoke poured from every window, every door. I fell to my knees.

The flames were put out, the firemen left, the sooty timbers were …

I acted without thought, and It was not at full power; my death matters not.

Burrowing tenderly with my hands, I could but adore this beast that had summoned me.

"Telemetry from the probe has been parsed and analyzed, Captain," Lady responds. The ship's voice is a soothing alto, designed to accommodate for the crew as they recover. "The data has already been uploaded to your stations and synced with your datapad…

I spoke to her in direct neural interface. A text or audio message might have sufficed, but there could be no mistakes today, no misunderstandings. I refused to analyse my motivations further.

The link pushed dark chunks of conceptual meaning between our…

5:31 A.M.

My heart races, and I immediately chastise my brain into generating 5 things to be grateful for. The list is the same as last Monday morning. The sun rose. I get a chance to start over. I have a warm bed. There is food for breakfast. I am.…

She sighed. Exhausted. Exasperated. Emotionally drained. More than a little demoralized.

And yet. All this and yet she was alive. She was both physically and mentally here. Not absent. Not somewhere else.

She was capable of listening. Of feeling.

Or at…

If Drow Elves are a rare sight in the surface realms, Half-Drow are all but unheard of.

Most humans have never seen a dark elf, and with his dusky grey skin and stark white hair, a lot of people assume Hraz'Elarion is one of the notoriously evil Underdar…

Jennifer waited expectantly for an answer while staring at her phone. Her mum had warned her about talking to strangers on the internet but it was 2018 and the world was far more connected than ever before. Besides it wasn't like she had given her number …

Story is marked as mature

I've been straining to stretch my smile

clenching my cheeks along with my teeth

as sweat soaks my smooth armpits

and my straight spine begins to spasm

-

exhausting myself to keep my comfortable life

of useless meetings and endless paperwork

as I content…

You wait, but there are no lights. The elevator doesn't seem to be working, and you can't stand to wait any more. You get moving.

There's a joy in anticipation, you know? In already composing the email response you're hoping for before you even open your laptop at the diner?

I've sent off hundreds of pieces for publication before. My poems and essays and shorts are scattered ac…

"So that's what that does," I said as the stars went out, "I'd always wondered."

Nervous but needing to do something a bit dangerous, you decide to take the fire extinguisher off its hook and carry it with you. But where will you go? Back to the window, or to the end of the hallway ...the one with the classrooms to one side and th…

I stood squinting up at the main mast. It was clear sailing and I saw Lookout Lenny in the galley. That meant the crow's nest was empty. I checked over my shoulders and gripped the shroud. I always wanted to do this. The crew did it all the time.

I eased…

"HELP! Help! Help...."

There is nothing you can do for whoever was calling out. It's probably too late already. You never realized that you weren't alone in that building.

Feeling obscurely guilty, you stumble to your feet and move away from the rema…

Loping along the highway in a bustle of activity and a Winebagel Scampmaster, Ossiary Lefthook sprang bodily towards the Arkansas border, more or less staying upon the tarmacked line of road that went by the name of Interstate 83.2, or "The Tagliatelle Ba…

I hadn't quite expected Neptune to escalate quite so dramatically. Perhaps the great ship-of-the-line had already been in the area, perhaps the captain owed favours. Either way, we needed to get out.

Ryle squinted at the slowly banking silhouette.

"We c…

It's late and a thin, wispy fog has settled atop the streets. I don't know when it happened. Last I remembered, the sun was mid-set in a darkening sky. Now every street ended in a gray void. Did the fog creep in, floating like some otherworldly horror, or…

This laptop has served me well over the past few years, ever since I picked it up from the on-campus IT store. This makes it all the more depressing when I manage to break it.

I don't know how I did it, exactly, but a piece of plastic that shouldn't exis…

"Take care of her, Woost," said the faerie, lifting off from the pillow and flitting to the window. "She's important in ways only she will be able to understand."

"I will be the very air she breathes," the elemental promised.

"I know you will." And then…