I found myself on the seventeenth floor of my father’s apartment building, staring at the door I hadn’t passed through in three years. The hallway smelled of synthetic pine and recycled air. My neural implant pinged softly, reminding me that I had 14 hours and 37 minutes to clear the space before the building’s automated […]
They said it was just a worksheet. Take one and pass it back. The paper was warm from the copier, still curling slightly at the edges, and when I touched it, it felt like static, like the hum in your fingers before a storm. On the page were dots. Evenly spaced. Too neat to be […]
I found him at dawn, asleep beneath the old oak that marks the eastern edge of our property. Not sprawled or curled against the cold, but positioned like someone who’d chosen their spot with intention. His leather coat was too clean for a drifter, his boots caked with earth that wasn’t ours. Somewhere, days ago, […]
A glitter-soaked nightmare from the fever dream of 1979. Randy “Razor” Romano slammed back a warm bottle of cherry-flavored wine cooler, cranked the wheel with one hand, and flipped his rearview mirror to avoid the shame. Somewhere behind him was Los Angeles. Far behind him, in fact, judging by the endless tunnel of pines, fog, […]
When I heard the cue, I didn’t realize it was coming from me. It was a low harmonic, like a cello being played through a glass of water. Subtle. Beautiful, even. It swelled when I looked at the ad on my feed, a family laughing in a sunlit kitchen, framed in soft focus as the […]
Venice, 1474 Even through the mask, the smell of charred flesh lingered. Giovanni Trismegistus wiped the blood from his hands onto his apron and studied the body laid out before him on the table. The corpse’s mouth remained fixed in a silent scream, eyes wide with the final terror of a man who had glimpsed […]
In 2022 I lost years worth of unpublished writing. Now, living in Cancun, in my own sort of monk-like retreat, I have cracked open the corrupted file that once held my hopes and dreams of a future earning a living as a writer. Not everything is there, not everything is complete, and what remains is […]
It takes a farmer to understand the Rapture. I was in the field at dawn, knees deep in wet cucumber rows, when the rain started, soft and steady, like a whispered warning. The patter on the leaves reminded me of a lullaby. But today it carried something else, as if nature herself were signaling something […]
The dark woods whispered with the secrets of countless shadows, and the air was thick with uncertainty. Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and their lovable Great Dane, Scooby-Doo, found themselves wandering through the tangled undergrowth, each step a symphony of breaking twigs and rustling leaves. “Like, are you sure we’re going the right way, Scoob?” Shaggy’s […]
Dr. Aldo Betta stared at the glass enclosure where the cockroach moved with deliberate precision across a small branch. Delicate circuitry glinted on its carapace under the laboratory lights, a marvel of bioengineering barely the size of an SD card. The device represented years of painstaking work, the culmination of his research into neural interfaces. […]