Tag: short fiction
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Crumbs
You see, it’s the small things that damn a man. Not the great sins—they’re too obvious. It’s the quiet compromises, the clever validations, the glimmering, idiotic comforts we make with the world. It begins so modestly—so innocently. The shopkeeper who nods approvingly at your coat, the way his eyes soften when he sees you’ve chosen…
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GASPAR DE LA NUIT
There are accounts—fragmentary, contradictory—of a man by that name. A minor poet in the salons of Paris, a soldier lost in the Napoleonic wars, a condemned prisoner who vanished from his cell before the executioner arrived. In each case, the same detail: he was last seen at dusk. A manuscript surfaced once, bearing his name…
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Aphrodisiac Jacket
1 The heat signatures moved across the screen in slow, rhythmic pulses, as if the algorithm itself was breathing. Gaza, 3:42 AM. A suspected militant, nothing more than a glowing red figure in the machine’s gaze, exited a cinderblock home, stretching his arms in the night air. A drone hovered above, invisible to him, watching.…
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Block Time
“Time is a junkie. Shoots up eternity and comes down as minutes. You’re not living in time—you’re processing it.” He sat cross-legged on a floor that never aged, scribbling with a pen that never ran out, his hand looping eternal cursive over blank sheets that devoured ink without a mark. This was Block Time—slabs of…
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Pipeline
“You don’t like me. Hell, you think I’m despicable. You sit in your faculty lounges and tweet from your ivory towers about ‘consultants ruining education,’ about ‘corporate greed infecting the academy,’ and you pin that target squarely on my back. But let me tell you something: You want me here. You need me here. Because…
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Firestarter
Scene: Boardroom, Stratodyne Aerospace Headquarters, circa Now The conference room shimmered with chrome surfaces and LED screens, a mausoleum for billion-dollar decisions. Aloysius “Al” Riparini, CEO of Stratodyne Aerospace and occasional reader of Popular Mechanics, slouched in his ergonomic chair like a sullen Apollo. He forward, hands steepled, his face carved in the grim expression…
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Riddles
1. What am I? I am the shadow of regret cast by two cruel suns, but I burn less bright. I am the bitter fruit that is eaten, but with fewer seeds. I am the choice that stings, yet I sting less. I am the poisoned apple, but with a sweeter bite. 2. What am…
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All the way Down
Imagine a small, unremarkable town called Nered. The residents of Nered had a peculiar habit that became the stuff of local legend: they insisted on “marrying down” intellectually. It was a tradition as old as the town itself, rooted in a philosophy that prized mediocrity as the true mark of contentment. The townsfolk believed that…
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The Tower
Act I: The Creation Ennio leaned over the glowing holographic drafting table, his fingers tracing the edges of a spiraling design that floated midair. In the dim light of his studio, the city outside shimmered like a restless constellation, its towers clawing at the sky in jagged competition. His studio, a sleek capsule perched above…