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Center your story on a character filled with love and fear in equal measure.

Posted in Character on Oct 25, 2024

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✍️ 65 stories

Sweetbread: An Epilogue

Winner of Contest #274 🏆

My sister has always had a soft heart. Soft as sweetbread.She cried after the old woman, despite everything. Maybe because of everything. I remember holding her as she wept, both of us covered in soot, her fingers scalded from holding shut the oven door. After the tears, she was quiet. She trailed me through the awful house with its sweetbread walls and sugared windows. I found the clothes we’d arrived in, offered up her kirtle, and she donned it without a word. She showed no whisper of response when we found the treasure in the attic, ...

163 likes 61 comments 61
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Hope

Submitted to Contest #274

DenialWhen the contractions began, I panicked, which was not the best thing for a woman in labour to do. However, a woman in labour also shouldn’t be on her own, yet here I was, alone, afraid and exhausted. I was not ready.In the past six months, I had aged twenty years. I know it’s only been six months, because I’d just had my three month unltrasound and found out that we were having a girl when they arrived. The media called them Aliens, then they called them Conquerors, then they didn’t call them anything anymore. All media, all powe...

35 likes 31 comments 31
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Morbid Infatuation

Submitted to Contest #274

Morbid InfatuationThere is a love that is born out of wedlock. It has one quails in reverie at its awful hypnotism, roiling a desire that is irrepressible and irremovable, beautiful and frightful, inalienable and ineluctable. Deathless is its imprint on the soul, and stultified is its fool whom it renders resistless. My tale all began when Eve fell, like forbidden fruit from the garden of Eden, and graced me with her delicious sin. I had been content with my life, till her fearsome presence dawned upon me, as of a foreboding, and had me...

33 likes 6 comments 6
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My Monster, My Ghost, My Love

Submitted to Contest #274

I’ve heard it said, “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”My monster, my ghost, my love – it hurts and haunts and breaks my heart how you manage to be all three to me at the same time. How you manage to be my everything to something to nothing, all before the leaves on our tree change from green to yellow to red – to gone. Gone, I see you but you may as well see through me, whenever you even can meet my eyes anymore without the tears you fight not to show me as if that would make you ...

26 likes 14 comments 14
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THAT THING ON THE HILL

Shortlisted for Contest #274 ⭐️

(Warning: Gore, bad words)Ya hear scientists and suchlike, -ologists of all stripes, they go say they’re reasonable. Ethical. Good. You show ‘em the whole history of their profession, how for every Carl Sagan or Marie Curie, there’s ten Unit 731’s and an electroshock clinic and an Ahnenerbe and a Tuskegee and every kind of secret pervert and sadist and psychopath under the sun, how the AIs they’ve built help our overlordly parasites in grey corporate Olympii suck up what’s left o’ our humanity, how their drugs work only for symptoms and prof...

26 likes 10 comments 10
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The Kilderchern

Submitted to Contest #274

I know you’ve read a thousand stories about women who have fallen in love with a vampire, with a werewolf, with one of the beautiful Fae. But this is my story, and it doesn’t involve any of the creatures you may have seen in films or read in books, because what he was, and what I am is something else.Are you ready to listen?Since the breaking of the first wave, he has existed; a creature of God, but lost and long-forgotten. For years he walked the wilderness alone, and when it happened that people came, they ran from him, not understanding h...

23 likes 4 comments 4
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Shore Leave

Submitted to Contest #274

Pavel knew a ship with him in the crew would never go down. It wasn’t because he was a fine seaman, and it sure as hell wasn’t because he was lucky. No, Pavel‘s ship would never go down because even the sea didn’t want him. Pavel was the only customer in the nameless place. On the stool next to him sat a pair of broken old work boots. There was no sign of their owner other than a neat parade of empty glasses on the stretch of bar in front of the stool that the boots occupied. At the end of the bamboo bar a record player popped and wheezed. ...

23 likes 15 comments 15
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Brushstrokes of Betrayal

Submitted to Contest #274

While waiting for the curator, Peter stood transfixed in the museum; his gaze locked onto a painting that seemed to vibrate with an eerie energy. A light from above focused on the painting, seemingly bringing her to life, while the rest of the area around him seemed dark and mysterious. The girl within the frame stared back at him with a haunting blend of sorrow and yearning, her eyes pulling him in like a siren's call. He felt a strange connection to the magic of the art that somehow breathed life into the scene before him. “I see you found...

19 likes 5 comments 5
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Precious

Submitted to Contest #274

*** Contains some strong language ***February 2014‘Mammy, I’m going to be a mammy.’Lynne was in the kitchen when the girls arrived.‘I’m sorry, Mum.’She’d been preparing veg for the sausage casserole. A winter warmer, a family favourite – enough to go round for her and Greg, and Ruby and Saphie and Jade. Would take about an hour, could be heated up if needs be, a pot full of potatoes just in case; Greg and Jade often ate on the hoof, and Ruby and Saphie sometimes brought their boyfriends back. The fiancé now in Ruby’s case. She’d have to get...

16 likes 9 comments 9
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The Village Witch

Submitted to Contest #274

“It’s getting so very damp lately… I worry about my little man’s lungs in this kinda weather.” “I know, Maggie; this wet, cold, miserable nastiness is just awful!” There was a companionable silence between the lifelong friends for several minutes before Lara cleared her throat and added, “You know you could always go see… well… I mean, go out to the cottage. You know what everyone says. They haven’t turned anybody away yet.” The color slowly drained out of Maggie’s already pale complexion as Lara spoke, leaving her friend wondering if Maggie...

15 likes 2 comments 2
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Liam the Lovable, But Fearful, Leprechaun

Submitted to Contest #274

“Liam the Lovable, But Fearful, Leprechaun” By Edward J. McCoul There are two things Liam O’Shaughnessy loved more than anything in the world: gold and friendship. And there were two things he feared more than anything else: heights and rainbows. Which was unfortunate, since he was a leprechaun. Every time he went to check on his gold at the end of a rainbow, he’d have to climb up a hill or down a rocky slope. “That gold won’t guard itself, Liam,” he’d mutter to himself, inching along on shaky legs. Then he’d see the shimmering rainbow stret...

15 likes 1 comment 1
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Sam

Submitted to Contest #274

SamBy Georges Martin LagasséI had a dream once. In it, I lay on the warm grass, the sun tickling my fur, and beside me, a small human giggled, his tiny hand resting gently on my back. There was laughter – mine, his, and the laughter of another human, a tall figure with a voice that made me feel safe. I dreamed of being loved and being safe. But that was a dream, and dreams don’t live in cages.The cage was all I had ever known. Its bars were rusted, the metal cold against my skin. They had taken me away from my mother before her warmth could ...

14 likes 0 comments 0
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Heart of Fire and Tail of Ice, Comets sing you Lullabies

Submitted to Contest #274

She couldn’t tear her eyes away from it. Out of everything that could be holding her attention, it had to be the single shoe in the middle of the road. Tipped over onto its side, caked in enough ash and dust that she couldn’t tell what its original color had been. It was small.Alone. Tara slammed her eyes closed and tipped her head back. The smoke and rubble had settled enough that she could see a dusting of stars in the fading light of the sky. It would be dark soon. She’d known, in an abstract sort of way, that things like t...

12 likes 3 comments 3
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fugue

Submitted to Contest #274

On the evening of Halloween, Jason held hands with a ghoul beside a pond. Their inverted, elongated reflections walked together upon the water’s placid surface. In the distance, somewhere near the pond’s center, far beyond where their stretched bodies could reach, a fish splashed lightly, flashing its tender white belly. Along the shore, reeds whistled gently as cool fall air nudged them to and fro. No one else walked beside the pond this evening. Award-winning neurobiologist; groundbreaking research; and of course, Nobel Prize Winner — thes...

11 likes 1 comment 1
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Lament

Submitted to Contest #274

“I want to go home!” “Sit here, this is your home!” “No!” And then you slowly lower yourself onto the bed, your gaze drifting away. “You know, my house has a green meadow that slopes down to the river. When I sneak through the thorny bushes, I dip my feet into the water full of pebbles that glisten in the moonlight. As a child, I caught fish with my hands and splashed my feet in the shallows. And on the other side of my house, pine trees rise up, waking me in the morning by hitting the windows with their branches. The wind howls and bends th...

11 likes 2 comments 2
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