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Center your story around one of the following: stargazing, lethargy, or a myth/legend.

Posted in Short Story on Aug 1, 2025

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✍️ 57 stories

Flickers in the Void

Submitted to Contest #314

She dreamed of a sky hungry enough to swallow every star—one by one, like candles snuffed by unseen fingers.The darkness wasn’t angry. It was starving.It swallowed light the way grief devours sound: slow, relentless, and without apology.When Maria woke, her window stood open. Outside, the night looked thinner, paler—as if the dream had seeped into the world and taken something with it.She hadn’t gone outside without a coat in weeks. That morning, the air felt strange—cold, but hollow, like breath without a body.No birdsong. Not the soft hush...

31 likes 4 comments 4
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Dad’s mythological machine

Submitted to Contest #314

As Jeffrey walked to the basement, he stopped to look at that old tarp covered machine, that his great grandfather built and was handed down. His father had told him about it when he was a kid. It did not look like much. It was an old piece of junk. He walked over to the deep freeze to grab some meat for dinner.Jeffrey had a simple life. He had a job at the local bank, and he never married. He fed Sylvester and grabbed his jacket, walked out the door and proceeded to begin another day of exactly the same thing.He took his car keys out of his...

24 likes 5 comments 5
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A Hunter's Plot

Submitted to Contest #314

Elderberry‘Never thought of murdering anyone until I started up the herb garden,’ said Fenella. She sipped the elderberry wine she’d so over-fermented, it’d bypassed fizzing for sizzling. Or maybe that was us, in the ponderous late-summer sun. ‘But this lot can really bring it out of you.’ I’d arrived at the allotment, some months ago, expecting sedate, solitary afternoons. Perhaps meditatively plucking a leaf here or there, having a cry about my empty nest, and seeking salvation through some nurture-based metaphor. Maybe I’d finally get to ...

20 likes 8 comments 8
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The Legend of Mere Noire: A Mike Dodge Histery

Submitted to Contest #314

CW: Themes of violence and substance abuse The first arc of the blade split the long plank bar, driving Boisfort expensively into the bottles and jugs on the back wall. Boisfort rose smelling of musk and sawdust and rye and corn whiskey and applejack and, most lamentably, the prized cognac delivered by train just that morning. Struggling to his feet, the behemoth roared an oath that might have moved Tarabeth Montgomery to a far more homicidal act had he used his adopted tongue. As it was, the petite, axe-wielding Methodist read the storm in ...

18 likes 15 comments 15
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'Round the Mammoth Way

Submitted to Contest #314

The worst thing about their father’s plan, as far as Aaron, Courteney, and Seth are concerned, is that most of their down time is outside of their coverage area, meaning that they will be off the grid every night for nearly two weeks. Their father, Joe Moser, had changed jobs from a company in California to one in New Hampshire. Unfortunately, due to something that nobody has been willing to explain to them, there is a two-week delay between when they had to move out of the San Jose house and into the Bedford one. Someone—they’re pretty sus ...

13 likes 10 comments 10
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July 32nd

Submitted to Contest #314

The heat. God, the heat. It's like being wrapped in wet towels, except the towels are made of air and you can't take them off. The asphalt's doing that shimmer thing again—no, wait, that's not right. It's night. Why would asphalt shimmer at night? Unless the streetlamps are hot enough, which they probably are. Everything’s hot here, even the moon looks like it's sweating.The moon looks tired. Like it couldn't be bothered to show up fully tonight.Del pushes through the back door and immediately regrets the wine. She doesn't really regret it. ...

13 likes 10 comments 10
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Star Goddess

Submitted to Contest #314

It’s the last day of school and Eleanor is day dreaming. She sits on her knees in her classroom chair, chin resting in her hands, her eyes unfocused. A soft stream of sunlight pours onto her desk. Someone calls her name. She perks up out of her daze. A dozen blinking eyes stare in her direction. Her classmates are giggling. “Eleanor,” the teacher repeats her name. “It’s your turn.” Faintly remembering what her class was doing, she turns absent-mindedly towards a random page in the book. They were talking about summer, the science of seasons,...

12 likes 2 comments 2
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Chronicon Angliae, 1127

Submitted to Contest #314

Many men both saw and heard a great number of huntsmen hunting. The huntsmen were black, huge, and hideous, and rode on black horses and on black he-goats, and their hounds were jet black, with eyes like saucers, and horrible. This was seen in the very deer park of the town of Peterborough, and in all the woods that stretch from that same town to Stamford, and in the night the monks heard them sounding and winding their horns.Henry d'Angely, 1127 Brother Cuthbert was always the last to go to bed. His was the task of walking around after eve...

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Jeremy's Eyes

Submitted to Contest #314

Jeremy’s Eyes It was a very toasty and warm night in Sedona, Arizona on July 15, 2028. The rugged, jagged and towering, somewhat mountainous red rocks were a sharp contrast to the multitude and brilliant audience of stars. Laura felt these luminous eyes observing her during her late-night walk. She loved hiking through the maze of familiar trails near the infamous and otherworldly Bell Rock. Furthermore, she had always been unusually fearless, as if she felt protected by an unseen force. That was how she liked it, as thirty-five year old Lau...

10 likes 7 comments 7
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Like the Dead?

Submitted to Contest #314

Lethargy was common at this stage, Joyce said. After all, you had lost a lot of blood, and even more energy. Were you and your fellows not adequately prepared... You sighed, removing the end of that statement from your thoughts. It was all you could do. All you should be doing, not worrying yourself over Raquel's worst fears that did not come true. It was a risky move, you all knew that, but it was done, and you were alright. You did not perish in the circle. You did not die in your friend's arms. You did not need to fulfill your promise to...

9 likes 2 comments 2
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WHERE THE SKY BROKE

Submitted to Contest #314

No one really saw the boy arrive. He wasn’t born in the village, and none of the old women recalled his mother waddling swollen with him through the market stalls or moaning in the birthing hut. Yet one day, as the sun carved its way across a cloudless sky, he appeared beside the cracked fountain in the square. Barefoot. Dusty. Eating a peach. He said his name was Lyre. When asked whose son he was, he shrugged. When asked where he came from, he looked up. "Where the sky broke," he said. "Past the line of trees. Beyond the bones." That summer...

9 likes 5 comments 5
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Nellie, the Hat Man, & Me

Submitted to Contest #314

My baby sister Sally’s crying wakes me up. Sally is five years old and I’m 10. There are only two bedrooms in our house, so we sleep in the same room. It’s a whimpering kind of cry. The kind of crying that a little girl does when she doesn’t get her way, not the crying she does when she’s hurt. Still, I hate to hear her cry, so I get out of bed and go over to where she’s lying. I reach out in the darkness until I feel her curly, blonde hair and stroke her head as if she was my dog, Scruffy. “Hey, there, sissy, what’s wrong?” I whisper. I am...

9 likes 3 comments 3
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What of it?

Submitted to Contest #314

As Jaims watched the flaming carcass of a ship plunge into the depths of the forest behind his house, he was reminded that the mundane routine of life could be interrupted at any moment. Sometimes people do it to themselves, other times it is done to them. Jaims kicked his feet against the wall above his bed and dangled his head over the side of it. He held his gaze out the window for only a few moments and decided the latter had just occurred. His mind went back to being absent until a small hum of a song he had never heard began...

8 likes 2 comments 2
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arachne: a twist in the tale

Submitted to Contest #314

There is a loom resting in the corner of a house. It throws shadows upon tiled walls as the sun dances across the sky. A woman threads her fingers through strings of multifarious coruscating hues that hang limply from the beam. They tangle together like vines, riotous colors clashing, baring teeth at one other. These colors are bold, so different from the pale, insipid ones commonly used throughout Lydia. Those ones lack lustre, lack life. Women have resigned themselves to the dullness of the esoteric art that is called weaving. Often, they ...

8 likes 2 comments 2
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~ The Great Cleansing ~

Submitted to Contest #314

~ The Great Cleansing ~ After breakfast Jimmy stood and addressed his “family.” Freshly baked sugar cookies on sheets of wax paper covered all the flat areas in the kitchen and the rich aroma hung thick in the air like a blanket of warm, sweet butter. Jimmy said, “Everybody is invited, which means expected, to help decorate and ice the Christmas cookies because there are a shitload of them. There are blue, yellow, and white icings. We have sprinkles and those little silver balls. What are they called, Cuz?”“Little silver balls,” Corrine answ...

8 likes 2 comments 2
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