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Center your story around someone who has (or is given) the ability to time travel.

Posted in Short Story on Aug 22, 2025

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✍️ 109 stories

A Doorway on Lenox

Winner of Contest #317 🏆

Theo had been staring at the same sentence so long the letters bled together. Lineage in Postmodern Black Poetics. He mouthed the words once more, flat and sour on his tongue. His coffee from the bodega on 121st sat cold beside him, the surface gone slick and oily, but he drank anyway.The radiator groaned in protest, the pipes rattling like brass warming up before a set.Theo pressed a palm against the open book, willing the words to stay still. For a moment they held. Then the page trembled beneath his hand.He told himself it was fatigue.The...

87 likes 79 comments 79
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A Shotgun Through Fog

Submitted to Contest #317

He appeared out of nowhere, bleeding profusely. I ran to help, but he stopped me. He held a small, octagon-shaped device and motioned for me to take it. I grabbed the blood-covered object and noticed its edges contained strange, otherworldly markings. "You must stop her!" The dying man coughed up blood. "The Lion must survive!" He fell, but regained his balance. "If she succeeds. Earth will undergo a hundred-year civil war. The Earth you know will never exist." He attempted to speak again, but started convulsing, and fell face down on the co...

32 likes 20 comments 20
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Time Perverts

Submitted to Contest #317

Content Warning: Impossible sexual implications. From the Peabody's mezzanine, I watch as the Duckmaster in his crimson regalia arrives to usher the ducks from the hotel fountain. What began as a 1930s prank fueled by Tennessee whiskey is now a time-honored tradition. Each morning at 11, the ducks slip into the marble fountain with practiced ease, ripples of time spreading outward beneath the crystal chandeliers, a wholesome counterbalance to the sordid spin cycle of my own life. Now as dusk approaches, they will begin their gentle ascent to...

23 likes 12 comments 12
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Descendant

Submitted to Contest #317

Somewhere in Space, Year 3072 Hark was tense in the pilot’s seat. He closed his third eyelids for total darkness and imagined his crew was back and safe, Si by his side. He felt a moment of peace. But pings from the Nexus’s automated operations disturbed that almost immediately. He lifted his opaque lids with a sigh and looked out the panoramic window through his shaded secondary lids, allowing him to view the spacescape. Zantanor’s twin suns were soft golden orbs in a sky the shade of unbuffed steel, while red Zantanor itself bulged from hi...

21 likes 3 comments 3
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Ocean of Time

Submitted to Contest #317

The child returned from the tidepools, singing, and carrying an object shaped like a giant egg. "It's the egg of an ancient creature. I found it. I was there." Her voice bubbled with wonder and joy. Wet and panting, the four-legged shadow that followed her everywhere, jumped around her, playing and twisting, wagging its tail. “Kakahiaka Noe, Foggy Morning, good dog, come here, silly thing.” The young girl's high pitched voice mingled with the sound of the waves. Back at the village many serious eyes watched from the hill. "What is this nonse...

20 likes 14 comments 14
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God's Time

Submitted to Contest #317

As always I end up in front of the big two story, wood shingle house, that means so much to me. The wind has suddenly come up. I'm standing by the walkway that leads up to the front porch and lost in thought. My mind years in the past. I feel the arthritis in my ankles and know I’m not young anymore. Why do I walk by here so often? What’s the point? I tell myself the past is dead over and over again, but my longing keeps leaking through like an unwanted habit. It’s overwhelming now. Filling me up. “Charlie, what the hell you doing just stand...

19 likes 3 comments 3
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The Bell

Submitted to Contest #317

The word slides into my cell like a rat under the door. Possibility. I keep my eyes on the ceiling, on its geography—the hairline crack running from the light fixture to the water stain over the toilet, like a little river delta of rust and time. For eleven years, I have followed its slow progress, a millimeter at a time. The Lawyer speaks. His words are for some other man who measures life in appeals or stays of execution. "...they made a mistake in the trial, Arthur. The judge... he gave the jury bad instructions. It's a real opening." A f...

16 likes 8 comments 8
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Time Is All We Have, My Friend.

Submitted to Contest #317

Reginald saw no change at all in the man sat across from him. He didn’t appear to have even moved. His old face was still creased with deep lines; his cheeks were redder than they used to be and what was left of his hair was just as grey as always. The damn fool had gone and gotten old. He hadn’t truly noticed until that moment. But then, when was the last time he had really looked at his friend? It never seemed necessary. He knew the twit's face well enough, having to deal with it every damn day for the past thirty years. No matter. He was ...

16 likes 15 comments 15
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You're the TV

Submitted to Contest #317

If you could travel to the future, would you? Would you risk knowing an outcome and thereby realising it, ensnared in a self-fulfilling prophecy that mightn’t have eventuated had you not known?On the nightstand sat a silver bowl like a miniature satellite dish or a metal hibiscus, an antenna in its centre.“So, it’s a time machine?” said Melissa, cross-legged on white sheets.“Not quite,” said Nora. “It’s a time dish – it collects signal, waves, from existing superpositions yet to be collapsed.”“Alternate realities, then?”“Alternate potential ...

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The Trouble with Nuns

Submitted to Contest #317

She was several minutes late for her appointment with Bram Dallaglio, and the reason for it was stupid. It was raining, or at least mizzling. The climate rarely produced a satisfying downpour, but preferred to wet the little people with light and persistent moisture, like being smothered by a wet towel. Her hair, straightened that morning, was prone to frizz, and she was vain enough to know that Mr Dallaglio was quite uniquely handsome. She saw him immediately, sitting in a booth with a pint of Guinness, sporting a suit and tie. If he appear...

16 likes 18 comments 18
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Time Wars

Submitted to Contest #317

Scientists say that as we approach the speed of light, time slows down for us compared to everyone else. If we actually made the round trip, we’d come back younger than the people we left behind. We might experience only a day, while a year passes for everyone else.****Emily grew up skipping time. Everyone with the gene could do it. She used her power for the little things—jumping past the wait at train stations, fast-forwarding through boring afternoons, or once, when she was in a car accident, skipping straight to the wail of sirens, pain ...

16 likes 9 comments 9
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The Endless Downfall of Bradley Longram

Submitted to Contest #317

The afternoon sun beat down, prickling the back of Officer Bradley Longram’s hand. It was his first week, fresh out of the academy, and as a newly minted, duly appointed officer of the law in the Cedar Falls police department, he had answered the calls nobody else wanted. The noise complaints from the elderly busybodies, the cats stuck in trees, the reports of a serial defecator were the calls dispatch gave to him. He stood in an empty parking lot, save from a brown 1991 Honda Civic. It was only a few minutes before he had opened the back do...

13 likes 7 comments 7
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Chrono BnB

Submitted to Contest #317

On Thursday a bunch of us data jocks got together over drinks to celebrate end-of-quarter. We ran out of conversation, so people started boasting about where they’d spent their last vacation: skiing in Dubai and surfing in Antarctica. That’s when Lancaster, the renowned “early adopter” in the office, brought up time-travel. He’d spent a wild weekend sampling the Roaring Twenties in a gin joint packed with flappers. It had been arranged through ChronoPort, the company that had taken time travel out of CERN and privatized it. “Think of chronos...

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Hollow’s End

Submitted to Contest #317

When Nathan discovers a mysterious note from his grandmother, he is drawn to a forgotten town no map remembers. In Hollow’s End, he finds a past alive and a warning that the town is destined to vanish — unless he preserves its memory. The first time Nathan saw the name Hollow’s End, it was written in his grandmother’s hand. He’d been sorting through a box of her things in the attic — photographs curling at the edges, brittle letters, smudged recipe cards. Tucked inside a cracked leather journal was a folded scrap of paper. The ink had faded,...

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Just Three Minutes

Submitted to Contest #317

He did it. He looked at the limp rat body and then back at the screens on the cluttered desk, then back at the chamber where the rat lay. I wasn’t dead, He wasn’t even sure if it qualified as sleeping. Ethan would explain it as the conscious mind leaving the body and relinquishing control of the autonomic system, which then maintains all necessary bodily functions. At the same time, the conscious mind shifts to another time. The numbers over the chamber door counted down from three minutes. Ethan watched with anticipation, reaching for his ...

12 likes 5 comments 5
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