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Start or end your story with a character looking out at a river, ocean, or the sea.

Posted in Short Story on Oct 10, 2025

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✍️ 135 stories

North Brother Island

Shortlisted for Contest #324 ⭐️

An old man, a young woman and a helmsman pulled up at the boat ramp, slick with East River slime. The short voyage had been a little rocky, this not really being a river but a saltwater estuary of conflicting tides.A crow’s mile from Manhattan, the ghost island was sedately fragmenting, brick-by-brick, frame-by-frame, beneath a kudzo canopy. They say it is now a bird sanctuary, a plumaged excuse for Parks and Recreation to sit on their backsides for rolling decades debating what to do with it. Few people were allowed there, but the old man w...

44 likes 48 comments 48
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Salt Does Not Forget

Submitted to Contest #324

Content warning: emotional abuse, pregnancy loss. Some things don’t disappear when they’re gone. They wait. The tide always came home. Maren never quite managed to. Most mornings she found herself here again, though she couldn’t have said why. Maybe the sea remembered her. Maybe that was enough. The road ran until it forgot itself and became water; each dawn she stood at that seam, stone loosening into tide, and watched the ocean retreat as if it had somewhere better to be. She had started coming the week she turned fifty, when she woke with...

34 likes 16 comments 16
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Seagull

Submitted to Contest #324

The sea was there, and even though she could only see it, that sliver of greyish blue barely visible from the kitchen window, it was nevertheless still reassuring in its presence. Reassuring to know that it stretched much further down past the roofs of her neighbours, past the entirety of Craig’s Street and past anything she had ever seen from her window. Reassuring to think of its everlasting presence and the continuous push and pull of the eternal tide. Even behind glass and walls she felt it brought to her mind and body a refreshing, cool...

28 likes 13 comments 13
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At The Shore Between Worlds

Submitted to Contest #324

Adrian sat on the shore, forlorn and insignificant against the white, gleaming sand that cocooned his body. He clutched fistfuls of the warm sand, then let his arm hang in the air. Slowly, he unfurled his fingers, allowing the grains to slip through the cracks. Again and again. He had become a living hourglass, waiting, refusing to let it stop flowing. As long as it did, he could wait a while longer. He gazed at the horizon, at each new, darker stroke of pink staining the late afternoon sky; at its yellows and oranges disappearing below the ...

26 likes 10 comments 10
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At the Edge

Submitted to Contest #324

Elias sat perched in his seat, eyes intent on the vast stretch of water that melded into the horizon. The tides were forceful, smashing the rising waves against a blanket of fine, white sand. He raised his coffee to his lips and savored the bluntness of the morning, the familiar taste of resolution. He wanted something beyond grasp, a fleeting thought that retreated with the pull of the water back into its primordial depths. His instinct was to follow, rocking with the steady drone of the ocean. It was a gentle lulling that bought time for h...

23 likes 6 comments 6
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The Secrets A River Can Hold

Shortlisted for Contest #324 ⭐️

{This story has mentions of death and dying.} All he can hear is the water. Loud- too loud. A screaming rush that fills each ear and swirls in his nose. The rapids are strong and Bennet can’t keep his head up long enough to get oxygen. Hands grasping on anything and nothing all at the same time- just the air and water that keeps churning and throwing him around.It was an accident. Bennet was trying to get home faster. It’s never been dangerous to cross the river. Not normally anyways. But it rained last night; stormed actually. The water is ...

21 likes 7 comments 7
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Salt of the Earth

Submitted to Contest #324

It smelled like rotting fish, potato chips, and the bottom of New York City’s oldest dumpster, but it also relaxed something deep inside of me, a muscle in my soul that no amount of meditation can touch. And the birds we saw – oh, the birds we saw! Pelicans, storks, and cranes. Long-legged blue-tinted creatures with stoic poses. Brooding and shy beings with stunning beaks longer than their bodies. In the early 2000s, we ran home to this place.We ran out with our binoculars and played house in the scorching sun, surrounded by this sea so choc...

20 likes 5 comments 5
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Low tide confessions

Submitted to Contest #324

The wind has teeth. I taste salt on my lips before the ocean even comes into view, and my eyes water - not from emotion but the way a cold slap to the face makes you tear up, automatic. The notebook in my hand weighs more than physics should allow. I check the cover: “Book of Mistakes.” It’s not the original title, but the rebranding happened when I started logging failures instead of feelings. The trail is rutted into memory from generations of dogs and people with unfinished business. The beach is visible in bands between the clumps of ice...

18 likes 3 comments 3
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Night swim

Submitted to Contest #324

Dark upon dark, black on black. The moon was hiding together with the sun below the night horizon. Absent from the night sky, ignoring the events which were yet to unfold. In the black darkness, hearing became the prime sense, the only reference point to the mind regarding distance. Sounds close at hand in the nighttime darkness were alarms, warnings, to be aware of motion and movement. The crashing waves dominated all sound, far and wide in the dark black scene. There were shades of colour; shades of darkness, with indistinct flashes of lig...

18 likes 2 comments 2
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What the River Tells Us

Submitted to Contest #324

I dip my hand in the river. The water continues its journey, unfazed by my presence. I try to scoop it up as if my hands were perfectly shaped. The sound of a branch breaking startles me. I turn around and find nothing. I dry my hand on my dress. Another footstep. I look up to a boy. He stared at me curiously. He stood on the other side, his hands in his pockets.​“What are you doing?” I asked.​His little green eyes stared back at me. I could tell he wanted to say something, but was unable to do it. He looked down at his feet and ran. I ran a...

17 likes 3 comments 3
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Upon the Far Distant Horizon

Submitted to Contest #324

The wind, like a mischievous spirit, tugged and tangled at Argwyn’s cascading golden tresses as she stood at the edge of the cliff, staring out at the vastness of the sea. Unchecked, silken tendrils of hair escaped the loose confines of the deceptively fragile silver diadem she wore, a delicate piece crafted by the finest silversmiths to represent the leaves of the great Vaylinwood trees of her home. She stood unwavering against the wind, her eyes—blue as the summer sky and deeper than the fathomless depths of the ocean—fixed intently upon t...

17 likes 10 comments 10
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Redemption

Submitted to Contest #324

RedemptionJune, the month the Colorado River gorges itself on mountain snowmelt as it picks up steam, weaving its way down the Western Slope. Rapids, calm, wide, narrow, shallow, deep, left turn, right turn. Six million years in the making, but it was today that mattered.Carl often came to this place at river’s edge, the magnetic pull of the imagined and the unforgettable. The images played in his mind as often as the sun rises, creating a tapestry of memories and dreams competing for places in his mind. God made the human brain in such a wa...

17 likes 2 comments 2
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Into the abyss

Submitted to Contest #324

Blue, unmoving, ominous. The stillness disturbing. This is how the ocean looks to me now. Sat outside on a wooden bench draped in blankets, looking out to the array of pebbles that blend effortlessly with the sea. A shiver rushes down my spine with every crash of a wave, a sound that once soothed my soul. My throat closes, muscles trying to remember how to breathe. My hands around my cup of tea tremble slightly. I take a deep breath. The ocean was once something I viewed as a beacon of hope, something that made me feel like anything was poss...

16 likes 4 comments 4
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Land, ho!

Submitted to Contest #324

George looked out over the ocean. As far as he could see, there was nothing but deep gray sea, teeming and rolling under equally gray, cloud filled skies. He felt his spirits plummet. He had hoped to see faraway, distant shores, some sort of mark on the horizon. The mark of Terra Firma. Mother Earth, land. It wasn’t to be. At least not yet. He didn’t know exactly when that momentous occasion would occur. The moment when one of the sailors on board would yell triumphantly “Land, ho!”George had almost forgotten what day it was and how long he ...

15 likes 5 comments 5
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Awakened

Submitted to Contest #324

Nathan stumbled across the sand, falling to his hands and knees and dropping the revolver in the sand. He retrieved it, shaking the sand from it and shoving it into his jacket pocket. The car, half buried in a dune behind him, the tires kicking loose sand in the air, the roar of the motor overlapped the sounds in his head. Explosions. Screaming.Take cover!Automatic fire titter-tattered into the distance. Bullets snap through the air.Corpsman!Stop, stop, please make it stop...He scrambled to his feet, hands clutching his ears as he ran and fe...

15 likes 0 comments 0
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