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Your character meets someone who changes their life forever.

Posted in Short Story on Aug 8, 2025

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✍️ 55 stories

Julia and Robert

Shortlisted for Contest #315 ⭐️

My favorite student just died. I hated that guy. Julia slammed her journal shut, sat back in her chair, and remembered. It had never been her intended profession. After all, those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. But right from the beginning, Julia found she had a knack for it. In her mind’s eye, she always envisioned herself as a powerful woman of industry, but even as a freshman in college, her classmates would seek her out, knowing she could translate the professors’ sleep-inducing lectures into language they could understand. Julia h...

30 likes 9 comments 9
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Foxglove

Submitted to Contest #315

To exist in prison is to be suspended in a jar of formaldehyde—preserved, observed, never quite alive. The cell is a mausoleum, and I its most charming corpse. The walls, jaundiced with the stains of a thousand sleepless hands, close in at night like the jaws of some ancient beast. My reflection in the polished steel of the sink is a study in contrasts: a face too handsome for these surroundings, features carved with the careful malice of a Renaissance devil—angular jaw, lips soft and misleading, eyes pale as a winter sun, quick to flicker w...

21 likes 13 comments 13
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Spin the Bottle

Submitted to Contest #315

The basement smells of buttered popcorn, sweat, and something faintly sweet—vanilla candles burning low on a cluttered shelf. Shadows cling to the corners, and the air feels thick with the heat of too many bodies in one room.The kids are older than me. They sprawl across beanbags and a sagging brown couch that smells of stale cigarettes. They’re talking and laughing like they’ve known each other forever. Their laughter overlaps in a way that feels, at thirteen, like a language I don’t yet speak. I hover near the snack table, the cold curve o...

21 likes 26 comments 26
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Beneath the Cypress Shadows

Submitted to Contest #315

I arrived in Dubrovnik at the end of September, when the air had that peculiar mix of summer's fading warmth and autumn's crisp promise. The tourists had thinned; the Stradun was quieter. The locals, freed from the constant rush of summer, moved more slowly, chatting in doorways, their voices mingling with the scent of coffee drifting from the cafés. I had come here not as a tourist but as a translator on a short freelance contract. A week of work, maybe two, helping a small museum near Cavtat prepare an exhibition for English...

18 likes 4 comments 4
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… So Grows the Tree

Submitted to Contest #315

Content Warning: Contains domestic violence, as well as implied alcohol abuse and indirect references to anti-homosexual behavior. Author's Note: This is a first for me, not only a second submission in the same contest, but the first time I've written multiple stories about the same character. I don't have room with "… Not as I Do" to make this comment, but both stories stand on their own in my opinion. I wrote this one as a prequel to the other, but I believe that the order doesn't matter. I hope that both are good. Please let me know what ...

17 likes 6 comments 6
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The Day I Met the Wrong Person at Exactly the Right Time

Submitted to Contest #315

He didn’t rescue me. He didn’t stay. But he left me with no way back to who I was. I was sitting on the cold metal bench outside the train station—the one with the gum stuck underneath that’s been there since the ’90s—waiting for a train I had no intention of boarding. I wasn’t going anywhere. That was the whole point. I’d been there for over an hour, watching people with places to be and lives to live, while my coffee went from hot to lukewarm to that perfect bacterial petri-dish temperature. I’d been invisible all day. Which was exactly wh...

16 likes 15 comments 15
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Matthew (1)

Submitted to Contest #315

Matthew (1) 5:1 - 2 He found his way over the sharp rocks. His sandals might as well have been his bare feet, they were so shabby and thin. It was a pain that might discourage other men, but He was driven by the words in His heart. The words burned His lips. The pain of His body would not challenge His faith until much later when His arms are hanging from the nails piercing His wrists. The word "forsaken" had no meaning to Him now. It hid in the shadows of His mind and on the other side of this mountain. Today He climbed the bright side, wit...

15 likes 4 comments 4
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Ares Goes to Woodstock

Submitted to Contest #315

The air crackled with an energy Ares hadn't felt since the Trojan War. Of course, that energy had been fueled by the delicious scent of fear and the satisfying clang of bronze on bronze. This energy… smelled faintly of incense and something vaguely floral, underscored by a pervasive aroma of grilled onions. Ares, magnificent in his battle-worn armor (slightly dusty from the chariot ride—parking near Bethel, New York in 1969 was a nightmare, even for a god), surveyed the undulating sea of humanity spread across Max Yasgur’s farm. He’d been dr...

13 likes 8 comments 8
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The Racoon, The Interviewer, and The Coffee-Maker

Submitted to Contest #315

A raccoon had broken into Emma’s car.Four years of college and a shiny, new degree later, and she was still working jobs that barely paid the rent. This interview could change everything. A dream job with a better-than-dream paycheck. She was running on five hours of sleep and a cup of black coffee that certainly wasn’t hitting the same way a comfort late would have. At least she was running early.The cold morning air nipped her cheeks as she crossed the lot. Frost feathered the windshield, catching pale gold in the early sun. Her phone was ...

10 likes 0 comments 0
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The Uncanny Encounter

Submitted to Contest #315

I turned thirty on a Tuesday.There wasn’t much ceremony to it. I went to work like usual, answered emails, deleted others. Had lunch by myself at my desk — a bland chicken salad that felt symbolic somehow. The office printer jammed again, and someone left a passive-aggressive Post-it on the communal fridge about labeling leftovers, creating a brief ruckus. Thirty came with the subtle realization that the life I had wasn’t quite the life I imagined. It was either the cornerstone of my journey, or the hindrance that devastates my path. It wasn...

10 likes 1 comment 1
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Lost in the Middlelands

Submitted to Contest #315

Private Eugene Crawford was lost. Stumbling over the uneven terrain, he had become separated from his unit during an attack on the German lines. It was a frosty morning, the kind that numbs you to the bones and stings your lungs each time you breath in. Fog mixing with gun powder from the battle had obscured his vison as cloud after cloud rolled on through. It seemed to him that his comrades took the high road, and he took the low road during the fiercest part of the fighting. Going over the top, he felt was nothing but utter suicide. B...

10 likes 2 comments 2
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Within The Garden Tower

Submitted to Contest #315

The silver-light sound of cracking porcelain woke Annadae from her sleep. The hazy blue morning drifted through the window, but she fitfully attempted to gain another dream or two—though the memory sneaking into her dreams again had been precisely what had awoken her to begin with. Eventually, she conceded to the daylight and slipped out of her sheets. Still barefoot, she climbed the careful pattern of stones down her tower’s wall into the garden. Her fingers roamed the buds and leaves, edging around the bonny bees to pluck out her selecti...

10 likes 0 comments 0
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Interview 2 - Markus [the ex-boyfriend]

Submitted to Contest #315

[TW - the following fictional interview excerpt contains mention of emotional abuse] “Let’s start with how you met Georgiana?”We met at my High School formal in November twenty-eleven. I went to an all-boy private school, and she went to an all-girl private school. Gin — Sorry, I called her Ginny. Ginny went with a mate of mine, Oliver “Ollie” Harper, who was a closeted gay at the time and figured taking Ginny would stop the teasing. I went stag as I broke up with my cheating ex shortly before the event.By the time I showed up, they were alr...

8 likes 0 comments 0
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Jose

Submitted to Contest #315

José was 29, a barista with a dream that stretched further than his paycheck ever did. Originally from Portugal, he had arrived in the United States on a student visa, young and hungry for opportunity. He had studied economics at a state university, spent hours in lecture halls filled with numbers and theories and graduated with honors. But when it came time to follow the well-worn path into finance or consulting, José paused. The thought of cubicles, dress codes, and performance evaluations left him cold. He didn’t want to spend his life an...

8 likes 7 comments 7
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Collapse

Submitted to Contest #315

I read somewhere that we’re all a decision away from an entirely different life. Only, we don’t know it, not always, not often, because we either fail to make a choice or, when we do, we never see the alternative outcomes – not without tinted glasses, that is. And it begs the question: do we ever actually live? This life, I mean, not the inebriating nostalgia of what ifs.Tracing paper spread across the table, bare nails, 2B lead. “This,” said Nora, “is a collapse.” She tapped a circle on the page from which two thick lines branched out, one ...

8 likes 4 comments 4
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