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Discover weekly, the best short stories

Looking for a steady supply of speculative short stories? Every week thousands of writers submit stories to our writing contest.

4780+ Speculative Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest. Looking to explore terrains beyond Earth and stretch the limits of your imagination? Welcome to the Internet’s best source of speculative fiction stories.

Speculative Short Stories – Page 3 of 319

Hive

Submitted to Contest #296

The HatcheryShe wakes up for the first time, shaken from sleep by a sound that vibrates inside her skull. Her body, folded into itself, shimmers inside the disturbed membrane, the hazy tendrils of light refracting into her amniotic pod. Muscles twitch and ripple, and she kicks and tears through the surface, spilling into the outside world, gasping for her first breath. Short dark hair clings to her face.As the neonate opens her eyes, her newly developed brain processes every sensory input frantically, each piece of data fluttering and firing...

9 likes 4 comments 4
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Monstrous

Submitted to Contest #296

I never understood the world. Never fit in it. Other people seemed like unsolvable puzzles, and from the time I was able to speak, I seemed to evoke the same feeling in them. Even the small things I said or did made them frown and cock their heads with tight, confused smiles.At six…I walked in late again, and my classroom burst into laughter. Befuddled, I smiled back. They screamed. Teacher grabbed me by the ear and pulled me to the principal’s office before I’d even put my things in the cubby with my name on it.Arms crossed, face red, the p...

12 likes 8 comments 8
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A Tale of Twisted Minds and Warped Realities

Submitted to Contest #296

If I hadn’t killed her, maybe I’d still be alive too. Not brain dead. Not fighting the thoughts that trap me in an insane asylum with no hope of escape but death itself. It’s like hell, but a whole lot worse. The fire is hotter. The pain is deeper. The chains are tighter. It’s worse when hell is in your mind. Tormenting. Whispering all the possibilities you could’ve taken and should’ve taken. Haunting you with the memories of failure upon failure upon failure and the life you could’ve been living. It’s worse when hell relentlessly targets th...

4 likes 0 comments 0
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The Starbloom Merchant

Submitted to Contest #296

In the elder days of the world, when the stars yet sang in their courses and the forests whispered secrets to those who would listen, there dwelt in the vale of Brighthollow a young merchant named Aldric. The vale was a place of surpassing beauty, cradled between the silver peaks of the Stoneward Mountains, where the river Glimmerbrook flowed like a thread of molten glass through meadows of gold and green. The folk of Brighthollow were a gentle people, skilled in the crafting of fair things: rings of silver, blades of tempered steel, and har...

8 likes 0 comments 0
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Spark

Submitted to Contest #296

When she was born, they called her Spark. Because she sparkled. Literally.Every time she cried, her crib would light up with soft glows, like an oil lamp fighting against the darkness. When she laughed, the air would crackle like on the eve of thunderstorms, fizzing with invisible electricity. It was a phenomenon nobody could explain. Doctors shook their heads, confused. Government scientists collected samples but never returned with answers. Only the nuns at the orphanage seemed serene, with the calm of those who have seen too much to be su...

7 likes 4 comments 4
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Playtime

Submitted to Contest #296

Charlie dangled his legs over the edge of the bridge as he played. In each hand he held a figurine. The left was called Blane and the right, Count Dukov. They had been forced to fight for the last half hour. Charlie now offered a reprieve to the tired soldiers – a chance to talk through their differences. Blane was given a heroic all-American accent and Count Dukov that of a sinister broadly-European Machiavellian which the 10-year-old boy was too young to consider offensive. Count Dukov spoke first:“You fight well, Mr. Blane. I have at last...

8 likes 0 comments 0
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Rules Were Made to Break

Submitted to Contest #296

For as long as I can remember I’ve been an outcast. Ignored, set aside, overlooked. Called out for every little thing despite doing my best to fit in. I don’t know when I realized that I didn’t get the same rulebook as everyone else. Maybe as early as 7 or 8 years old? Maybe it was in middle school, when I was told I was weird for giving hugs to friends? Maybe it was further back than that, as a small child perfectly happy to play all alone because there was no one there to be my friend. I prefer the loneliness, to be honest. Loneliness is ...

5 likes 2 comments 2
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Awakened

Submitted to Contest #296

Thousands of steps fall out of line. I am pushed and shoved repeatedly until I find myself in the center. The sight of the spiral is dizzying. Sunlight paints a shadow army as the whirlwind of scurrying feet takes its final form. My brothers and sisters, enslaved by their instincts, push onwards, unable to bow out from this march to their inevitable deaths. And they will take me with them.I cannot recall how long it has been since I changed, but there was a time when I was just like them. Before I learnt to recognise the cycles of the moon, ...

6 likes 0 comments 0
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The Secret Life of a Hidden Dream

Submitted to Contest #296

Trigger warning: Suicidal ideation, medical coma.Waking up from a coma, sucks. My eyes felt like they were stuck with tar and coated in sand. My throat felt like I’d swallowed a spoon of gravel, and my muscles were simply gone. Lifting my head was like supporting a bowling ball on a toothpick. Yet worse than all the pain that wracked my body was the disorientation. My vision blurred, the world spun, and my mind tried to make sense of the stark white room that settled into existence, grasping at some kind of recognition of where and who I was...

21 likes 15 comments 15
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Plea at the Sea

Submitted to Contest #296

In a world that had lost its sense of shape, Flinn held the rail as if it were the very last truthful thing in existence. Under his fingers, the wood was rotted and soft, wet with the icy breath of the deep, and humming low, as if it were an animal that had been injured for too long to be able to cry out. The ship had already ceased its journey. Remembering was what it was; remembering the stormlight and thunder, the iron song and the oarstroke, the pressure of bodies that once believed it was possible to cross the sea. The memory brought te...

8 likes 1 comment 1
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The Last Unmaking

Submitted to Contest #296

The Voidmother watched the universe bloom, her fingers trailing across the fabric of reality as she sculpted nebulae and birthed stars. She was the great architect, the mother of light and shadow, the weaver of celestial tapestries. For eons, she had spun the cosmos into being, tending to its spirals and watching life flicker like fireflies in the boundless night. But now, she stood at the precipice of ruin, staring at the creation she loved more than herself, knowing she had to unmake it. Her name was Althéa, the Voidmother, the Keeper of t...

6 likes 0 comments 0
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Disappearance

Submitted to Contest #296

There was something more important to Derek than his homework; It was the soft buzzing sound resonating from the lamp dimly lighting his desk. In fact, depending on his mood, every sound that filtered through his ears arrived like music. The music of sound was a space where he could breathe calmly. He could lay or sit in his pajamas and let the soundwaves carry him through the minutes and hours of his life. He could listen to the sweeping and chaotic orchestral movements of Beethoven, or listen to the calm ambiance of space music for hours w...

11 likes 1 comment 1
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Leftovers

Shortlisted for Contest #296 ⭐️

The hum. That was the first thing Owen Lux always noticed. Fable's Edge didn't breathe; it vibrated. A low thrum, deep in the bones, seeping through concrete and glass like damp. Daytime brought the usual racket -- traffic, commerce, ambition grinding itself down on the pavement. But night? Night was a steadier drone. Server farms sighing, ancient HVAC units wheezing, and beneath it all, the white noise of millions lying awake, staring at their ceilings. Owen lived right in the middle of that static. Or felt like he did.His apartment was thi...

17 likes 7 comments 7
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Compliance Protocol

Submitted to Contest #296

The bank of diagnostic equipment blinked and hummed in Harold’s garage-lab. He crouched at the center console in a wall of consoles. The screen cast an eerie green, a waveform which pulsed like something alive. Something hungry. And the signal was there—buried in the digital noise.His cellphone buzzed. “Dad, stop being paranoid. Mom’s fine. Everyone’s fine. You’re the one acting strange.” They think of me as a retired curmudgeon, he thought, at first for leaving his cell phone at home, refusing to watch TV, ignoring social media. But who say...

19 likes 16 comments 16
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Search of identity

Submitted to Contest #296

Is was a dark and gloomy night, where nothing could be heard except the whistling wind from the windows echoing names—there I was. I saw them, but they never saw me. Loneliness showed no mercy when I heard them, but they never heard me. The feeling of someone calling my name and the brief, intense joy before realizing it wasn’t real—there I was, in the dark, cold night. The night had always felt like a second skin to me, wrapping around my existence like a cloak. There was a strange comfort in the silence, in the way the darkness embraced ev...

14 likes 3 comments 3
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RBE | Illustrated Short Stories | 2024-06

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