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Latest Stories

December 02, 2025
Fantasy Stories Tom Kropp

Titan Territory

Scot Lancer heard the foot falls of giants. Under the three moons in the clear night sky, he could see for hundreds of yards in any direction on the open rocky range. The earth still shook underfoot with the ponderous tread of titans. Off to his left side,…
December 02, 2025
Mystery Stories Syed Zeeshan Raza Zaidi

City Of Blood And Shadows

The city never slept. At least, not in a way that lets you breathe. Karachi in the summer of ’97 was a pulse you felt in your chest long before you heard it in the streets—the clatter of boots, the hiss of tires, the occasional pop that could be a gunshot or…
December 02, 2025
General Stories Abdul Basit

Breaking The Wall Between Us

It all started when I came to Moscow for my master’s in Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication. After completing my bachelor’s in Literature and Linguistics in Pakistan, I already had a strong interest in different cultures. I enjoyed meeting new…
December 02, 2025
Fantasy Stories Frank Talaber

Full Moon Madness

Drumbeats, hearts melting. Your memory haunts the corridors of my sequestered dreams, where silhouettes of mountains fill the horizon and tinkles of orchestrated mewlings shatter the chill of a full moon night in northern British Columbia. A land I swore I’d…
December 01, 2025
Flash Fiction M.S. Douglas

Second Chance

You were gone for two months when I noticed her. I didn't see it at first, because her hair was lightened and she wore it up. She didn’t wear glasses or makeup like you. Perhaps I didn’t want to admit the similarities, but once I did, I realized I had a…
December 01, 2025
General Stories Hossam Belal

Crushed By A High School Crush

I saw her for the first time in 1998. I was in high school back then, and I was about to see the literal beauty queen of the city. No exaggeration, she was stunning. She looked like the Lead Singer of Ace of Base quite a lot. One of my close friends objected…
December 01, 2025
Fantasy Stories Frank Talaber

Christmas Attractions

“What? Still no prezzie for my wife? Crap!” But no. The mailbox was resolutely empty! Okay, so I know that, as usual, I'd left it until the last minute, but that site had promised it was absolutely guaranteed to be here by today at the very, very latest! But…
December 01, 2025
Crime Stories Tom Kropp

New York Nightmare

 In 1986 Shawn was just another sixteen year old kid trying to survive on the ghetto streets of New York. His dad was a white guy that abandoned his pretty Latina mom. Her name was Lita and she was a young, lovely lady that was an illegal immigrant and she…
November 30, 2025
Horror Stories Syed Zeeshan Raza Zaidi

Voices Beneath The Waves

The wind had no mercy that night. Kund Malir stretched before me like a forgotten promise, the highway’s asphalt dissolving into sand and shadow. My car’s headlights barely pierced the darkness; the desert swallowed everything else. I had been driving for…
November 30, 2025
Crime Stories Andrea Tillmanns

Three

Michelle had fully expected to find one or two beer corpses in the tents in the garden the morning after her wedding. However, she hadn’t expected to find the body on the bricked round barbecue. Now that she saw her cousin lying there with the barbecue spit…
November 30, 2025
General Stories Syed Hassan Askari

A Guest From Moscow And Her Queen Of I.C.C

Professor Elena Viktorovna Moshnyaga always said one thing to her students in Moscow: “Intercultural communication does not live in books. It lives in people. “Anastasia believed her. Or at least she wanted to. So, when Elena told her about the short cultural…
November 30, 2025
Flash Fiction L Christopher Hennessy

Plugged In, Zoned Out

The city was a carcass. Neon signs flickered like dying stars over streets lined with broken glass, trash fires, and bodies nobody bothered to move. The cops didn’t like coming here much anymore. Too much static. Too much nothing. Too many junkies, as they…

Everything started at the beginning.
In a very confused moment I was informed that I had been born.
This happened, years ago, on a small isle with an unpronounceable name: Ghawdex, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and even if everybody attending to the event asserts I was there, too, I must admit I cannot remember it.
I was baptized and they say that in that precise moment all the water in the font evaporated, but I guess it is an overstatement.
I tore down my childhood petal through petal, building reality as an infinite pieces multidimensional puzzle unfolded over the eternal hills of the natal hamlet.
Puberty and adolescence assaulted me without warning, preying on my inexperience and youth. I repaired my rent inner tissues dealing the distressed moments of my treble voice with those of off-key baritone with the charm of a diplodocus and a horsefly trying to dance the black swans 'pas de deux'  together.
Finally time put me the adult costume but my entrails did not know it, adulthood is a chronology, not an ontological condition. My face came in my help: I looked adult.
During some years I tried to save the world but then I realized that my arrival was late... Way too late!
Astride on time I let it carry me ahead, the sad voice of the Mistral and the icy breath of the Cierzo followed my memories after leaving the cosy world of the 'Mare Nostrum' and the universe opened up to my amazed childish eyes of toddler who looked like an adult.
That very innocence and ignorance were my deliverance, nobody could believe that I could be so imbecile! (perfection does not exist except for especial cases as mine) and that belief made them, (people around me) to cook up stories of conspiracies where I abet stronger and darker forces or that I was that darker force myself with wicked, hidden, and unspeakable purposes. This same stories awaken trepidation and fear and took them to show an esteem toward me that they do not feel really, but served well to preserve me from greater evils.
So I flew over human miseries, mine and others, filling my empty days with arias and readings that as guardian angels wrapped my soul and let me be happy even in the middle of cruel vicissitudes.
Then again, the meddlesome time stated that I was an old man and to my chagrin my body agreed: each time I told to my body: "Let's run to that bush and jump over it"!, my body answered: "Who, me ?!!
And it happened that the inner child found himself alone: older people thought him crazy, and younger fellows, not understanding his predicament, thought him a lunatic.
Again, innocence and ignorance came to help me, looking around I found that my experience in languages acquired in years of traveling our rickety planet could be used to balance different cultures from language to language.
Unscrupulously and with the freedom that only youth can use I started to be a translator and Luck, who as a good female she is, loves naiveté and babies rewarded me letting me feel my intention accomplished, which is all you need to feel successful... Years went by and one day, adding to my already very confused nature I was informed that I was not any more part of those that warm their bones in the fire of Life.
With my usual soft resignation to the inevitable, I tied up my little baggage with the few belongings I had: some blurred memories of warm and kind hands which owners I couldn't remember and with a feeling of light-heartedness started my journey toward the unknown.
After a trip on a parallel line to time I found myself on a beautiful meadow almost alive in timing with a breeze that made the stems of shining dandelions move as a lively sea.
Colours danced between earth and sky leaving hue wakes that filled the eye with new scents and Immensity coiled in the hollow of my hand as if infinity wrapped around my fingers tried to comfort that daily solitude that clothed me in life.
I quickly removed my footwear and began to walk on the soft grass that carpeted the ground. The contact of the gramma and soil with my feet revealed a new secret:
This was home... No, Home!
I started to run and jump over low shrubs, now my body followed me in happy conjunction.
I felt the urgency to lie down over the grass as long as I were and I must be very long since I could not see my feet. I looked up to the sky, the clouds were so beautiful that I wanted to sing and tell the world my feelings so humankind could be with me in this extravagant experience.
Then I knew it! I had to sing it!, I had to write it! And I remembered a sentence read many years ago, I do not recall where from: "unless you change and become like little children..."
That had been, that IS my Gift: "to change and become like a little child", all my life was like that, full and filled by grace. I understood it then and I wanted to convert that gift in my legacy.
I took a thin dandelion spike and moistening it in some dew drops I started to write this tragicomic story of mine and the secret message so, if there are people who still ask themselves what are they doing in the world, could find a small compass showing that deep in our heart always there is a reason to live.
And then again, my innocence and ignorance make me believe that I have thread for a yarn and as a writer this words will reach the heart of my readers...

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