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Latest Stories

March 18, 2023
Science Fiction Stories L Christopher Hennessy

Broken Girl With Blonde Hair

NYC, 2236, and Harley Ambrose decided to take her home. Her name was Arabella and she was broken. Ambrose lived alone on floor two-twenty of a building project and he was aging but not considerably old. For over a week now he had passed Arabella sitting on…
March 18, 2023
Crime Stories Jason Smith

Did Annabelle Murder Her Family

Their mother had been unconscious for forty eight hours and they’d been told to expect the worst. James and Gregory talked, Annabelle preferred the silence her brothers found uncomfortable, they were strangers to her. “Is anyone hungry?” Asked James. “I could…
March 18, 2023
Science Fiction Stories L Christopher Hennessy

A Man Named Damo Ura

They called themselves Mechanics and had discovered a planet long dead, its Sun extinguished now for thousands of years. From this planet they took samples of plants and animals which used to be there in abundance and decided to breathe life into them. At…
March 13, 2023
General Stories Devin Householder

The Best Of Intentions

Luli slid gently out of Alfie’s arms as she checked his nightstand clock [9:54pm]. The California new year was still two hours away. A nearly full moon lit the way over to the window of her boyfriend’s twelfth-floor Avalon Towers apartment, an empty Stanford…
March 13, 2023
Flash Fiction Lawrence Hartmann

Authentic

I want to be authentic. I want to be ME, as I was when I was a boy. No filters, no strategies for life-coping. I want to walk out in the sun everyday and feel that I am 100% ME. Towards this goal, a few months ago, I embarked on a reading adventure. I would…
March 13, 2023
General Stories Emanuel Diaz

Gravitational Meow

Calis Dafelis, a female laboratory animal science researcher, loved felines and was currently studying the behavior and abilities of her favorite suborder of animals in California. She was particularly interested in the myth that cats always fall on their…
March 06, 2023
Poetry Paweł Markiewicz

Arethusa And Alpheus

Introduction to the myth The myth has happened in darkness of forest, near the old druidic altar with the stone. It was foggy then, shrouded in last summer. Here a fawn was born at dawn and morn - no woe! Near the spring that belonged to the moony grove,…
March 06, 2023
Science Fiction Stories L Christopher Hennessy

Sora, My Future

“ That guy’s the angriest loneliest guy I know! “ George laughed. “ Says he’s in love! Every time I visit a cyberdoll I fall in love, too! “ Tokyo, 2360, and Ric Henry let them laugh. He drank his beer and didn’t care because he knew what was real and he had…
March 06, 2023
Poetry Emanuel Diaz

It Is Not My Fault

"It is not my fault, I swear. I was merely seeking knowledge and power, just like any other magician. When I found the Necronomicon, I thought I had struck gold. But the secrets I learned from that eldritch tome were far beyond anything I could have imagined.…
March 06, 2023
Crime Stories Peter Greenhall

Tortured & Taxed Part I

"Right, do you remember the fella you met the other day, the one from Brookbourne, by the Exhibition Centre?" JJ often had to emphasise every detail to Tommy two fists. He was never the sharpest tool box, but he never questioned anything that JJ asked him to…
March 06, 2023
Fantasy Stories Emanuel Diaz

A Not So Cute Mountain of Cuteness

In the mystical land of Japan, there lived a Ryūjin shinkō dragon by the name of Viryu. Viryu was an ashen-colored dragon with black spots, and she was a protector of nature. She had lived for centuries, watching over the land and its inhabitants, but she had…
March 06, 2023
Flash Fiction Paweł Markiewicz

The Broken Soul In My Homeland

Do you know where this world has got so much evil in it? When I was in the Osuszek-grove for the first time, I was fully grown. I went there on a bike after finding out about it on the internet, a few years ago. I drove south through my whole town, on the…

From: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

To: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

Re: Reduced Sentence for Murder

 

Dear Neal,

 

Thank you for taking the time to work with the police recently.

 

Before I begin, I need to make it clear this message will auto delete 5 minutes from opening or if you attempt to save it. So read carefully.

 

Over the past 3 months you have been working with Detective Pater, from Metro Police. You recorded a series of interviews to aid us in our investigations. And for your generous help with our inquiries you have been promised time off your sentence.

 

The twenty year sentence you received for the rape and murder of Sharon Glass was judged by the courts as sufficient. So, with good behaviour, you’d be out in ten. But once that steel door slammed shut on your first night inside your claustrophobia told you even 10 years in that hell would kill you. So you cut a deal. Confess to 2 unsolved murders and your sentence would be halved and then halved again - pretty sweet, out in two and a half years for the rape and murder of three young girls.

 

Detective Pater came out and went through everything with you. To discover what happened to poor Cindy Russell and Catherine Vine. Recording the interviews of what you had to say. You started coy, unsure how it would play out. The detective won your confidence though. To sign the immunity papers, he gave you that beautiful onyx fountain pen you loved so much and after that you were singing like a bird. Singing for your freedom.

 

“Singing” couldn’t be further from the truth though, could it? The degraded details you revealed on how and where you carried out the 2 unsolved murders feature some horrifically accurate descriptions. I didn’t know you could “slip” while strangling someone and crush their wind-pipe. Or how anyone could rape the dying Miss Russell as “the life went out of her eyes”.

 

 

I say interviews but they have become your confessions. The recordings leave no question to your guilt and confirm, beyond any reasonable doubt, you committed the other two murders. And how heinously you committed them. However, I did laugh during the last interview when you said “I feel like the truth has set me free”.

 

Now, though, it is time for my confessions. Detective Pater is no more a member of the police than you will be a free man. When he came to see you that first time you didn’t check to see if he was from Metro Police, did you? What you can now do is check the prison register - you have been visited many times over the last 3 months by David Paris. “Friend of the Family”.

 

It is my pleasure to reveal the man who conned you was the worst kind of con. A cheap, second-rate actor who I paid off in rye. It’s a crime to impersonate a police officer so I’ll spare you his personal details. But he’ll go back to his own, private hell while you’ll remain in yours. Forever.

 

You can rest easy, the evidence we collected is inadmissible in court so the police will not be receiving copies of your confessions. I am keeping those to drag myself back into darkness whenever my mood brightens. Instead the police will receive a tip-off telling them where to find the bodies of the missing girls. Amongst the orgy of horror you left will be the onyx fountain pen you admired so much. With your unmistakable finger prints.

 

Soon your life sentence will mean life. All that now awaits you is an eternity so ugly, lost and lonely in that tiny steel box you’d be better off just curling up and using your bed sheet as an eternal gag.

 

Do not worry. You are not alone. For the last 4 years I have always had hope my daughter Cindy would be found alive. From your description, I visited her mangled, decayed corpse 5 days ago. Unable to touch her, bury her or bless her, instead of flowers, all I could do was leave that onyx pen. What I saw will be my steel box for the rest of my days.

 

Forever together,

 

Conrad Russell

Father

 

 

My name is Thom Goddard and I am a writer living in High Roding, Essex, England. I previously wrote for the BBC and other television companies. This is my first crime flash fiction.

 

 

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