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Latest Stories

July 08, 2025
General Stories Michael Barlett

Dance Of Death

CHAPTER ONE 1940 Chief Inspector Kenneth Langford offered the Commissioner a crisp salute, and then walked back through the labyrinth of passageways to his own small office. Langford was a member of the London Metropolitan Police, commonly referred to as…
July 08, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Winter Blues

the winter blues has a grip on me, all so tight Its icy tentacles wrap around me and squeezes freezing my fingers and toes with its nasty frostbite staving off the cold is a battle, an endless fight it brings forth an assortment of nasty diseases The winter…
July 08, 2025
Horror Stories Sushma R Doshi

Deliverer Of Messages

A loner in my childhood, my scrawny and weak figure prone to being bullied by sturdy and robust boys, I tended to wander around places frequented by few. Those curvy roads which fell into darkness after evening without street lights, the area near the pond…
July 08, 2025
General Stories L Christopher Hennessy

With A Side-Eye I Cherish

for Brittany ma amour Up to my neck in sadness for something just out of reach and she came along and fired up my life with kisses and the physical. The moment I looked into her eyes I didn't want to share her with anyone else and keep her all to myself. In…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Days Of Future Dreams

the days of future dreams the flames once rose high thinking our lives would end up supreme thinking our future seemed a far of dream but in the end nothing is what it seems many times the winds of changed has blown this way one minute we`re lapping the cream…
July 03, 2025
General Stories L Christopher Hennessy

Bad Girl

Part 1I lost the entire manuscript when I assassinated my laptop with sauvignon blanc as I rubbed the lower back of a woman who dozed drunk on my bed, sweating. She was crazed, somewhere between screaming and lying about the orgasm. Bree was a miracle to me,…
July 03, 2025
Horror Stories Nelly Shulman

Black Is Our Colour

“I swear she could have been you. Look! This girl is your long-lost twin.” Fi nudged me, and I smiled. “Never had or wanted one.” I stood up. “Let’s go, or the bargain hunters will clear the shelves before us.” We dived into the vintage emporium across the…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Transformation

"I need a brake" words that twisted my heart- shattering the dream that we would never part. I asked myself 'what ever did I do wrong? sad, gloominess could`ve easily been my song. I wouldn't let the anger and misery grow or cultivate- uprising feelings I…
July 03, 2025
Flash Fiction Benoit

Jae

It was Jae’s birthday today. She turned eight. What a beautiful sunny girl! Hyo planned a surprise or two; Li, his wife, did too. Birthday cake, a puppy and … Don’t forget, they grinned just before he drove off. Traffic was intense. A long call came from…
July 03, 2025
General Stories Matias Travieso-Diaz

Fear

Leandro stood outside the Kroger, leaning forward as he shivered in the early March dawn. He hated this moment: the cold, the fatigue, the feeling of helplessness, the anticipation of another day ahead at his degrading job picking collard leaves under the…
July 03, 2025
Horror Stories Mihko Askiweno

Found You

Panic gripped her as she staggered up the steep, rocky incline, breath coming in jagged, shallow gasps. Sweat streamed down her face in torrents, her hair clinging to her forehead and cheeks in disheveled clumps. Her legs trembled with exhaustion, molten fire…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

Lost On The Path

But alas; sometimes I think we've lost our way- too many strayed opinions...one too many a survey. Walking on the road ahead, just following the herd of sheep- with a hypnotised mind, wide awake yet very fast asleep. While yelling...join the team of the…

I never knew my mother. She left when I was very young. My family told me stories about her, they told me she loved me, but they would not tell my why she left. That truth came when I became an adult. It came after I was married, after I had a child of my own. My life was supposed to be normal until then, as normal as it could be under the circumstances. My people needed me to be normal. They needed me to have children. They needed me to love and to feel loved. It was a necessary part of the tradition.

When I turned twenty eight I learned my mother’s fate. Mother had gone to live inside the Kraken. It was a monster that lived in the sea. It was the queen of the monsters. She was the largest and strongest of her kind and ruled over her brood, her many children. They were massive beasts that stood taller than our tallest skyscrapers. They came in the thousands devouring everything in their path. They came to destroy us with fire, ice, and lightning. We had tried to stop them with conventional weaponry, but our atom bombs were more damaging to us than they were to the monsters.

So we hid like rats. We survived. We rebuilt our civilization, and our scientists came up with a new strategy. They called it the traditional sacrifice. There would be no more bombs, no more missiles, no more guns. Instead we would sway the Kraken’s heart with love and compassion. This new technology determined the fate of my grandmother and her mother and my mother and my children. They would sacrifice me to the beast, implant my love for my son in the Kraken’s heart so all the people of earth would become her children.

I went willingly to meet my mother, catapulted across the sky in a translucent sphere, the vehicle of our new technology. It was a ship, an orb filled with a living mucus in which I floated. Ailerons on the hull guided my craft through the air ensuring my success. I would enter through her nose, a pair of massive holes on the front of her flat face. I was so tiny in comparison it was almost imposible to miss. But I was blind to all of these things. Operating the craft was not my job. I was just a passanger. I was just a piece of the machine.

The orb was sucked in as the Kraken prepared her next roar. Inside her head my ship dispensed with its little wings as it flexed and tumbled along the beasts inner membranes. Long thin claws grew in their place, tearing at the creatures flesh to halt my momentum. I heard them popping and stretching and breaking and hooking again as they brought my craft to a stop.

It was dark now. I am not a scientist, but I was aware of how the sphere worked. It began stealing nutrients from my host to sustain me. It would grow legs like a spider and begin the journey up to the brain. I felt the beast clawing at her nose though I was sure my craft was causing her little pain. The ship was designed to invade her skull, not kill her or torture her. This was a surgical operation designed to reach her grey matter.

When the hull contacted her brain I could feel her rage transmitting through the ship’s mucus into my mind. But this connection was a two way street. I was a pychic infection, and she could feel me. I came here to tell her about a baby boy living in the city she was about to destroy. But I didn’t come just to talk, I came to make her feel what I felt. I let her feel the love I had from my son, and she in turn let me feel the love she had for her children. Our love became one, and we decided to let my people live another day. We called her children back to the sea and saved my world from destruction.

My society would live another day, perhaps another decade or longer until the antibodies in the beast’s brain ate their way through my ships hull. Then the Kraken would forget my love for my son and return for the next sacrifice. But by then maybe my son would be a man with his own children. And perhaps on that day the beast will discover the love in his heart.

About the Author:  A. I. Bloom has worked as a web designer, a fine artist, a home renovator, and a stage hand in theatre. He’s from Minnesota and loves cooking, playing with his cats, and watching movies on Netflix. He started writing fantasy and science fiction short stories for fun during college and was encouraged by friends and family to publish his work. MATILDA THE STONE FAIRY was Bloom’s first published piece of fantasy fiction. Look for more of his work in 2015.

 

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