Literary Fiction Stories

Elara Nightwood

The dress arrived with the morning tide, draped across the old stone marker at the edge of the marsh where Mara's mother used to count herons. It was still reco…

Sofia Verlanti

As she stood alone in the kitchen at 6 a.m., the warm water washing over her hands, Emma felt the weight of the day ahead. She was washing a chipped blue mug, i…

Dr. H. Ashford

The smell reached her before the light did. This is what Mrs. Ruth Ellery recorded in the notebook she kept in her cardigan pocket — the small green Silvine tha…

Cass Ferren

The wardrobe smells like naphthalene and something under it. Cedar, maybe. Or just wood remembering damp. You open both doors because one alone felt like prying…

Sofia Verlanti

She wrapped her fingers around the delicate handle of the first teacup, a gift from her grandmother, and dunked it into the warm soapy water. The gentle clink o…

Marcus Veil

1. The air scrubber hummed, a low thrum against the pervasive silence. Elias checked the atmospheric processor’s readouts. All nominal. 12.7% oxygen, 87.3% argo…

Elara Nightwood

The unicorn had stopped correcting people about what it was approximately three hundred years before it was captured, which meant it had been quiet for a very l…

Sofia Verlanti

The community garden, tucked away in a forgotten corner of the city, had seen better days. Once a vibrant oasis, it had fallen into disarray, its beds overgrown…

Dr. H. Ashford

Being the account of Miss Agnes Culver, housemaid, as transcribed by Dr. F. W. Hartington, physician, during her period of convalescence at St. Mildred's Infirm…

Elara Nightwood

47° 12' N, 15° 08' E — First Quarter The observatory had been built to watch stars die, which was, the last weaver thought, an odd calling for a building made o…

Sofia Verlanti

In the kitchen, where the morning light streamed through the window and danced across the worn countertops, a sense of stillness had settled. It was as if the v…

Elara Nightwood

The ivy had grown over the door for the third time in as many centuries, and the house was beginning to suspect it was doing so deliberately. Not suspicion in t…