FACELESS • by Yuliia Vereta
No matter how many people I met here, none of them had faces. Probably I should have listened to my mom, who always told me to draw them. I never did. She said, “Jimmy, if you don’t draw their faces,… Continue Reading
Horror
FORTY-THREE • Nivara Lune
The sparrow in the filing cabinet had been dead three days, maybe four. Marianne could tell by the way its feet had curled, the dim gloss still caught in its eye. She set down her cleaning kit and crouched, her… Continue Reading
THE LAST SEED SHE SWALLOWED • Nilay Kumar Sarker
Mira took her medicine in the dark. The jar was smooth and cold, the label hand-written in faint ink: B17 — Immuno-Restorative. Below that, smaller: Apricot kernel extract. Natural therapy. Unregistered. The lid creaked open. One seed in the morning.… Continue Reading
SWEET ROT • Verity Mason
My son, Tommy, chomped down the toffee apple with the unthinking greed of a child who’d never learnt control. His cheeks puffed out sticky with sugar and caramel, the glaze catching the carnival lights like a fragile shell. Lopsided on… Continue Reading
THE GATHERING • by Andy Morris
There is a place in the New Forest where a festival is held. Once a year, celebrations bloom, banners unfurl, music drifts, and the scent of roasting sugar thickens the air. No one can tell you where The Gathering is… Continue Reading
GLOW-UP • by Yoram Ong
Jenna didn’t believe in the product. But she believed in metrics, and GlowSkin’s launch video had already hit 1.6 million in under three hours. Her contract included a bonus if she crossed two. And anyway, disbelief didn’t pay rent. She… Continue Reading
SHADOW PEOPLE IN THE AMBULANCE • by Nilay Kumar Sarker
It started with a whisper in the rear-view mirror. Not the kind you hear, exactly — more the kind that curls under your skin and waits. Dean adjusted the mirror. Empty backseat. Just trees blurring past. Just the heat. He… Continue Reading
EVOLUTION • Caelin Beaty
“They say He lives in Tibet,” she told me. She was still digging in the tan, dusty ground with her hands, even though we hadn’t found another turnip in almost an hour. “Where’s that?” I asked. The shaded tree bark… Continue Reading
THE FIRE GAP • Natalia Danjon
Everything we had in the Emirates fit into seventeen cardboard boxes. I rifled through them, pulling my bra from the box marked Important Documents, while vintage Rosenthal china clinked inside Toys. On arrival at the top-rated Airbnb in Sharjah, the… Continue Reading
SET YOU FREE • Christopher Haba
Grief is an anchor, I think. It traps you in one moment, weighing you down interminably. I think about this constantly. I am thinking of it now, when the phone rings. Mila Gurevic, it says. The number is a jumble… Continue Reading