11 free-to-read stories indexed on Quasar
Gerry and I didn’t have kids though we’d tried. I’d lost those babies in the fourth month, the fifth month, the fourth month again. By then I was so exhausted by hope and disappointment that I didn’t want to do it again. Gerry didn’t push me since we had...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
It took Corey Liao seven days to wrench herself free from her body. The skeins of fascia and sinew lashing soul to body had been stubborn. She’d painstakingly scraped herself free, thread by thread, while silt enveloped her limbs and clouded her eyes and...
abusedeathviolence
Amelia’s favorite time of day is before dawn, when all the beauty is hidden by shadow. She rises from her bed every morning, shivering in the hushed air, and gets dressed in the dark. Sometimes she has to redo the buttons, but she doesn’t turn on the light...
body-horrorgoreviolence
Bring your sister and I will tell you the story of how the waters returned to Apicuya. No, bring all the children. This is important. Don’t splash. If you cannot hear the thrum of the skymill, you are being too loud. Sit in the shallow pool, otherwise your...
child-deathdeath
(Editorial Note: Starting with this month’s story, we will only post ebooks in the EPUB format as Amazon phased out the MOBI format a few years ago. Also, moving forward, we will be tagging our stories. We plan to tag our backlog of stories over the next...
body-horrorgoreviolence
When the symptoms first set in, it had taken her three months, three full moons, and one nervous confrontation in a coffee shop to realize that she was, in fact, a werewolf. In retrospect, she wondered why it took her so long to figure it out. But after...
Content Warning: religiously motivated ableism and homophobia, both internalized and external; self-harm; and depictions of ritual sacrifice including drowning, hanging, and burning, not very graphic. Alone but for the crows, the priestess peers through...
deathhomophobiaself-harm
After a months-long drug-fueled party across Europe, I found myself homeless in the town of Portishead, abandoned by my so-called friends and estranged from my family. Some bad luck, but mostly my own fault. I thought back to my days as a Harvard student,...
substance-useviolence
Content Warning: Mentions of hurt children On Saturday morning, Amélia received a call from the Santa Minerva Nursing Home for the Empowered Elderly. They didn’t use to call except for urgent matters. It could only mean one thing: Vovó had passed away....
April It is in the floral heaviness of late-spring that his mother comes home and hands him the present. It fits well in the palms of his hands, neither too heavy nor too light. Perfectly square, perhaps—and later confirmed to be exactly—five inches wide...
self-harmviolence
In the last blush of autumn, the King of the Forest requested an audience with the King. The King was so delighted that he agreed at once. The audience was held in the King’s hall, the burnished tile laid in gold and green, the fire stoked high with ash...