578 free-to-read stories tagged “Contemporary”
The narrator is a witch who works in a public library somewhere in the rural American South. Her job is to get patrons the books they need, but a lonely teenage boy poses a challenge.
child-abusedeath-of-a-loved-onemental-illnesssuicide
"So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different...
child-abusechild-deathgoreviolence
"Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (Roud 423, Child 313) is a traditional English folk ballad. Like many traditional songs, the lyrics are unattributed. Child transcribed twenty verses, and a twenty-first got added later (and is included here for some unknown...
deathviolence
Meimei dates really bad guys. Who want to use her. Who don't know what they're in for.
abusebody-horrordeath-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
Stella’s helping an old high-school friend clean out his dead brother’s house, but the brother was a hoarder, and the task is horrible in several ways.
death-of-a-loved-onemental-illness
"It is 2091, and Grace is staring at the rabbit in the corner of her visual overlay. It is an Angora rabbit, fluffy and white, and when Grace picked the icon out, she did not realize how much she would come to dread the sight of it. She moves, and the...
abusedeathmental-illnesspregnancy-losssexual-violencesuicide
The inventor of trans-multiverse travel invites hundreds of instances of herself to a conference. It’s great fun until one gets murdered.
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorchild-deathdeathviolence
Sam’s ability is modest, but he’s still excited to be accepted into the Super Team. Now he just has to figure out how he can make the biggest difference—assuming he can do more good than harm.
violence
Following a disaster in Antarctica, MacReady spends summer 1983 in New York and starts to wonder what he might have brought back with him.
body-horrordeathillness-and-pandemicsubstance-useviolence
"Paulie rushes out the elevator doors the moment they part, only to skid to a halt at the sight of his father’s wife. She shakes her head, but he doesn’t need the confirmation. If Tricia is out here and not in the hospital room with his father, it can only...
death-of-a-loved-one
Computron was the only intelligent robot built in the 1950s. Now all he does is answer questions from children and write fan-fiction about the robot in the Hyperdimension Warp Record TV show.
In a world desperate for wood for fires and paper, a man and his brother look for a tree good enough to make a world-class violin.
illness-and-pandemicviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
Months after mysterious aliens scattered their spacecraft across North America, no one has a clue what they want. Avery knows what one of them wants, though: it wants a tour.
animal-harmdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Entertaining tale of a modern search engine that achieves real artificial intelligence by accident and decides it wants to be helpful to people.
mental-illnesssubstance-use
"My dear Cara, Thank you for sending me the photos, I never thought I’d feel this way again. But the pictures help. They really do. I can’t stop looking at them. Thank you for scanning and emailing them to me. These photos and our old videos are all I’ve...
AirBody is like AirB&B except you rent out your body, not your home. Arsalan doesn’t expect any trouble from a middle-aged Pakistani woman, but everything she does reminds him of lost opportunities in his own past.
death-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
In this provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth, Orpheus, the musician son of Apollo and Calliope, successfully rescues his wife Eurydice from Hades after her untimely death.
body-horrordeath
Zanna settles into a remote mountain cabin to write her next book. No internet. No phone. No distractions.
body-horrordeath
When the the elitist institution of Ozymandias Academy and its headmaster, Vamon Kinctuarin, can't find a solution to the city's worsening drought, 2 self-taught magicians, Noah and his partner Manny, take it upon themselves to find a solution to the crisis.
"That first video of the flying man goes viral on social media and gets featured on the news. No jet pack. No hang glider. Just him, unaided, soaring over the cable-stayed bridge that leads into the city. The video looks like it was shot on a cellphone...
racismviolence
The girl he killed was much more than merely human, and there will be consequences.
deathmisogynysexual-violenceviolence
A young hustler discovers that he's supposed to play a big role in transforming New York from a city to a City. If he can survive it.
deathracismviolence
Salman pursues the truth behind stories his grandfather told him about an impoverished princess he used to know back in Pakistan and the Jinn that protected her.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
The vampires aren’t even the worst part about being a teenage trans girl on tumblr.
abusechild-abusedeath-of-a-loved-onegoremisogynysexual-violencesubstance-usetransphobiaviolence
"I’ve ferried two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death, and I can already tell my two-hundred-and-twenty-second is going to be a real shitkicker. I know by the lightness of the manila folder in my hand, the preemptive pity in the...
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"A week before the Season began, as Mrs. Vanessa Saunders held brunch court at the Empire Hotel, a photo appeared on her phone: a large oak door beneath a pale green sign with silver lettering. Impossible, she thought, flipping the infernal device over...
death
Childbirth attracts zombies, so Brit has to leave the shelter for a while when she gets ready to give birth so as not to put the others at risk.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
When Megian sets out her homemade book exchange, a mysterious neighbor starts trading objects and art for the books, but some of the items don’t seem to come from this world at all.
war
Hannah watched her sister Melanie die, incinerated with her own magic. Hannah can't accept that and sets out to use her own magic to put things right.
abusedeath-of-a-loved-oneself-harmsuicide
Alzheimer's patient's family can't visit her very often, so they buy a robot to fool her into thinking they're visiting her. The robot tells the story.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
An android who knows nothing besides his work in a factory, is given one final week to explore the world before he is forced to undergo mandatory reprogramming, in this bittersweet precursor to TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets.
body-horrordeath
"Everything Anton owns goes in one black trash bag. His ratty yellow sketchpad, which he bought to draw the other familiars when he moved here, and only ever used three pages of. The few shirts and khakis that he paid for with his own money, before Mr....
abusesuicideviolence
"WHEEP-3 (“Dr. Weep”), probably the most renowned AI AI-critic of the last two decades, was retired by the Shallow Laboratory at Stanford University last Wednesday. Created by Dr. Jody Reynolds Tran more than two decades ago, the experimental generative...
death
"June was the first of my friends to get into it. This isn’t surprising—she was playing Wordle for weeks before Margo or I discovered it. When we met up for our weekly lunch, she kept checking her phone and I assumed it was some new game. Then she put it...
substance-use
"It was half past midnight when Olga heard the Devil cry. They were supposed to be wild tonight, the three of them. Cassandra had led the way and Maria and Olga didn’t put up much of a fight. They would visit the Devil’s bridge—anything that claimed to be...
body-horrorchild-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky comes so near to earth it has to use the crosswalk just like everybody else. … There’s a woman outside of Sheridan and she is eating the sin of America."
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Long ago, Sylvie turned herself into a tree to avoid rape, but she wonders if there might not be a better way.
sexual-violencesuicideviolence
Lola (aka Eliza) has had problems dealing with people ever since she was a child, but she's always been good with snakes.
abusechild-abusedeathdeath-of-a-loved-onesexual-violenceviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathsexual-contentsubstance-use
As the Cold War stalls and the threat of nuclear warfare dominates the news, small-town misfits Laurie and Fell bond over a shared love of music and the mystery of the erratic radio messages that hint at the existence of a future worth reaching out for.
In this spell-binding tale, a Pakistani storyteller captivates a group of wide-eyed tourists with a nesting doll of interlocked stories about a trickster and a hidden city ruled by the Queen of Red Midnight.
abusebody-horrorchild-deathviolence
Cecily goes in search of her highschool best friend, who seems to have hidden in China where he’s using her research to try to create enhanced human beings.
In 1888 a woman suffering a hideous deformity was murdered in London. Today, her descendent wants to find the culprit.
deathviolence
Adam has 70% of the memories of the man who created him, but something vital is hiding in that missing 30%.
death-of-a-loved-one
Madeline is having an adverse reaction to an experimental drug--she revisits episodes in her past.
A woman about to leave on an overseas business trip, calls home from the airport and discovers that “daddy” isn’t there and her six-year-old son is all alone in the dark…
abuse
When Hurston Hill is threatened by a suspiciously powerful urban development firm, Miss l’Abielle steps up to protect her community with the help of a mysterious orphaned girl in this charming follow-up to “St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid”.
"From the first time I visited Mariah Lee-Cassidy in prison, she radiated defiance. The poisonous orange of her prison jumpsuit might have been the decision of the state, but everything else about the twenty-nine-year-old, from her aggressively spiked hair...
deathmental-illnesssuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
racism
An immigrant is distressed because her mother’s ghost is confiscated at the border.
death-of-a-loved-one
June’s sister Wanda suffered some kind of brain damage in an experiment aimed at learning the nature of reality. Two other people died in that experiment, and June would like some answers.
death
A Chinese woman living in the Bay Area needs to raise money to get her daughter into Stanford. She tries to sell her English-language proficiency, but even after fifteen years, it’s not good enough. But her native fluency in Mandarin is worth a lot, if...
Leah studies stories people tell about their own experiences with ghosts. To her it’s all folklore—not real at all—until she gets hints her dead mother wants to talk to her about something.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
‘Nisha only has five hours to get across New York to her dead aunt’s apartment before the city comes to throw away all her stuff. She’s not even sure it’s worth it, but they said her aunt was a witch…
deathgoreviolence
"There’s nights in the deep end of summer so hot and thick and wet you can feel the dark wrinkling up your fingers like bathwater—and my last night breathing was one of those. 2 a.m. came to ring my bell and found me perfectly awake, swinging back and...
abusebody-horrorviolence
A professional caregiver’s commute takes an unsettling detour when car trouble forces her to pull over on the highway, where she begins receiving distressing phone calls from strangers…
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathmental-illnesssexual-violencesubstance-useviolence
A day laborer hired to clean up a flooded creek outside of Boulder, Colorado uncovers what could be a valuable find—if it doesn't kill him first.
deathgoreviolence
When you were eight, the haunted house changed your life. Twenty years later, you’re determined to study it, but it’s determined to change your life again.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Brian wakes up in his mountain retreat to find his home AI system has been hacked and he can’t escape the house without paying a huge ransom. He’s an engineer, so he’s not ready to pay up without a fight.
Jamie’s a non-binary teenager in a small town, but they remember at least a dozen past lives, one of which relates to a forty-year-old murder.
violence
Corinna was eleven when her magical journey to the Land of Nibiru ended with her returning to her kitchen at home. Now she’s waiting for her friends to return for her. Probably.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorchild-abusedeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
In 2001, just before the attacks, a girl out West has a very close encounter with space aliens.
body-horrordeathgoresexual-violenceviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"A dual-carriage road descends from a flyover bridge in Thamesmead, bearing sluggish traffic on both sides. From inside bus number 229, a woman looks out of the large windows and thinks the other vehicles look like toy cars. For all she knows, the 229...
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-onemental-illnessviolence
In one small town, the delicate balance between predator and prey is threatened when five girls are murdered on prom night.
body-horrordeathviolence
Evan is suddenly coughing up bones, like, A LOT of bones, but that’s not even in the top ten strangest things that have happened to him since he moved into his new (possibly haunted) duplex...
"Andrew was convinced the writer had been trans. By this point his friends were tired of hearing about it, but he had no one else to tell besides the internet, and he was too smart for that. That would be asking for it. Samantha Finnes was a minor...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusedeathgoreviolence
"Aden had never once forgotten his gear for bulk trash day, but he found it touching that Nura still taped a monthly reminder note on the door from the kitchen to the garage. Sweet of her to remember, given how exhausted med school had her these days."
death
It’s been two years since Jenna’s ex-boyfriend left her alone in East Texas heartbroken. Now he’s back in town and she wants to payback. One night, she stumbles upon a bloodthirsty Camaro that may be the key to carrying out her revenge.
deathgoreviolence
Approaching 50, Mabel decides to become a glass bottle dancer. She tries to hide it from her family, but the local cockroaches notice it for sure when she gathers up their bottles, and they’ve got dreams too.
"He spoke once, the words whispered by frozen lips on a face so frostbitten he looked like a porcelain doll. I found him below the summit as our expedition bottlenecked before the Hillary Step on our final ascent of Mount Everest. And above the bottleneck,...
body-horrordeath
She wants to get out of Hell, but all the boys she has in mind keep letting her down.
Samantha searches Paris to try to find what’s killing fallen angels.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
Donny is a young teen in high school, but his augments give him an intimate connection to the Internet—and put him at odds with his teachers and other students.
Ben’s parents send him to a special camp for gifted students, but the camp rules are very strange and one of his classmates is so weird he wonders if she’s from another planet.
deathviolence
Claire meets a handsome older man at a dinner party held in a virtual reality where something has gone subtly wrong.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
child-abusedeath-of-a-loved-onesuicideviolence
A stoner kid and his best friend attempt to move a sofa across town during an alien invasion...
death-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
"If you were to drive to my sister Violet’s house today, you would find yourself at a very different place from the one I encountered on my first trip. The road up the mountain has been paved, for one thing, to make it more accessible to the tourists who...
death-of-a-loved-one
"You’re asleep in dreams of your father holding your head underwater, so the call from Magnolia Assisted Living goes to voicemail. “I didn’t raise a son of mine to count on his fingers,” your father says in the dream—because ah, yes, it’s all of your worst...
abusechild-abuse
"Episode 60 Transcription by @jbutler22 0:01 Murray: Hey there, I’m Dean Murray and this is a special episode of Homewrecker. We’re on the road this week, heading up to historic [garbled] where we’ll venture [garbled] outside the city to see the colonial...
body-horrordeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"i am a memory. i am an METI carrying a memory. i am an METI (Message to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) carrying a memory beaming through the vacuum of space. Because i am an METI, i presume my purpose is to communicate with extraterrestrials, should i find them."
deathwar
A photographer’s obsession with an unsettled subject exposes two friends to a darkness that won’t be contained by frames…
child-deathsuicideviolence
"In your head, the dead man wakes up crying. He stutters into awareness just as you manage to stanch the tears welling in your eyes, a response to the pressure of his presence on your limbic system. Your fingers brush, irritated, against the port at the...
"In the beginning of me, I was a bird. A magpie, although I’ve since been a jay and a red-tailed hawk and even a big, black crow, crying tok-tok-tok at every passerby. But the magpie was special: on my first day, I saw those flashing blue wingtips, and I...
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorviolence
More than a hundred years from now, an arborist fighting to save the last remaining forest on Earth discovers a secret about the trees—one that changes not only her life, but also the fate of our world. Inspired by the real-life “Future Library,” a...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"Big Edie was a useless piece of shit. Johanna Telle found the most significant relationship of her life on a Saturday afternoon in late May, sitting on one of those excruciatingly handmade quilts crafty stay-at-homes used to make out of their precious...
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
A magician dies on stage performing his most famous trick, but what really happened?
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Mebuyen doesn’t get many lost souls anymore—modern Filipinos have moved on—so when a bunch of young people start showing up whom she can’t send along, it’s time to visit the Earth and learn what’s going on.
child-deathdeathviolence
Humanity is under attack from intelligent creatures we never knew about from the abyss of our own oceans. Cally is a researcher trying to communicate with them when the underwater facility she’s on is attacked and she has to escape before it disintegrates entirely.
deathsexual-contentviolence
Ostap can’t wait to visit his girlfriend and see her big project that’s trying to use quantum mechanics to develop faster-than-light travel.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
What if you tried to teleport and succeeded? What if you couldn’t manage to do it again?
A sad tale of how, unable to bear losing your dog, you travel back in time to visit her again and again.
animal-harmdeath-of-a-loved-one
Vincent lost his mom on one of the first Mars missions. He’s had a career as a successful author, but he’s always refused to talk about his mother. Fifty years later, he tells us how he decided to end his silence and write a book about her.
death-of-a-loved-one
The soprano playing Liù keeps trying to change the opera’s gruesome plot, starting with her own death scene.
deathsexual-violenceviolence
A washed-up magician drinking whisky at 9 AM meets a mysterious British lady, who leads him into the worst day of his life.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
Chaplin Win is in trouble for letting an unauthorized ghost talk with hospital patients, and inspectors are coming tomorrow.
deathillness-and-pandemic
When the world changed and the sky turned silver, magic became real, Emma Anne became a little girl and her neighbor became a pirate. But can a little girl fight off an attack by the Loping Man?
deathviolence
During a flu epidemic, the narrator uses her cooking blog to tell the world about how she and her family make do on short rations.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
Magical Girl Antifa War Machine By Esther Alter XYLIA We were at the bottom of a hole, a new construction site that went deep into the bedrock. I was the first to touch the artifact, a thing that didn’t quite have shape or color. I grabbed it. My new...
deathgoresexual-contentviolencewar
"As always, I’m doing a buddy read with MariaReadsALot because she talked me into it, and boy, was she right! What a strange world and what powerful characters Titos Pavlou has created! I can’t stop thinking about this book even though this might be for...
death
"We used to cage them in the tide pools, when they were still small enough to capture in our little hands. Pull them out and snap photos that we could pretend to sell to magazines just like Papa. Them, gasping for breath, unable to see, fins fluttering. We...
abusebody-horrordeathviolence
The survivor of an apocalypse event in an alternate universe tries to rebuild and avoid being dragged back into the past when a visitor crosses the in-between and asks for help.
"Now that I’ve failed as a woman, my punishment is to become a garden. I receive the verdict on a Sunday evening. They’re supposed to give you advance notice so you can put your affairs in order, but the letter is postmarked from more than a month ago—I’ve...
body-horrorpregnancy-loss
"The campsite looks like it wants to eat them. A fire pit yawns in the middle, an ashy-grey mouth ringed by rocks like rotting teeth. The trees crowd in, sizing them up, knifing the daylight. One gulp of that smoke-and-pine air, and Henry shudders head to...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
When their rental truck breaks down, two friends moving cross-country kill time by telling stories about the strange carving in front of the motel where they’re awaiting a mechanic…
deathviolence
"Can someone get the doors? Thanks. Please remember we’re on an honor system for chairs—if you’ve eaten today, please leave them for someone who hasn’t. We don’t need another fainting incident. First of all, if you’re looking for a technical look at...
"I was kinda worried about being the new kid, but apparently new kids are cool here. This guy named Scott Marsh who seems pretty popular and has a good jump shot was really nice to me, so the other guys were nice to me, too. I think maybe because me and...
abusechild-abuseviolence
"Alice wants to hold a funeral for me, which is disconcerting because I’m not dead. But humans, like all aliens—and certainly all single-forms—have their own idiosyncrasies. I’m used to the idiosyncrasies, of course: I’ve lived on Earth—in my tertiary...
death
"There’s nothing quieter than the sound of dreams not coming true. The moment when reality sinks in and Gwen realizes she’s never going to have the one thing she’s been yearning for since high school—the thing she made so much space in her life to...
"I tell Mateo to meet me at a wine bar. It’s a quiet, low-key spot—ideal for first dates, because it’s easy to make a speedy exit in case the red flags start flying—or worse, if the men in blue come knocking. It’s been over an hour, and we’re on our second...
The sister of an abducted child is haunted by a sinister figure who may or may not be real…
"Mirae sits on her bed, parting her hair with one hand and feeling for the access port on the back of her head with the other. She finds the notched edges of the cap and twists counterclockwise until it comes loose. Her eye twitches as she slides the plug...
abusedeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"There’s a dog in this house. A not-quite-a-dog. An undog. I heard its whimpering the first week I slept here, the thump, thump, thump of its bulky legs on the old tiles. I found long brown hair mixed with dust bunnies where the walls met. When there’s a...
abuseanimal-harm
"A hoodie is what a Soucouyant give birth to when she trick a Midnight Robber.” Or so Rose calls herself. Passed off to orphanages. No idea who her mother and father were. Didn’t know the source of herself. Because she wasn’t given a proper foundation to...
suicide
"If you’re looking for a cheap way to kill all this mold—and who isn’t, right now—look no further than Inkicide Disinfectant Concentrate 64oz (4 Bottles). It’ll curl your nose hairs right up into your skull, but that just means it’s working, amirite? Two...
body-horrorillness-and-pandemic
"I want you to make a dragon for me,” the client said. “I need it ready to go by February first.” Dragon, Feb 1, I wrote down on the paper pad I use to take notes during video meetings. Also to doodle. I’ve always had trouble paying attention in client...
"I live in my car. It’s both worse and better than you’d expect. It’s an old Subaru hatchback so I can put the back seat down and sleep. I have all my stuff in the back but I have a space where I can lay. The place where I park is, like, the unofficial...
illness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
Allie and Rooster are heading down to Asheville for Rooster’s new gig, a cushy stint as artist-in-residence at UNC. ... But when they stumble upon an old backcountry church—the perfect backdrop for Rooster’s latest project—they discover that some...
body-horrordeathviolence
"INTERVIEWER We’ve spoken about your use of the “weird” in your stories, but have you personally ever experienced anything akin to something that might happen to one of Lovecraft’s characters? BOEKNER Yes — despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain...
"Joy nearly got lost on the root-knotted red dirt path off of Highway 99, losing sight of the gaps between the live oaks and Spanish moss that fanned across her hood and windows like fingertips. Driving back to her family’s cabin twenty years later...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Beni’s a drag queen who reads minds, and he’s shopping for a new dress and the story that goes with it.
abusechild-abusepregnancy-loss
Alice prefers to stay in human form, but one of her own kind is after her seeking vengeance, and she’s got to find a way to protect herself before he finds her.
violence
"Charlie wasn’t a ghost standing in the corners of the house, but at the same time he was everywhere. He had been haunting my thoughts since we received Uncle Jamey’s emails and the plane tickets. Now, everyone gathered at our mother’s house, my childhood...
deathracismsubstance-usesuicideviolence
When he’s caught kissing another boy, one of Izuchukwu’s two big secrets comes out. But if they find out he can turn into a bird and fly, he’ll be in real trouble.
abusehomophobia
The aliens occupied and controlled the bodies of animals, destroying most of humanity. A few survivors in a ski resort pass the time preserving the bodies of friends who didn’t make it.
animal-harmdeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Nora has a tendency of turning into whatever she’s dating. She became a rock climber when she dated a rock climber, a comedian when she dated a comedian. But the amateur acupuncturist goes differently.
Dez is abandoning his acting career in mourning for Cherie, his one true love. But there is a technology that can temporarily bring her back—or something like her, anyway.
body-horrordeath-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
Vera grew up in America, but she was born in Winter, a mysterious, very cold European country. She thinks she’s left it all behind, but it finds a way to come for her.
death
Cassie takes her hallucinating uncle and a needy animatronic dinosaur head on a road trip through the suburbs of a decaying city.
death-of-a-loved-one
A soldier wracked with guilt about his actions in the war leaps at a chance to do something to end war forever.
deathviolencewar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorsubstance-useviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
Master Zhao shares his tale of how he discovered his time-travel ability and what he’s done with it. But why hasn’t he used it to become more successful?
deathillness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
Etta left her sister’s shoes behind at last night’s drunken party, and she’s ashamed to show her face there again, so she hires a man and his octopus to sneak in and steal them from under the bed.
Delilah makes some money modeling, and Crispin offers twice what anyone else does. He never lets her look at the works in progress, though. He has his reasons.
violence
This story follows Amir and Mani’s careers starting when they’re teenagers in water-starved Beirut.
sexual-content
Only Marianne can see that her new brother-in-law is a horror, and although she knows she can summon the faeries to get rid of him, she also knows the price will be very high.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-onepregnancy-lossviolence
The time travelers across the road think they’re being clever, but Jade’s family spotted them right away. Even so, they’ve got a daughter her age, and she wants to make friends.
A disabled human veteran takes in a disabled AI veteran. The AI doesn't talk anymore due to trauma, but Tawn tries to get through to it, even though his mother thinks it's dangerous.
war
A woman appears to be helping a child recover from some form of brain damage. His perceptions and memory are off, but something is off about her too.
child-deathdeathviolence
What if rhinoceroses behaved like human beings and talked about their upcoming extinction during book club meetings?
death-of-a-loved-one
Fundamentalist mom takes networking drug so she can track down her missing teenage boy.
abusechild-abusesubstance-use
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrormental-illness
A disabled son care-taking for a disabled father tries to understand the mysterious blur haunting them.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"It turns out you’ve missed your favorite season. Your wheelchair rolls along a path strewn with ginkgo leaves, and you catch sight of the SWAILS building complex: fourteen dome-shaped structures surrounding a flat monument of what looks like black marble....
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"Steve, over here! Turn to your right. Can we get a smile?” He falls back on his training easily enough, turns to the cameras, gives them his famous crooked smile, tilts his head just so as the flashes go off so they can capture the smoulder that...
There is a woman, and she is a man’s wife. Please give her name. Call her whatever you’d like.
abusebody-horrorviolence
"This is the eighth floor of the Al-Ahli Memorial Library, my favorite place in the building. When the elevator door opens, it’s like walking into a quiet circle of glass. So, as we walk, I’m going to whisper. People are reading, writing, drawing—it’s such...
child-deathdeathwar
"No signs protect the backyards in this part of town from the Marl Pits Forest. There’s no treeline either. Of course there isn’t. But even in the dark, you can’t really miss where the forest starts—not if you’ve lived a childhood in the wilderness here...
child-abusedeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"Alvin’s scripts arrived in yellow envelopes. They were hand delivered, placed inside his letter box as if part of the regular mail, but with no address or stamps on it. The scripts were typed on unlined paper. They were short, never longer than a page,...
deathviolence
"# Unit COFFEE_VENDOR.06 # Notification of new update 09:00 A.M. [Installing update_Exp.42] Process: 100% complete Self-execute (update_Exp.42); # Time of new interaction: 10:24 A.M. input: options = cappuccino; sugar = 3; if (input == (options =...
"Not all the ghosts of Chornobyl died in 1986. Some died years—decades—later, bodies ravaged by mutated cells. They were a hundred kilometers away, not realizing their favorite mug was doused with irradiated atoms from the destroyed reactor. I died in...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onewar
"Fejértorony There’s dysphoria, and then there’s turning into a mid-size city. But sometimes you try male, you try female, you try different kinds of nonbinary and it only makes you realize that something still doesn’t quite fit, something fundamental....
racismviolence
"A man who will be given a second name in ten thousand years and a man whose name will be forgotten sit in a forest, or perhaps a grassy plain, or perhaps a cold tundra. It is a biome that will not exist in ten thousand years but whose footprint will be...
mental-illnesssuicide
It’s just business as usual at the Bureau of Metahuman, Mutant, and Occult Affairs until an employee for the government agency begins to wonder if work is following her home…
"You ever love the pretty right off someone? When I was a kid, had me a BMX, bright red like a candy apple. I rode it all summer long, cresting hills trying to catch the perfect gleam in the sunlight."
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Their power is how they can turn you into one of them. That’s the trick of it, see. You can go in with your swords and sacrifice, you can go in with your red heart and good intentions, and they will grin with their white teeth and say, “Welcome to Grey &...
A woman who fears she’s failing as a painter and as an artist seeks inspiration from one of her favorite poets and finds something even more wondrous, but also more impossible to capture on canvas…
"Up on the spoil heap Morag found a robot. This wasn’t that unusual in and of itself. She was always finding them, or parts of them anyway, frozen in contorted attitudes like dinosaur fossils, plastic housing cracked and aluminum limbs splayed. What was...
deathviolence
An all-but-forgotten demigod bets everything on one last gambit to secure his future before he fades from existence. Copyright khōréō magazine 2022. Story by Guan Un, edited by Rowan Morrison. Audio edition read by Guan Un, edited by Lian Xia Rose, with...
violence
"Who is the most beloved person alive? Is it one of those actors who plays superheroes? Is it a political leader? Maybe you’re a galaxy brain and say Beyoncé? No matter who you pick, you know you’re wrong. There’s always that better person who we love so...
self-harmviolence
"I didn’t expect the trailer to feel so small and that some of the blood would still be wet. But I must have expected some blood because I cuffed my jeans before going in. And I didn’t expect the cats would have come back—a window was open, its screen...
deathviolence
A university student seeks special accommodations for her new support animal, causing havoc all around her.
animal-harm
"Jinah stands in her old underwear and scrapes the future from women’s skin. Their scales fall to the floor. The women sit up scoured red and smooth. The scales are impossible to see unless you’ve learned how to look, but impossible to miss once you’ve...
"The Noon Witch is not a cat person. She likes the color purple, hates police procedurals, loves breakfast foods, thinks scented bath products and anchovy pizza are gross. Hates platform shoes. Hates walnuts in brownies. Used to like the electropop group...
"A four-hour drive between me and my parents is a distance that works well for everybody. I can come back for a weekend, but they don’t call me back for every little thing. So when Mom did call me at work in the middle of the day and said, “Your father is...
For Grant Rutherford, work is both life and legacy — but when he dies a mere week after his wife, what he leaves behind will have metaphysical reverberations he could never have foreseen. Content warnings: Grief, medicalized illness, death of a loved one...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
Fear was already on the street waiting for her. Tulaya had seen this purge-and-nightmare Manifest before in Fatih, tagging the footsteps of an old man in the spice market with its shadow like claws.
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-oneracismviolence
"Besides the vedma who lived behind the stove in steam room three, the banya in Grand Lake Plaza was the same as any other budget day spa on Chicago’s West Side. It had deep-tissue massages and signature facials, plus day passes for the communal baths and...
abusesexual-violenceviolence
"Today one of the minders rolls one Veena Kaur Chan into my hairbay for a shampoo and cut. New client, transferring in from Palliative. Brainstem stroke. Unsuccessful rehabilitation. Pancreatic cancer. Ouch. Triple whammy. As the newly implemented...
deathillness-and-pandemic
"Your grandfather is dead. Your instance gave you the news: a phone call in the dead of night that woke you from a dead sleep. “Hello?” you said, accented with slumber. “Is this Soyoung Kang?” your own voice said, accented with Korean. “Yes,” you said. The...
death-of-a-loved-one
Pauly is a good son. When he brings home three beautiful Masquerades, he’s expecting that his mother will be proud of him. But when his mother begins asking favors of his Masquerades, he realizes that being a good son sometimes means disobeying.
"Good art changes you. And that was the point, right? That’s what the social media ad that caught my attention wanted me to believe: Our Shoes: You couldn’t understand our struggle... Until now. I had read the line over and over again during a rare...
racism
Even as a grad student, Sarah Levy focused on her research to the detriment of her family, and things only get worse when she makes a breakthrough discovery.
death-of-a-loved-one
On his deathbed, a man implores his son to visit his plaque at their ancestral temple—which appears to exist in virtual reality.
The narrator undergoes a special treatment that lets her revisit (and change) key memories that trouble her—all of which involve people she had sex with.
sexual-contentsexual-violencesubstance-use
Glenn and Vivian are Berkley students with a good thing going up until he finds out what she really does for a living, and it’s literally out of this world.
Connor works at a restaurant in New York where he has a magical touch with food (literally). Problems with his family keep interfering with his career, though.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horror
At age 9, the narrator and his best friend discover a dangerous alien on an island near their homes, and they spend the summer fighting it with their friends. But is it real or just their imaginations?
An old woman travels to Beijing to find out what’s wrong with her son, and she relates her story to a taxi driver on the way home.
An aspiring young stage magician meets an older magician over coffee to try to convince him to share some of his tricks. And to show him a few of his own.
Since her cancer, Sydney has just been drifting through life, but when she lets a friend move in, things change in an unexpected way.
illness-and-pandemic
A mother talks to a scan of her daughter taken just a month before, ah, something happened. It’s a short conversation but it packs quite a punch.
death-of-a-loved-one
After memory-loss plague strikes the world, Gouda helps clients track missing family members they can barely remember—even though she can’t even remember her own last name.
The narrator and her friends go fishing for snakehead in a stream in Singapore, but the biggest one is something more than just a fish.
A closeted young Hawaiian man bails a devious Native-American god out of a Honolulu jail and watches his life spiral out of control.
substance-use
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorchild-abusedeathdeath-of-a-loved-onesubstance-useviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
Gina and Bruno are supposed to manage the town’s factory, but someone keeps trying to steal their robots.
The narrator’s homelife has fallen apart since she told her husband she’s asexual, so they order a device that looks and talks like her, but with “improvements.”
mental-illnesssexual-contentsuicide
The narrator makes a deal with the Devil—or one of his snakes, at least. She thinks she’s clever, but one deal leads to another.
animal-harmself-harmsubstance-useviolence
Ben Clarke travels to Hollywood to settle his late brother’s affairs. He learns a variety of things about his brother, but the biggest surprise is what he finds in the bedroom.
deathsubstance-usesuicide
A group of women have been chemically altered to set cities on fire from a distance. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea—including the women themselves.
child-deathdeathillness-and-pandemicviolence
The world is gradually being destroyed by what seems like an alien plague that attacks people and software alike. Caitlin lives in a seaside Scottish town, nursing her dying lover.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusedeathgoreillness-and-pandemicsexual-contentsubstance-usesuicideviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorcannibalismdeathgoreviolence
A dead woman sees her doppelgänger watching over her remains and wonders what she's up to.
deathsexual-violenceviolence
Ava recounts the visit of the "Needlers" to Earth and her part in the attempts to communicate with the aliens.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemicviolence
Aliens decide to rule the Earth indirectly, picking a middle-aged woman from an insurance company to be their intermediary.
deathsuicide
"I heard you’re returning to our world again. What do you want here exactly, Orhija? The Earth is dying slowly. It’s losing its sheen and glow. The blackness of the soil that you used to say was as beautiful as mine has changed since you left. It’s redder...
"A scream rises from the bush. One last call to the living: a warning of pain. Katarina’s heard that same sound more times than she’s had hot dinners but still a ribbon of unease unfurls in her gut. She sets her cleaver down for a moment, shifting from one...
child-abusedeathviolence
"The apartment is dark when I return, the blackout curtains doing their job of keeping the late afternoon sun out. It doesn’t matter, though. The air is stifling hot, thick and oppressive. Sweat gathers on my skin, sticking clothes to flesh. But I welcome...
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathsuicide
"We put my body double together in June Lee’s basement. Her mom was one of those chill Asian moms who liked having an artsy-fartsy daughter she could brag about at Bible study. She was already pushing the whole portfolio-for-college-apps deal, so she...
"Dear Dr. Erzsébet Krajcsik-Nagy, I am contacting you as a member of the general public, and not as a fellow scholar, though I must say my chosen field of art history does have certain similarities to yours. I read the interview with you in the online...
Author : Eden Royce Narrator : Laurice White Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 914: The Magnolia Returns is a PodCastle original. Rated PG The Magnolia Returns By Eden Royce The Magnolia blooms out of nowhere at any time of year it...
abusebody-horror
"I ended up on Pluto on the night of my nineteenth birthday, after breaking my own stupid heart. It wasn’t even over anything important. All I did was jump in a pool, and then the chlorine got in my nose and I came up coughing on the side of the tiles, and...
sexual-violence
As a young scholar sets out on a research project to find the stones where the settlers of Iceland made human sacrifices, a long dormant volcano rouses…and other, long-sleeping horrors might also be stirring.
"We lost so many souls today. Reports stream in across five continents; icons bloom on the map like blood spatters. Broken filters, zero latency, bandwidth that somehow blew through the roof when no one was looking. The hardware plays catch-up as best it...
Even death is no match for a trio of elderly, stubborn, ever-sparring sisters, who refuse to rest in peace while their grudges live on…
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Don’t start with the birth certificate. No, take an obituary-out approach. Pick an age, a date, what to do in lieu of flowers. Yes, she must die. I know how hard it is to kill her, but the spell won’t work without it, for every story ends in death. We set...
An engineer who frequently travels for her job, suddenly finds herself in airports other than the one she arrived in…
"We drove out to Joshua Tree for the star party—a gathering of amateur astronomers under a clear, dark sky. It was Holly’s idea, an impromptu adventure on a Friday after work: “Hey, Lou, do you want to go look at the moon tonight?” Holly had the best ideas...
child-deathviolence
"Half-painted in the angled mirror, I ignore my mother’s calls and sweep blush onto my temples. The face of Luz Divinity takes shape beneath my brush. My mother tries again as I tug a wig onto my shaved head, the unit sleek and long, and again as I zip a...
"Scarlett’s eyes had to be perfect. Jon was the artist who’d made her, so it bothered him to think that so much of Scarlett would be crafted by other people. Scarlett’s limbs were carved from silicon polymer and coated in a soft synthetic skin from the...
body-horrorsexual-contentviolence
"Nate doesn’t often receive wedding invitations. This year, he gets seven. To be fair, the first one is work, so he doesn’t even get to pick his outfit. But an olive-scented breeze squirrels joyfully through his hair; waiters bring out little triangles of...
death
A comatose patient undergoes an experimental procedure that uses favorite childhood stories to pull the patient back into consciousness—but the experiment doesn’t go quite as planned…
deathviolence
"Umeboshi" by Rebecca Nakaba is an exploration of what it means to be connected through heritage—and chain email. Copyright khōréō magazine 2023. Story by Rebecca Nakaba, edited by Sachiko Ragosta. Audio edition read by Heidi Tabing, with sound design by...
body-horror
"The country was at just over ten thousand deaths the morning that the door appeared. On Kosmo’s phone NPR was interviewing a doctor with a nasal voice about the need for social distancing, while Kosmo himself collected empty cans from around his home office."
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Your mother spends every evening working on her machine. It looks like no other machine you’ve seen. A hunk of metal on the ground, with wires stringing each section to the next. Like the inside of a giant robot’s belly, if someone cut it open to expose...
"Long before you came along, I was myself just a seed in Raffa’s pocket, something she fumbled with as she stepped on the plane, her other hand clutching her mother’s. Small as I was, I sensed her fear. I tried to hum reassuringly. Above the ocean, I...
abusedeath-of-a-loved-one
"I did not want to write a report for this book, but Lady Koi-Koi convinced me to, even though she says it “does a disservice to our own stories.”1 I also have to pass my WAEC, and this book is on our reading list for the mock exam, so, fine. I will...
"Ask me something only I would know.” You say this to your wife because you know you’re human. You can feel it in the familiar ache in your back, and the fear writhing in your guts. You feel it in the cold seeping into your bare feet from the kitchen...
body-horrordeathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"The seven siblings sit in a place beyond the boundaries of space and time, where everything is made of stories. Even them. Especially them. People are made of stories too, but only the versions of their stories that they tell themselves. Curated, limited,...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"The little girl was blonde and had very blue eyes. She stood on the steps to the house and stared at Mara without expression. “It lives in the closet,” the little girl said. “Klara…” her father said. He looked apologetically at Mara. “Please,” he said....
"For Julie, it was the cryptid out in the woods behind our old elementary school. Wings, red eyes. Yes, Julie came back knowing exactly when everyone she loved was going to die, but it was worth it, she told us. The six of us—well, five after Sophie...
deathviolence
"Today is upgrade day and Gabriel, a model 2098 post-human intelligence robotic service assistant, wears an appropriately festive hat. The perfect cone of polka-dotted purple paper slopes to one side of his head, his glossy plastic surface giving the weak...
"Grandma died last year, yet she comes every Saturday to have lunch with me. When she was still alive, she loved telling everyone that we were roommates. She would say to her embroidery club friends that her roomie had landed a very hip job in the city...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
"Patricia could hear them gathered on her front porch, the kings and popes and saints, gossiping and chattering and generally having a good time. She turned. King Solomon lay sprawled across the bed like it was his golden throne. He raised his head to...
death-of-a-loved-one
"This much was clear. At some point in my future, I would have access to a time machine. This was a ridiculous sentence and a tragically irrelevant concern while my wife Judi was on the floor and possibly dying, but there it was: nonsense, in the presence...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
"Time is absolute. My son is born and there is blood, screaming sweet as rain, tears, and joy. I hold him. Things precede. Time is a straight line that exists independent of observers. My son’s second birthday follows his first. He walks shortly after his...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"Monday’s lover tugs at Jan’s ribbon with his teeth. Jan doesn’t yell at the lover to stop. The guy just received bad news from the front—a friend lost to a bomb, perhaps, a sibling blown to bits; Jan doesn’t ask. He tells the lover, instead, to be...
war
"I’m pretty sure I’m photosynthesizing. That’s what I mean when I say this year made me a real plant lady. I promise this isn’t another weird quarantine derangement thing, like losing track of time or holding conversations with taxidermy. I still need to...
"It is in the summer, during the monsoon season in Taipei, when the pigeon keeper’s daughter moves into the apartment on the top floor of a building on an alleyway in Wenshan District. From her window, she sees not only Taipei 101 in the distance with...
"Nostalgia died a quiet death, wrapped in cellophane and power cords. The future had killed it. The ghosts of yesteryear’s fragrances no longer haunted, no longer hung and clung to the passersby. Instead, those ghosts lay shriveled like salted slugs in the...
"The infomercial jangles for DoubleSpace were never quite as catchy as the ones for its more expensive alternatives, and yet, you and I would hum them indiscriminately, little heads bobbing, lips vibrating, as we ran about the house. The day the installers...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
A series of interviews between a young, clean-cut journalist and an alternative, independent pichal pairi turns into an unexpected romance. But their relationship is tested when the entire world around them shuts down.
Author : Kel Coleman Narrator : Hollis Monroe Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Discuss on Forums Delete Your First Memory for Free was originally published in FIYAH Magazine Issue 17 (January 2021). Delete Your First Memory for Free by...
"The truth is that I lost my arm the same summer I lost my brother. Lost is a euphemism. In fact, my arm was retrieved by the paramedics and brought to the hospital, along with the two fingers severed from my left hand, and the various parts of my...
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"The egg must have hatched overnight, though he could see no sign of a hatchling anywhere. Only empty shell bits remained, strewn here and there across the tatami."
death-of-a-loved-one
"What do you mean, Why didn’t I warn them before? Are you serious? I did! Answer me this if you are so smart. If you had seen it, what would you have done? It all began with a scrap of fabric I used to test the machine’s tension. Over and over and over,...
death
"Here’s the thing you need to know to understand this story: I was meant to be an only child. The doctors, when they examined my mother, only counted one heartbeat. One. Me. I don’t know when my sister came along. My mother, so ready to accept, so...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Babysitting/bodyguarding a group of rich kids should be easy money, especially for a tough joker-ace like Khan—provided he doesn’t end up killing them himself.
violence
A child struggles with the loss of his big brother and his feelings that maybe things are better without him—and maybe he’s not really gone.
child-abusedeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Every Halloween, an elderly woman hands out candy to a young trick-or-treater who’s dressed as a witch each time, looking exactly the same age. With each passing year, the woman grows more attached to the little witch and her odd nature. But she is no...
death
"Juana thought this was bullshit. She had found the broken sailboat in the south wind and tried to pilot it to Hispaniola, but it wouldn’t go in the right direction. You’d think flying would be the hard part, but no, it was steering. And you’d think...
child-deathdeath
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
An occult detective and a creature work and love together across multiple lifetimes.
deathsexual-contentviolence
As Charlotte’s husband sinks into early Alzheimer’s, he becomes more and more obsessed with a cult religious figure known only as The Reverend.
deathviolence
Four different groups of people explore the pros and cons of different ways to reproduce in the future.
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathsexual-violenceviolence
After 500 years, the King of Myth and Shadow is getting bored, so he decides to take a vacation in New York City.
In which grown up Gerda and Kay from “The Snow Queen” get separated, and she goes after him again, finding that much has changed and yet a lot is just the same.
misogynysexual-violenceviolence
A songwriter and her boyfriend seclude themselves at his old family cabin back in the woods to work on a new album. But in the isolation, she has trouble getting work done, and reality itself seems a little off.
deathviolence
A middle-aged man settling his dead mother’s estate discovers he can still slip through the wardrobe into a different world.
Adriana’s going to be all alone when her best friend moves away, she’s bracing herself to be all alone, and she’s starting to have strange dreams that affect the real world.
deathillness-and-pandemic
Everyone has a timer on their wrists counting down the years, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until they meet their soul mates. Fiona’s just 24, and her timer says she’ll have to wait 40 years. So what to do until then?
Kleave’s life is upended when a freak accident disables all three of the archives where he stores copies of his experiences and memories.
Chime’s husband is also another woman’s wife. The sharing isn’t a problem, per se: she has her own wife when she’s male. The problem is that she keeps getting him back in increasingly beat-up condition.
It’s been a long time since Ravi left Guyana, but he’s sure he recognizes a Jumbie, even in New York, where they don’t believe in evil spirits. And it’s following him.
sexual-contentviolence
The two-tongued Jeremy app helps lots of kids with their schoolwork, but Jeremy thinks it’s asking too much of him, and he’s afraid to try to turn it off.
abusechild-abusesuicide
After the government rules he isn't really human, Chris loses his human wife and hybrid kids.
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
The narrator wants to spend the last hours before the asteroid strike with her parents, but she runs out of gas in the middle of South Dakota.
Electricity does strange things around Arthur, especially when he gets excited. He's excited about Christina, so their first date is going to be a real adventure.
sexual-content
Zhou is an ad man for a Chinese marketing firm, and he has to find a way to get people to buy a new photo technology that has unusual capabilities.
Ellie is trying to catch a train from Boston to DC so she can visit her ailing mother when her sister calls to tell her she needs to "go to the skunkworks and repair the physics of this universe."
illness-and-pandemic
A woman paramedic and her best friend fear that despite their best efforts, they end up causing more pain than they relieve.
deathsuicide
All the imaginary creatures a young person could want to make apartment life more pleasant.
A lonely old Chinese man gets involved in the fight against smog--without government approval.
illness-and-pandemic
An estate agent is forced to choose between a sale and his humanity when facing the inhuman eldritch forces that feed off rental tenants across the United Kingdom.
abusebody-horrorviolence
"Before you hear what I’m about to tell you, I need you to understand two things. Firstly, I do not know how to swim. When you live in the place I do, it’s more or less a useless skill. I mean, the deepest water around is up to my shoulders at best, can...
body-horrordeathgore
A transnational adoptee is haunted by the ghost of his birth mother. Content warnings: Self-harm, suicidal ideation Copyright © 2025 khōréō magazine. Story by Woody Dismukes, edited by Isabella Kestermann. Audio edition read by Sam Cavalcanti, with...
body-horrorgoreself-harm
"My ghost bled through the shadows, an icy wind stirring the leaves. Eyes like candle flames shuddering and crescent moon mouth, it had found me as a girl and never let go—the only thing that was really mine. It led me to an overgrown graveyard, pelts of...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesexual-violence
"The men knew before she did. Before this boy, before sophomore year, before even her twelfth birthday, they had jostled her on the sidewalk and hooted from cars, searching for something just past her skin. But now, with her panties stripped off and the...
goresexual-violenceviolence
Following a mysterious world-wide event that makes ghosts visible, a young woman is invited to attend Ghost Camp.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
gorehomophobiaviolence
"Oscar’s Digital Double comes two hours, thirty-eight minutes, and eleven seconds late. Maxine snatches the package from the delivery drone and doesn’t tip. She rearranged her day—went to HMart right when it opened, skipped the gym, cooked Grandma a quick...
child-deathdeathsuicide
A woman returning to her family’s home town for a wedding discovers why people in Connorville—including her family—might be more than they seem.
body-horrorgoreviolence
"I learned from Bernadette that there are two ways a star can go supernova. The first is in a double star where one partner dies first, turning into a white dwarf, and the surviving partner swells in grief and dumps mass onto the compact star. But the...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"A garden is a joy, but also a labor. It is no small thing to call forth life from the desert; do not imagine any but a witch could do it so well. Every day I draw flowers from sand, shrubs from sand; I turn sand to grass as rich as cream. The garden is...
slavery
Mel relishes running the “Enchanted Jungle,” a roadside attraction in the Everglades filled with live parrots, concrete dinosaurs, and other unexpected wonders.
death-of-a-loved-one
"Itsy bitsy,” whispers the girl in the glass tank beside mine. Not a girl anymore, not really, but it’s better for my sanity to pretend she’s still human. That we both are. We had names once—and skin, soft to the touch. In the sterile, blinding white...
body-horrorgoreviolence
Author : Ruth Joffre Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Dean Kidd Discuss on Forums PodCastle 916: Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush is a PodCastle original. Rated G Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush by Ruth Joffre Yesterday, I...
A woman talented in the art of spinning–creating pottery by manipulating clay in her mouth–longs to become the best, but wonders if it is worth the sacrifices she must make…
body-horrordeath-of-a-loved-oneself-harm
"We called it the monster because we could, though none of us found the label to be particularly satisfying. After a certain point, Yerim started calling it the Logos Pilgrim. Which was understandable, seeing as how she was the most mystically inclined...
"Tyler Moore’s spells strive to exist in and of themselves. They make no excuse or justification for their existence: no promise to speak to the dead, predict next year’s grain or gold prices, or read the mind of lawyers during a hostile takeover. They are...
"When I leave home at seventeen, my mother tells me three things. Not to care too much. To keep my gift a secret. And to get used to being alone. “You’ll see what it’s like,” she says. “Out there in the real world.” None of this is good advice."
"If it was the first time I saw a house mourning? No, my dear. Not at all. Yet, it broke my heart to enter House and hear her parquet floor moaning, see the toilet sink weeping, feel her foundations shuddering ever so slightly. I put the plastic bags on...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Posit a man. He could be any man. She could be a woman. They could be any human being anywhere on the spectrum. The story would play out the same. This is, however, entirely the creation of a writer who has written plenty of formidable women, and so he...
"You’re not meant to fix what happens in the time loops. Doctor’s orders, and that comes even before they give you the survey and the spiel and the confidentiality speech. The psych fiddles with his tablet in his cozy, yellow-couch office, and talks to you...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
"Finneus Lark finds the man nestled inside of the abdominal cavity of a doe, his skin so pale that his veins are like spiderwebs. Slick with visceral fluid, leaves and petals cling to the man’s bird-boned wrists. His face, haloed by damp curls and crowned...
"The alert comes screaming in on Jana’s implant, bright light lancing through the fog of REM sleep: [New glyph. Intersection of 148th and Cliffton.] When her eyes snap open, it’s there, the only thing fully in focus. A blurry image of the yet-untitled...
"The Lightning Road cuts far across the Cosmos, a streak of dazzling gold amidst the star-studded void. Paved in otherworldly stone, the road climbs over sleeping giants, past ringed planets and frozen worlds, connecting one unknown to the next. Xiaofei...
war
"It’s my twelfth birthday and we’re all waiting for Wormwood and everyone is here and I mean everyone. Me and Mom and Dad and Big Pa which is my grandpa who was the strong man at one of the last traveling carnivals in America, and Bigfoot of course, and a...
"A whale soars over Brooklyn. Clouds spread in streaks over the pale blue sky like cold butter. And the whale cleaves right through. Dar spots it from his perch on the rooftop, smoking a contraband cigarette. At first, it looks like the whale is just...
body-horrorgore
"The world-organism is awake and has spent the last decade playing round after round of tic-tac-toe with itself. Hearing this the first time, Anais reacts like anyone would to a stranger sitting next to them on a plane, insisting on conversation for the...
mental-illnesssubstance-use
"It’s only after they’ve loaded the moving truck halfway with boxes that the parents finally notice Parker’s gone. They spend three days yelling for him. Mom waits the longest, wanders the farthest into the forest in the dark. Her voice is a plea, an...
death-of-a-loved-one
"When I was young, I used to fray apart my mother’s tales, seeking the threads of their structure. They were journeys, always, and marked by transition-places: doorway, gate, river. On the other side, someone offered the rules of this new environment. I...
violence
"Wait, stop. Pause. Don’t move. Please. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Just…don’t touch anything. The remote, your phone, your always-listening voice-activated digital assistant designed to make modern life a breeze. Accept my cookies. Agree to...
On a trip to Italy, a woman stuck in a crumbling relationship discovers the city she loves holds a secret that could change her life…
"Iris is deep in an empty ocean, gray-green twilight fading to black everywhere she looks—and she can breathe. She’s a thousand feet above the ground, climbing a fractal cliff suffused with flickering veins of electricity—and she cannot. Iris is flat on...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"Who loves you?” I ask. My daughter looks away. Doesn’t answer. I lean down and turn her to face me, resting my thumb in the dimple in her chin. It’s the same dimple her mother has. Or had. “You love me, Daddy.” “That’s right, so please listen closely,” I...
child-abusedeathviolence
The Uncool Hunters By Andrew Dana Hudson Before she settled down into publishing in Minneapolis, before she got taken for a ride by the Chicago AltNormLit scene, before she flared spectacularly out of Silicon Alley, and had her pilot shoot C&Ded by the...
"When the Fae stole my wife, I followed them into the dark woods to win her back. Jess dropped breadcrumbs along the trail, except she had no bread, so she dropped other things instead. Not far from the house, I found a blue sweater, embroidered with gold...
"You knew from the beginning. You knew because the world knew about the intricate and fascinating life-cycle of the Svarrs, and it had been documented and discussed everywhere throughout the media endlessly. And you knew because Vo made sure you...
"The house was on the same street as a bakery whose only offering was penis-shaped waffles. Rufaro didn’t like American houses very much. They looked paper thin like doll houses that would lift off into the clouds if a strong wind came by."
abuse
"The Whole Foods where Justin works is a block from the beach, close enough to smell it. Apart from the rusting cars in the parking lot and the blood-spattered branches on the Eucalypts, the store looks much the same as it always did. Justin can do his job...
body-horrorcannibalismgore
A man is offered the opportunity to partake in an exclusive, subscription-based eating club for those who wish to dine on human flesh. But he may have bitten off a little more than he can chew.
cannibalismgoreviolence
"It forced itself to take that last step onto the ferry. Every step further from land felt like falling. Through space, through time, through every place it had ever been. It kept its eyes open, its features arranged in what it hoped was a neutral...
deathviolence
"When I die, I want you to keep my bones.” Vasanthi floats in the dark pool, the softness of her voice punctuated by softer drops of water from stalactites. “You mean your ashes.” The best misunderstandings come from our language differences. “I’ll find...
death-of-a-loved-onewar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
racism
"Almost everyone has, at some point in their lives, encountered a door that was not there before. A little girl sits up in bed, staring at the two identical closets in her bedroom. She feels certain there had been only one when she fell asleep. A salaryman...
cannibalismviolence
"Folks later claimed she was acting strange from the moment she boarded the plane. They described her as skittish, curt, radiating an aura of danger. Some, when confronted with the security footage, which showed her to have behaved rather unremarkably up...
child-deathgoreviolence
There are worse things than a local gangster’s cronies lurking in New Jersey’s wetlands…
deathsubstance-useviolence
"There’s reasons not to go sit by the banks of the Dequindre. The mosquitoes bite something fierce this time of year, for one. May through September the air is thick with them. The river swells wide on its way through Wyandott."
"Dear Senator: I am writing with concern about the recent legislative decision (SB-AR-15) to place monsters outside our schools. As a lifelong resident of Arkansas and these United States, I certainly understand the need to protect our children from active...
A weary resilience worker should know better than anyone: no one is safe when the world is always ending…
death
Prosperity City’s corrupt mayor never guessed his greatest opponent would be a fire-breathing dragon and her unconventional platform…
violence
"Mom—” “I swear, Mal, I don’t know whether to be proud of you or horrified.” I held the phone away from me. I didn’t even have it on speaker, she was just that loud. If people around me started getting horrified, I wouldn’t be able to go through with this....
"and in a strip mall parking lot off a side road in some Baltimore suburb my hand is trembling as I take the last of the voidwater in its little bootleg dropper and I peel my eyelid back and though I am so careful and try so hard a bit of the precious...
self-harmsubstance-usesuicide
"Hi, we were both in Central Square on Friday, around 9:30 PM. I’m a tall trans lady with brown hair and glasses. You were standing in front of Sonia with some people. You were looking at your phone and then you looked up at me. Our eyes met for—I’m sorry,...
"Nobody noticed the first few. They walked. One by one, in the beginning. Isolated instances. On every continent, mid-meal, mid-shower, mid-work, mid-fuck, right out the door of a pulled-up car in the middle of a freeway—ordinary people turned their backs...
death-of-a-loved-one
"It’s a few minutes before seven on a cold October evening and I’m just reaching into the bottom drawer of my desk for the Old Monk and my well-thumbed copy of The Big Sleep when I hear footsteps hurrying up the stairs. A new case, has to be. I sigh, give...
"In Greece, we have a saying: You must eat the body part you want to grow stronger. Or maybe that’s just something my grandmother used to say. After partying with friends until the early hours, Katerina and I take a detour before we go home. The meat...
"Everything the sea takes, it gives back in its own way and its own time. That was what Jess’s grandmother believed, what she’d told Jess as they stood in the shadow of the giant red cedar that had washed ashore, its severed roots thicker than Jess’s body....
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"The sign for the exit said FATE in blocky white letters, with an arrow pointing the way to town. The old woman laughed and drove on. The highway unwound before her like a spool of frayed grey ribbon. Once the jewel of America, now the system was cracked...
"K’un died. It breathed for tens of thousands of years and, at long last, life came to an end. Its body was washed ashore. Pale red scales plowed through vegetation as the bulging exoskeleton grazed against dunes. Its enormous carcass formed an imposing...
death
Chelle’s friend, Wenqian, has everything Chelle doesn’t. A slim figure, pale skin, and most notably the affection of her longtime friend Preston. Like the ocean waves she calls home, Chelle feels transparent and overflowing all at once. So when she’s given...
body-horror
"Red for temperature. Blue for ignition. Green for airflow. It takes four hours and forty-two minutes for you to finish your transformation into a pile of white ashes. I keep a patient vigil over those three primary colors on the cremator’s monitor, making...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"The multiverse broke last week. Broke is perhaps the wrong word. More accurate would be performed a state-change or found new equilibrium, but tell that to Catalina Chang, who has been popping aspirin like M&Ms ever since last Thursday, 5:54 PM, when the...
An artist’s work attracts the eye of Andrey Porgee, a notorious gangster, who becomes her best customer. But when he commissions a painting based on a childhood photograph, the artist fears his reaction to the final product.
deathviolence
PseudoPod 807: The Bleak Communion of Abandoned Things is a PseudoPod original. I accept the house in lieu of a settlement. I don’t want Ashley’s dirty money. The house is the least ill-gotten thing she owns, an isolated property she won in a card game and...
abusedeathmental-illness
"If you’re reading this—on some godforsaken imageboard, or dog-eared book page, or in encrypted base pairs sequenced off 3D-printed oligos—you’re probably grappling with a pretty tough decision right now. Breathe. I’m not judging you. I know how it goes....
pregnancy-loss
"It’s the day when the last war is over, and skeletons of swallows are already starting to return. They don’t have beaks, and their white, hard-boiled eyes fly three inches ahead of their semi-transparent faces, or sometimes on their side. Skeletons of...
deathwar
"On the first floor of a Colonial-style house constructed last century out of planks of old growth cedar, a monster is dragging a woman’s husband from room to room. The specific path this monster takes will be evident the next morning from the gashes in...
abusesexual-violence
A reporter travels to the Norwegian Arctic to cover an unusual sled race with the undead leading the living into unknown territory.
deathviolence
"James had always been able to tell when Camille was eavesdropping. Even though she kept her eyes carefully focused on the messages on her band while she poked at the remains of her salad, it would not have fooled him. He wouldn’t scold her in public, but...
death
"The rabbit was back this morning. It stopped outside the portal like it always does and it checked its pocket watch like it always does. It doesn’t matter—the rabbit’s always late. So far I never found out what the rabbit is late for. It wore a jazzy...
"None of them can see what lies behind the tree line. They finger the oak trunks, white hands racing down the bark’s craggy, deep grooves. There is no blood on the leaves. As morning sun peeks through heavy branches, a light breeze masks the ashy bite of...
child-deathsexual-violencesuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death
"There are nights when she twists like a tree in the breeze. Hair falling wildly in brown curls around her shoulders, she dances in the dark kitchen, dress twirling as she spins. On those nights she giggles, and asks me to play her favorite music, and...
"Marcus was meant to be going to the moon today. Years of training, years of anticipation. I can’t imagine the letdown. Instead, he’s in the community garden, as usual, weeding. Marcus hates weeding. He’d rather prune the fruit trees or tie up the bean...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"You are the unalive thing possessing her body. Her body was printed three days ago from blueprints transferred moments before the motorbike crash over the bridge. Her flesh and fat and keratin and bone are accurate to prior specifications, except for the...
"Matt tells the waiter he’ll have his eggs over easy. They come back scrambled, a neat glistening pile framed by perfect triangles of toast, a lacy froth of hashbrowns lurking across the plate. He doesn’t notice he’s chosen to move until he’s already...
suicide
Eli is—one hundred percent, without a doubt—vampiro, but he's missing all the stereotypical traits. Is there room for him to exist in a world where everyone has already decided who and what he is? Copyright khōréō magazine 2021. Story by K. Victoria...
child-abuseracismviolence
"It was 10 a.m., and Anmar clapped his hands to silence the screeching wake-up alarm he had set for himself. He didn’t actually need the alarm, since he had already been awake for twelve minutes before it went off, but Anmar enjoyed using technology...
"Ti came to see me, you know. Three four days before she died. Knocked right on my door, and I’ve never been so surprised in all my life. This is a woman who when we were on tour would have the driver drive her halfway down the block rather than walk to...
death
"We met on the 107th floor of the South Tower. She was standing in quiet contemplation, watching fire spread through the building across the plaza, smoke and paper billowing out into that baby blue sky. I was nursing a thunderous hangover, neglecting my...
deathwar
"I have experienced some tastes of my afterlife as a crustacean. In it, I am one of many, on a beach with purple sand abutting a sea that could be water but might be some other liquid entirely, beneath stars that seem larger and brighter than any I see in...
deathsuicide
"The sign on the door said Dreams Not Sold Here, and I mostly stuck to it. Dreams were extensive and exhausting projects, not to mention expensive. Nightmares, on the other hand, were quick. On a good day, I could stitch up a hundred off-the-rack ones:...
deathviolence
Haunted by stories he hears while on jury duty, a documentary filmmaker finds himself in an abandoned mall at the dead of night.
"Witchcraft is a gift. Imelda would wave her steel spoon at Mercer and insist on this as he measured ingredients for her, whether she was boiling potions or a pot of farfalle pasta. Watch the salt, a teaspoon only, never pour too much. Don’t overheat the...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"He finds her in his grandpa’s attic, in the Big House. The hatch has been locked up tight since the day Grant Dixon was born—twenty-two years of locked up tight—and long before. He used to ask about it, between the stories his Grandpa Dixon liked to tell. "
abuseslaveryviolence
"Kia ora te whānau, Welcome back to term 3! I hope you are all safe and well. I’m sure the holidays were a little different from usual. My name is Kara and I’m the teacher allocated to the year 1 to 3 children in your sector. I know it can be hard...
"The emergency call came in before the seagulls had even started crying. It found Quinn lying sleepless on the leaky air mattress she’d set up in the back of the shop... She fumbled for her phone and raised an eyebrow at the severity rating the user had...
"You never expect to meet one of the refugees. You aren’t a scientist or a politician, you’re a middle school history teacher. The story of the refugees from a destroyed parallel Earth... should fade into the background of your life like every other major...
death
"I was 19 when I met Tommy. A day and a bit into a two-day Greyhound trip from bumfuck, Nevada to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Going to meet some trick from the internet. Thought it was true love. Funky and itching for a smoke when we pulled into a truck stop in...
"Two days after my brother turned seventeen, he was gone, just like he’d guaranteed my dad. No sad goodbyes, no notes, no taking a knee in the hall before dawn to give me any good advice for high school when I got there. My mom’s story when anybody asked...
racismviolence
"For as long as I can remember, I have always been two people. My earliest recollection is of myself as a three year-old boy, Danny—and at the same time as a girl of the same age, Cristina. Another early memory is of playing in the rubble of the...
"The day they took my mouth hadn’t been spent eating De la Rosas, or smoking, or spitting. In fact, I hadn’t used my mouth in any way that you might expect someone who was about to lose their sense of taste, their tongue, their voice, might have."
"I’ve been feeling a bit down, I suppose,’ Catherine said, ‘and my friend recommended you. She said you might be able to help.’ The doctor made a humming noise. He sat back, folding his arms. ‘Do you know what it means to cleanse, Catherine?’ he asked."
body-horror
"Tom called Adriana Honey-Bunny, and she called him Pumpkin. A moment by a window. An orange California morning. Tom snapped his fingers, the waiter understood and came and refilled his cup with fragrant coffee. The sun shone on their table and the street...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"The taxi from Guiyang Airport passed through long tunnels with curved white crescents every fifty or so meters along. It was simply some reflective material, but the bright curves leading her off into the distance through the darkness of the tunnel made...
death
"Two men in dark sunglasses stepped through the doors of the Monte Carmelo. They stopped and scanned the gloomy inside. Geshem-Nofel-Ba’oranim clocked them and kept to his booth. He knew trouble when it walked through the door looking for him. The two men...
deathviolence
Nine years after the ace John “The Candle” Montaño first wielded his fire powers as a teenager on the reality TV show “American Hero”, he’s landed a job as the lead investigator for a prestigious arts insurer. His latest assignment, providing security for...
deathviolence
A group of five friends rent a cabin in the woods—the next day only four are alive. What happened and why is something the survivors are desperate to unravel.
deathgoreviolence
"For the longest time I could only get sliding jobs. It didn’t depress me, though; it seemed like a natural place to start. There was still time. I was sleeping rough in Wellington when I got my first job. I hitched from Palmy into the Hutt and started...
"When the doorbell first rings, I do not rise from my chair. It is one of those days when the hurt bends me double. My nerves pulse sharp behind my eyelids; my fingers, clenched around the worn wooden armrests, are full of thorns. But outside the open...
The Path Through Time” is Jules’s favorite part of the museum, a marvelous exhibit that brings the past to life, from the present all the way back to the prehistoric. Tonight at his aunt’s wedding reception as Jules walks along the path, it comes alive...
"Disaster, betrayal, and the ship already blasting its horn. The family clusters around the packing crates, destitute, stunned. We must go regardless, says their father, this is the last ship, what else can we do? Their mother nods, frowning so as not to...
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
illness-and-pandemic
"Michael is afraid to go farther. Pudgy pushes him on. They walk through the shrouded city, the sound of footsteps all but obscured. Pudgy holds hard to the band of the broken fedora that perches crooked atop Michael’s bent head; the knees of Pudgy’s...
"Nobody remembers exactly when it started. Probably back in the ’90s when they cloned that sheep, back in the ’10s when they started working on cloning people on the DL, back in the ’20s when the retrovirus broke our genetic virginity. If you’re rich you...
sexual-content
Raphael, a prototype humanoid robot, tells us the story of his life.
deathwar
Bab Yaga from the fairy tales turns up in modern-day San Francisco looking for help tracking down her house, which has run away.
In a world dying from pollution by micro plastics, Ana struggles to protect her family, but even the food they eat is slowly killing them.
deathillness-and-pandemic
Ava can make it big if she can just win the prize for best coffee in an upcoming reality show. And she knows just the equipment she needs, even if she has to steal it.
Today’s a big day at work, but just walking there looks to be a death-defying challenge, what with people randomly turning into monsters and such.
body-horrordeathviolence
You just drive the getaway car, for the same heist, over and over, trying somehow not to break the artifact that resets time.
"In the winter of 19–, having newly arrived in England, and still recovering from the nervous indisposition which had afflicted me greatly ever since my circumstances during the war, I responded to an advertisement placed in the Yorkshire Post, for the...
"It is said that Archimedes was asked by the King of Syracuse to authenticate a manuscript. King Hiero had received what purported to be Alexander of Macedon’s own copy of the Iliad, brought out from the Library at Alexandria itself. He sent envoys to...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
"Dong Fang still clearly remembers the joyous love of that rainy night. It seemed quite bad at first. After three years of dating and two years of marriage, their formerly shy and sweet explorations had become routine business. Nevertheless, he was in the...
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"The notion of the quantum mirror was first floated by two graduate students (Sapna Gupta and Mark Shaw) over a fourth round of beers in a small pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and therefore one should consider the role of intoxication in its initial...
body-horrordeathviolence
An academic’s whimsical decision to take a DNA test leads her into uncharted territory, where she discovers some extraordinary truths about herself and new possibilities for her future.
When Candice gets upset, she sometimes spontaneously combusts and then comes back to life. She needs to get this under control because her family can’t afford the medical bills.
deathillness-and-pandemic
A teenager struggles to relate to his mother who’s trying to help build an automatic translation system so he can speak their language more like a native.
self-harmsubstance-use
A wealthy woman has the multiverse searched for divergent versions of herself who’re near death, offering to add them to her personality, and they always accept. Up until now.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Ruby is a powerful “Ace” who cynically does dirty jobs for bad people who help her keep her pain under control. Her world changes when a job puts her in contact with an elusive, childish, but very powerful Ace who won’t give in.
illness-and-pandemicviolence
In the ruins of a dry, blasted Australia, Edward looks after an abandoned nine-year old girl as they travel in search of an old reservoir.
deathviolence
Tyler loves being in a boy band, but the label doesn’t want him showing affection for one of the other boys in the band.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusedeath
A young child visits a family friend to learn about her powers—the sort of powers her mother long ago rejected, but which are too powerful to ignore.
death-of-a-loved-one
Despite being paralyzed on one side, T.K. insists on going to gym class, even though the other girls torment her in dodge ball. Up to the point where the tormenting brings out her specialized telekinetic ability.
Teenage Dorothy accompanies her father across the US in search for the mythical Viper-King, a giant snake whose fat confers wisdom on the first person to eat it.
violence
A young couple has enough relationship troubles without a mischievous dog that appears to have telekinetic powers. But there seems to be a pattern to its mischief.
A young Wall Street investment banker tells how he lost a billion dollars in a Bitcoin for black people.
suicide
In an alternate 2018, A teenage roadie at a Who concert risks his life by using his sonic ability to try to save lives when a fire engulfs the building.
substance-useviolence
Phoebe goes to her late Mother’s townhouse to dispose of her effects and to reckon with the feelings she’s never been able to articulate.
No longer entirely human, Luis revisits his childhood home and reflects on how the world ended.
deathviolence
In the Third World, a teenage girl sees her whole family killed and flees with her brother. In Washington, an old woman gradually gives up on life. Somehow, their paths cross.
deathillness-and-pandemicwar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
A road is so nasty that it attains consciousness when it becomes aware of just how “not-nice” it really is.
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abuseviolence
A future Korea requires government proof of identity before you can access the Internet, and the narrator tells about her sister, who was a subversive trying to enable an uncensored, anonymous system.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathsexual-violenceviolence
A terminally ill astronaut begs everyone she can think of to give her a chance at one last mission so she can die in space.
death
A grieving father tries to recreate the son he lost.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
In a future where successful people spend most of their time in cyberspace, Martha struggles to make ends meet servicing the systems that take care of them.
death
A family has problems when their little daughter falls out of sync with the usual times everyone else wakes and sleeps. But it’s not just her.
The Owen corporation has brought some dinosaurs through their “gate,” and Dr. Crimshaw thinks she can use sign language to communicate with one of them.
The Golden Crusader must be getting old or something. He’s not so fast anymore, and he never flies higher than the sixth floor, but he keeps doing super deeds. Or trying to.
Mixie’s family makes food for the dead to get them to come back to answer questions for their loved ones. She’s surprised her ex-husband’s widow wants them to do this, though.
death
A young man fleeing the ruin of his career returns to his home village seeking the first girl he ever loved and a resolution to a mystery that has haunted him.
A retired superhero and a conspiracy theorist join forces to gather evidence against a mobster who’s trying to force their friend to sell her property to him.
violence
The narrator completes an interview to get qualified to communicate with aliens.
While Glen mourns the recent death of his baby sister, he gets a CD in the mail with a custom program she had someone design before she died.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
The galactic government has decided to evict humanity from Earth, but we’ve got a choice of different species that are willing to accept us—provided we convert to their forms.
After an epidemic killed off half the Earth’s population, Enfys wanders around a depopulated Europe, live blogging the experience and looking for tampons.
deathillness-and-pandemicviolence
An anorexic woman has an unhealthy co-dependent relationship with her alcoholic roommate, her “friend” since childhood. But she also has a monstrous secret.
substance-use
Kicked out of an elite academy, Suzanne survives on the streets with the help of a mute boy and four reluctant angels. And despite a demon inside her that keeps threatening to break out.
child-abuseself-harmsexual-violence
A young woman discovers she has the ability to fly, just as her mother did. But her father thinks there’s something shameful about it, so she tries to suppress it.
abuseself-harm
A doomsday weapon has changed the laws of physics on Earth, and most of the population has perished. Liyana spends her time trying to have a baby and studying elephants, who have started to spontaneously combust.
deathpregnancy-loss
When James was dying, he and his wife, Cat, worked to build an AI based on his personality that could keep her company in his absence. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Refugees from the destruction of their own planet, the Dragonflies struggle to find a place in a world that doesn’t welcome them.
deathviolence
Rourou is a Chinese little girl who loves her papa but wonders what happened to her momma. And why she can’t remember anything before age 5. And why she speaks fluent English.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Sheru is a dog in an Indian city. He’s captured by researchers experimenting with deep learning. And he’s sad.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
It has only been five years since The Fall, but the clinic where teenage Kath works is the only medical service for two hundred miles.
In hopes of getting money to complete his transition, Emrick and his boyfriend visit his wealthy estranged father, who operates a wormhole that links to other dimensions.
In midwinter, just after midnight, the narrator hitches a ride with a strange woman as cold as the night itself.
body-horrordeath
In which a chorus of time travelers give us advice, in the paradoxical way of time travelers.
Teenage Brit enjoys teaching little kids at a Seattle Experience Outreach camp, even though she senses that something evil haunts the abandoned bunkers up the hill.
suicide
Cloe is a black android built to let white people act out their aggressions.
racismsexual-violenceviolence
The narrator and his friend are racing towards Florida running away from the drug dealer they repossessed it from. But something worse is waiting in front of them.
Charlie's team has been out of touch with the Mars mission for a month. While she's attending her mother's funeral, a mysterious 47-second-long message arrives.
death-of-a-loved-one
There's a quiet war in Boulder between hikers and cyclists, but whatever ripped two hikers' throats out must have been the cyclist from Hell.
deathgoreviolence
A Greek free diver finds an ancient shipwreck where there was nothing at all just days earlier.
death-of-a-loved-one
"The formula for how to end the world got published the same day I married the girl who used to bully me in middle school. We found out about it the morning after, on the first day of our honeymoon in Cozumel. I got out of the shower in our small bungalow...
mental-illnessracism
"Valentini doesn’t flinch when the purple-bellied storm shakes the house, heedless of the film being shot within its derelict husk. Scene fifteen, take three. The Hollow Places crew rushes to stop the windows’ skeletal rattling before the atmospheric...
child-deathgoreself-harm
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
goretransphobiaviolence
"Here at 123aiLOVEu, we take all the guesswork out of dating. With personalized chatbots trained on social media and chat histories, we put you in conversation with hundreds of potential matches... and you never have to say a thing! Sandra was watching the...
While all her friends’ fish are changing into mermaids, is 12-year-old Anissa’s fish becoming something else?
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"You were six the first time you had a vision of someone’s death—your parents. The vision came when y’all were walking to the park and you were between them, holding their hands and heading towards the monkey bars. The vision was blurry and foggy like...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesexual-content
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
illness-and-pandemic
"Do you remember the war? No, of course not. You were too small, a solemn-eyed toddler in Má’s arms. You were born in the year of the rat, a lucky, ambitious year. I was two years older, year of the dog, loyal to the end. You were little souris, little Em,...
death-of-a-loved-onewar
Nothing tears two women apart like the men who want and take indiscriminately. In this retelling of “The Crane Wife”, a makeup artist and her actress lover struggle to stay together as the glitz and glamour of old Hollywood transforms into a cruel and...
abusemisogynyviolence
"Abigail sat at the centermost position at the cafeteria table. For her, it was unintentional. For us, it was by design. Abigail had no idea about the effect she had on people, obviously. It’s a blessing of having seen yourself in every movie, magazine,...
body-horrorself-harmviolence
"At least when I tell the fucking machine I don’t want pickles, it remembers that I don’t want pickles. Now, what goes on behind the counter is another story. They hire people who can barely read. But at least I’m trusting my order to something...
"One: My lipstick. The shade is Heart’s Blood. Morbid, if you ask me. I wanted to know if it was really the color of heart’s blood so I bought beef heart and tried dabbing my lips. Close enough. I emailed to congratulate the lipstick company on their...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death
Two little children come to a gingerbread house in the woods. The lady of the house is a witch, but so are the kids, and one of them is already dead anyway. The real problem is the people looking for them.
child-abusechild-deathgore
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abuse
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
Long ago, some people leapt from a slave ship, and something transformed their bodies so she they could breathe water. Today, her descendants try to cope with a changing ocean.
goresexual-violenceviolence
With Celia’s mistress missing, and presumed dead, the old, failing android is a prime suspect, but she herself doesn’t remember what happened.
sexual-contentsexual-violence
Unexpectedly, you woke up female this morning, in someone else's body. Now you have to decide what to do about it.
misogynysexual-contentsexual-violence
Some nights shining lights appear atop hills in urban areas, and people who walk into them disappear—some say to fairyland. A cop who thinks otherwise tries to talk a young woman out of trying it.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Hiding from her own problems, Winona volunteers at the local ornithological museum after she hits a bird with her car.
abusedeathracism
When newlyweds Courtney and Josh rent an old Victorian in Baltimore, they're told to stay out of the attic. But they hear noises up there at night. Footsteps.
violence
When her mother is absorbed into the local flesh monolith, Kayla struggles with her identity and looks for a way in. Content warnings: Violence, nudity, racism/discrimination, body horror Copyright © 2026 khōréō magazine. Story by Mary Miseon Wu, edited by...
body-horrorracismviolence
A woman returns to burn the last of her mother's body, in the wake of her mother's death — an effort to escape a dark entity that has sealed itself to the bones of three generations of Thai women. Content warnings: Racism, ageism, self-harm, blood,...
body-horrorracismself-harm
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
When you look out from the garage doors of the corrugated steel warehouse where the Fort Springwell Community College soccer team made their heroic stand against the forces of darkness, the view at first seems . . . idyllic. A rocky shoreline, uncommon for...
body-horrorgoreviolence
There once lived a boy who paid for a fortune. Nassim wore carob hair and eyes severe like cardamom. He spent his days scouring the souk for unique trinkets he liked to collect or counting the uneven stones of Jerusalem’s cobbled streets as he passed...
sexual-violenceviolencewar
Personality Disorder (Not Otherwise Specified) My patients called me Dr. Holloway. My friends called me Jason. I won’t tell you what my three ex-wives called me but I’m sure you can guess. I was a psychiatrist (and a damn good one seventy percent of the...
mental-illnesssubstance-usesuicide
Author : Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko Narrators : David D. Levine and S.B. Divya Hosts : Alasdair Stuart and Tina Connolly Audio Producers : Summer Brooks and Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1031: The Anatomy of Miracles (Flashback Friday) is an Escape Pod original....
Author : Tim Pratt Narrator : Isabel J. Kim Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita” first appeared in 2025 on Tim’s Patreon Sponsored by Mixtape Stories The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita by Tim Pratt My...
Author : Sharon Joss Narrator : Torin Andrus Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Love in the Time of Dust and Venom originally appeared in 2013 Fiction River – Time Travelers. Includes a form of assisted suicide. Sponsored by Mixtape Stories...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Author : James Dick Narrator : Abra Staffin-Wiebe Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “EDIE” was previously published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact (January/February 2023) EDIE (Part 1) by James Dick High above Europa, a lonely traveller...
Author : James Dick Narrator : Abra Staffin-Wiebe Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “EDIE” was first published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact (January/February 2023) Don’t miss Part 1: Escape Pod 1046: EDIE (Part 1 of 2) EDIE (Part 2)...
Author : Kiran Kaur Saini Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Amrit originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2023. Kiran Kaur Saini https://kirankaursaini.com/ Kaushik...
Author : Jo Miles Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1051: You Have Arrived at Your Destination is an Escape Pod original. You Have Arrived at Your Destination By Jo Miles It starts with an accident. A dreary...
Author : Ethan Ham Narrator : Elie Hirschman Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1053: The Game of Possibilities is an Escape Pod original. Ethan Ham https://www.ethanham.com/index.html?second-edition Elie Hirschman...
After the braiding, a low buzzing remains in Memoire’s ear. It reminds her of the low buzzing she heard while they shampooed her hair. They told her she could never submerge her head in water after the braiding. No more swimming. No more drifting on her...
body-horror
And all the devils are here. “What’s that from?” Millie asks as she gets her coat. I stand at the back window, looking out. Usually, you can see the downtown skyline from this position. Today, it’s just the hellmouth. A long tube that looks like an...
deathviolence
Notes on specimen “Efren Vargas” 1022/204.27.3: >> Supposed to be married to “Joan Dimagiba,” his fiancée. >> Was in bed with some other woman* a week (in human time) before […]
Look, it’s bad enough that my wife gets cat-called in the street and flashed on the train. There’s a lot of sickos out there who get their jollies by harassing women, and usually I try to shut them down without escalating it to a fight. But we moved a few...
sexual-violence