Chapter 2

Published by Zin Shandi on July 9, 2025

by Zin

The night settled gently around Tella, wrapping her in its velvety embrace, as the quietude knocked softly against her windowpanes like a timid guest. Yet, before she opened her eyes, her spirit was already racing, tangled in the web of a haunting memory. Her breath quickened, each inhale sharp as a shard of glass, her heartbeat a frantic rhythm drumming against her chest.

With a hesitant flutter, she opened her eyes, raising a trembling hand before her as if to question its quaking. An alarm blared from the nearby robot health monitor, its robotic voice slicing through the gloom of her room. “My lady, your heart rate is dangerously high. You need your injection, or you risk collapsing.”

The Ring on the Windowsill

Published by CJ Burrow on July 8, 2025

by CJ

Sasha couldn’t remember how her wedding ring had ended up on the kitchen windowsill, all she knew was that at some point it became part of the clutter.

Discarded between bottles of medicine and a neglected pot plant, it should have been invisible, but she knew it was there – a golden flicker out the corner of her eye as she ate breakfast each morning.

In a way, it had become a universal constant – the sun rose in the east through the kitchen window, and, every morning, it caught the metal and winked at her. Even on the cloudy days, or at the height of winter.

Emyr Travels

Published by Jason Davies-Redgrave on July 8, 2025

By Jason

The five sets of melodies, harmonies and rhythms rode in on the tide. They curled up and off the incoming waters, peeling away from the white crests to be caught by the breeze and reverberate around the rocky walls. In the cold Welsh air, the five songs found each other and finally embraced. The cliffs and the land welcomed them, embraced them and made them felt safe so that, slowly, they could become one song. At first Carol and the other sirens in the cove simply stood and listened. Marvelling at the new song with its intricate form, watching it grow in confidence, letting it fill with vibrancy, colour and light. As the new song started to shimmer in the night air the sirens stood along the darkened shore and braced themselves.

One by one, feeling the strength of their sisters’ shared music, they started to pick up the notes and phrases and repeat them. Singing them back to the cliffs and the water and the sand, adding to the melody with their own, weaving a strong song for Emyr. The music grew and when it was ready the sirens held onto the song like it was a lifeline. The sirens spun the song round the cove, looping it through the air high above their heads. It thickened the air around it, and when the sirens had given it enough momentum, they cast their song through the portal in the cliff face, up into the inky night sky and out into the universe, towards the Circle.

Sale or Return

Published by Janet Johnson on July 8, 2025

By Janet

Cassy looked at the pictures filling the screen, the latest celebrity couple smiling broadly, their white teeth gleaming as they presented their stunningly beautiful new baby to the World. They’d used a surrogate, of course, why ruin your figure when somebody else would take one for the team, at a price.

George Bernard Shaw and Isadora Duncan came into her mind. Duncan had apparently suggested to him that if they had a child together, it would have the perfect combination of her beauty and his brains. He had countered this, however, by saying that the opposite was also just as likely to happen, which would be far from ideal. There would have been no such chances taken with this baby, though, Cassy thought.

How to murder Aliens

Published by Sandra Lloyd Lewis on July 7, 2025

By Sandra

First: identify the right time. The purple hiota plants come into flower, just before the Cull, which was a good time, because the Akkers -sorry, that’s what we call them on account of the noise they make eating, Akk, Akk, Akk – lick the nectar and it makes them high. All the guards do it, although forbidden, because more prisoners escaped then than any other time of the solar. Some guards take so much they wander off into the jungle and die there, probably as happy as lice in a dormitory.

Two: pick your alien wisely and cautiously. The most obvious targets were the guards of course, but that had been tried many times, and the escapees were quickly recaptured. Of course they were. Guards were missed almost immediately, no matter how dopey some of them were – unless they were hiota high. And once recaptured, the prisoners were made an example of.

The night Uncle Johnny died

Published by Martyn Winters on July 4, 2025

by Martyn

Laurence was just fourteen years old. Though tall enough for his dark, bushy curls to brush against the lintel across the worn, wooden swing doors of the Bird in Hand public house on Bromsgrove Street, and broad shouldered enough to pass for a man in the right company, he was not going to fool anyone in the Bird, not on a Friday night.

He felt a tightness in his chest he couldn’t quite name: neither fear nor shame, but a heavy awareness he didn’t belong here, not yet, and perhaps never would. He acted as a silent postboy, carrying messages between adults, yet no one ever asked how he felt about their contents.

Month: July 2025