Literary-fiction Stories

Viktor wakes up on a lonely road in 1965. He remembers his name, but not how he got there - or why the world around him feels strangely familiar. As he finds shelter in a California commune, he begins to suspect that his arrival was no accident.

"Life, is just a game. That we play without tutorial. And me, Shigaraki Tenko, I am... The final boss." When she came back to Japan after the war, Réka didn't find what she expected. No one expected her connection with Tomura, nor the two children by her side. A decade later, Tenko joins Yuei, to prevent that, what happened to his father, would happen again. But the past isn't left behind. It surges back. About a story they ignored. About a cult slowly rising. About a cursed legacy, he both tries to break and is entangled in. ---------- Mature contents: -Strong language -Physical/psychological violence -Bullying/harrassment -Moral ambiguity -Substance use/addiction -Depression/suicide attempt/self-harm -Necrophagy -Lots of mentions around death/grief/mourning since the core theme exploited here is Tomura's death and legacy. TL.DR = I can't gauge each person's sensitivity and mine is basically low so you're warned. ---------- This story is also published on AO3, Inkitt, Quotev, Space Battles and FFN. Any repost, translation, or derivative use without explicit permission is not authorised.

After Queen Sita's exile, Ayodhya continues to celebrate, prosper, and move forward. But its king does not. Bound by duty and worshipped by millions, Rama slowly discovers that a kingdom can survive without its queen far more easily than a husband can survive without his wife. As festivals fill the streets and laughter echoes through the palace, Rama finds himself haunted by memories, regrets, and a grief no victory can heal. This is not the tale of a perfect king. It is the story of a man who gave everything to duty and was left wondering whether duty had taken too much. A heartbreaking exploration of love, loss, loneliness, sacrifice, and the unseen consequences of choices that changed history.

The story continues as the mysterious warden of Zig-Zig is eventually informed about Herschel's escape. Against every principle of his precious Dalmicir school, Lyeasrakardsul submits and asks the Knomes for help before finally receiving the dreaded p-wyrd. Herschel is arrested as a chicken thief and brought to the town Stagna where he has been prejudged as a p-e-r-v-e-r-t by popular opinion, and where he will have some of the most significant encounters in his life.

Nadia has always played with everything she has. Every serve. Every return. Every ounce of anger and frustration that has nowhere else to go. Then she meets Clara, an older player who refuses to be overwhelmed. What begins as a tennis match forces Nadia to confront what she's spent her life avoiding. How much of yourself can you unleash before power becomes something else?

In the chaotic avenues of the Grand Souk, an impoverished hermit guarding a quiet devotion collides with El-Hassan, a merchant watching his legacy turn to dust amidst corrupt pretenders. Armed with an unclouded eye that discerns truth from counterfeit goods, the hermit enters the subterranean vaults under a single pact: never pry into how he arrives at the truth. ​As market politics, hidden motives, and the arrival of El-Hassan's sharp, perfume-crafting daughter Bint El Hassan collide, a deeper trial begins-not over worldly commodities, but over the human self (nafs) and the integration of worship with daily transactions (ibadah wa muamalat).

My Soul Dances the Blues No one knows exactly when enitnatsnoC oãoJ began walking backwards. Some say it was the day he buried his own name; others believe he was born that way, doomed to see the world through the reflection of its ruins. This is the story of a man who collects rust instead of memories, smokes to converse with ghosts, and turns every defeat into a song no one ever dared to write. Through cities where the rain smells of nicotine, forgotten bars, and abandoned railway stations, he follows a long road between love, guilt, solitude, and the slow decay of hope. Each chapter follows a track from the album My Soul Dances the Blues, revealing another fragment of his soul. There are no heroes, no happy endings, and no promises of redemption. There is only the blues-the only language capable of translating the weight of remaining alive when everything else has already gone. Because some people do not dance to celebrate. They dance to stop their souls from sinking into silence. And when the final note fades away, you may discover that enitnatsnoC oãoJ was never merely a man. Perhaps he is the part of all of us that keeps walking long after the heart has forgotten how to believe.

For the average, middle school dropout, Tal Salve, her brother is this sort of enigmatic figure she has had her whole life: a genius writer, quiet, kind, aloof, her object of admiration... and jealousy. After dropping out of school, Tal found herself jumping from job to job and unemployment, never really having a dream of her own. Now unemployed again, she distracted herself with chores she hated, just as much as having to work in a job she never really had an interest in. Until she discovers something that made her remember a little light from her past, under her bed: a simple dream. *** Copyright © 2026 by _exsistam All rights reserved.

Emma Price is found dead in the shallow waters of Millbrook Creek. There are no wounds. No signs of struggle. Only a smile. As Detective Ray Pell investigates the impossible death, a grieving best friend, a brilliant thirteen-year-old obsessed with strange phenomena, and powerful people hiding an old geological secret begin uncovering something buried beneath the abandoned Hartwell Quarry. Whatever waits below has been watching the town for years. And now... it has started watching them. A slow-burn literary supernatural mystery where grief, guilt, and cosmic horror collide.

Asuhira never expected an ordinary school day to become something she'd remember for years. Quiet and observant, Asuhira has always found comfort in things that make sense. Books. Drawings. Familiar hallways. Her family. Her faith. The small routines that make life feel steady. Then there is Altar. A warm, artistic church server whose world seems completely different from hers. Their first encounter is nothing remarkable. A quiet hallway. A piece of artwork. A conversation neither of them knows will matter later. But some people don't enter your life all at once. They arrive in fragments. A conversation that stays longer than it should. A familiar face in an unexpected place. A drawing that begins to mean something else. A presence you start looking for before you realize you're looking. And somewhere between all those ordinary moments, Asuhira and Altar become important to each other. They eventually admit what they've been trying not to name. But knowing you are cared for doesn't make the future any easier. Because faith still matters. Family still matters. The lives they've built outside each other still matter. And sometimes, caring for someone means learning that feelings cannot answer every question. As their story continues, the fragments they've collected begin to form something neither of them expected. Something beautiful. Something fragile. Something they may not get to keep in the way they imagined. Because years from now, Asuhira will remember one particular moment and realize that she had been standing inside a memory before she even knew it was one. And when that moment comes, she will understand why some things are called fragments. Not because they were never whole. But because they were once something you thought would last.

By the time Trista Erwood realised the peace she had been searching for was never going to be found at the bottom of a bottle, she was already old. This final session will be her memoir. A goodbye to the last of her old things. This will be cautionary tale about monsters, and how they are not born, but made, piece by wretched piece. But what are monsters, if not human? And what is more inherent to human nature than the desire to be heard? That is why she can never regret Elijah Keane, his glass heart and slaughterhouse eyes, and everything he became. For all his radiance, his wit, his kindness, and later, his cruelty, one thing must be remembered: he tried. So, if nothing else, pity him. Understand why she allowed him the greatest mercy of them all. Forgetting.

There was a time when falling in love felt so simple. Karlee's first love begins somewhere between childhood and growing up, where the smallest and simplest things could make her heart race for the rest of the day. But, she doesn't know much about love yet. She only knows the excitement, the courage it takes to confess, the confusing feelings that she is still too young to understand, and the quiet happiness of having someone slowly become special to her. Set in the Philippines during the 2010s, Almost Never is a nostalgic coming-of-age story about first love, friendship, adolescence, and ordinary moments that one would definitely miss in their adulthood. When you're young, everything feels like it will last forever. And sometimes, growing up makes you realize just how special those simple moments really were.

Camille believed her marriage was rooted in trust and love, but everything shifted the day Dean asked to open their relationship. His request was less a discussion and more an abrupt announcement, leaving Camille's sense of security fractured. Struggling between heartbreak and the instinct to salvage what remained, Camille reluctantly agrees. Beneath her composed surface, sadness lingers-a quiet ache that Dean seems oblivious to as he pursues new connections, assuming her loyalty is unwavering. Meanwhile, Camille starts rediscovering herself: she writes again, listens to her own long-ignored needs, and finds unexpected solace in the company of Elijah Grant, a widowed architect whose kindness and wisdom offer her a space to simply exist. Their bond grows slowly, marked by gentle understanding rather than drama. As Camille reclaims her voice and sense of self, she stops seeking answers from Dean and instead begins to craft a future centered on honesty and emotional peace. From a distance, Dean observes as Camille transforms, no longer seeking his approval but radiating newfound strength. When he attempts reconciliation, Camille is neither angry nor waiting; she has moved beyond the version of herself who depended on his validation. This is not a narrative of vengeance but one of letting go. It tells of a woman discovering her own worth and learning that she never needed to be chosen-she only needed to choose herself. A subtle exploration of heartbreak and reinvention, this story traces Camille's journey through betrayal toward self-acceptance and freedom.

A YEAR OF FRIENDSHIP WORTH MORE THAN DECADE

I'm thirty-four, I teach psychology at the university, and the first time I walked down into that courtyard I took my own pulse. The place is called BPTFY. It isn't a club and it isn't a neighbourhood: it's a courtyard with a beer van and a step, and whoever gets up on the step is talking. No stage, no start time, nobody who says we're on. You just end up there. I spent four years studying ritualised aggression in urban settings. I published three papers. I knew everything about that courtyard before I'd ever seen it. Then I got up on the step myself, and found out that knowing how a thing works gives you no right whatsoever to do it. Six rounds. One for every time I thought I'd won. There's an old man on an upturned crate who gets every date wrong and is never wrong. There's someone who isn't good and the courtyard follows him anyway. There's someone who says false things and is right. There's a woman who lays the table for two on Sundays and should never have ended up in anybody's song. And there's a nineteen-year-old who learned to do the damage I did, but better, and with a chorus. A story about rap, envy, and what it costs to always be right. Set in a courtyard on the edge of an Italian city, where everybody is chasing something that was born seven thousand kilometres away. ⚡ Complete. Six rounds, two interludes, an ending already written - this one gets finished. Originally written in Italian. This is the author's own English version.

Harbin, November. Minus twenty-two and getting colder. She hadn't answered since Thursday, so I went over with a bag of tangerines because I didn't want to eat alone. I had a key. The lock always took three tries. I'm not going to tell you what I found. Not yet. Maybe not ever. What I can tell you is that when the paramedics came, I stood in her apartment and explained to them - calmly, reasonably, the way you'd argue with a bank - that she couldn't be dead, because she had work on Monday and she had never once taken a day off in three years. I was wrong about that. I was wrong about almost everything. I Don't Want to Eat Alone is a novel about grief, distance, and the things that get lost in translation between two people who loved each other in a language neither of them spoke well. It's about a foreigner with no standing - not family, not next of kin, just the man who found her - trying to piece together why, from three thousand kilometres away, in a country whose paperwork has no box for what he was to her. It's about her mother, who flew in from Fuqing and asked me one question in a doorway that I answered too fast. It's about a city built by people who left, that is very, very good at continuing. And it's about what was done to her online, in a language I can't read, by people whose names I will never know. She was learning English. She had an exam booked. There was a date circled in red pen. I never got to see it.

An anthology of ten short stories-ten shades of love. ☕❤️ From quiet sacrifices and unexpected reunions to laughter, loss, courage, and second chances, each story offers a different glimpse of what love can mean. A collection of heartfelt moments, woven together with warmth, wonder, and a little magic-one story at a time. ☕ 💗

ᴛᴏᴏ ʙᴏʀᴇᴅ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴛʜᴇɪʀ ᴏʀᴅɪɴᴀʀʏ ʟɪᴠᴇꜱ ʟᴇʜʏ ᴀɴᴅ ᴊᴏɴɪɴ ꜱᴇᴛ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴛᴏ ꜰɪɴᴅ ᴀ ʙᴏᴛᴛʟᴇ ᴏꜰ ʙᴇᴇʀ, ᴍᴇᴀɴɪɴɢ ᴀɴᴅ ꜱᴀʟᴠᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡʀᴇᴄᴋᴀɢᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ'ᴠᴇ ᴄᴀᴜꜱᴇᴅ.

Different lives. Same ocean. Under Water is a powerful story about five young Nigerians trying to survive in a society where dreams are not always enough. Mason graduated with a first-class degree but finds himself struggling to build a life with the skills he learned outside the classroom. Claire, born into wealth and privilege, discovers that money cannot protect her from guilt, grief, or the consequences of her choices. Addison sacrifices her own dreams to keep her family afloat, until she begins to question how much of herself she can afford to lose. Thomas turns to social media in search of success, only to discover how quickly the world can take it away. And Christopher, born into wealth but determined to live life on his own terms, chooses freedom even when it comes at a painful price. Their lives are different, but their struggles are connected by one thing: a society that asks young people to keep swimming while constantly pulling them under. Under Water explores poverty, privilege, family, grief, ambition, unemployment, societal pressure, sacrifice, freedom, and the unequal opportunities that shape our lives. Because sometimes, drowning doesn't mean you are in water. Sometimes, you are simply trying to survive.

She was the girl who bandaged scraped knees and studied anatomy by flashlight. She was the daughter who sent half her paycheck home. She was the sister who braided hair on Sunday afternoons. Then one night in a house that smelled of old money and older pain, she became someone else entirely. A case number. A headline. A cautionary tale. Inside Westmoreland Correctional Center, Taryn Hollis learns that survival is not about becoming harder. It is about refusing to let the world decide who you are. Between concrete walls and counted spoons, she finds a family forged in unlikely places. A Korean American accountant who stole to save her mother. A Navajo tattoo artist fighting the same demons that killed her own. A German seamstress who knit her way through thirty years of silence. Together, they are not innocent. They are not simple. They are human. And humanity, Taryn discovers, is the only thing that cannot be confiscated at intake. This is not a story about whether she deserved to be there. It is a story about what remains when everything else is stripped away. It is about the distance between accountability and annihilation. It is about going home to yourself when the world has already buried your name. © 2026 Relle H.