Literaryfiction 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.

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.

CEMENT Ordinary material. Extraordinary problems. People get stuck. In habits. In relationships. In bad decisions. Sometimes quite literally in concrete. Cement is a collection of dry, absurd and darkly comic short stories about ordinary people caught in situations that become increasingly difficult to explain. A funeral goes wrong. A convoy rolls out like the Wild West. A meeting without purpose. A receipt becomes a record of a life. And sometimes, the best thing to do with a perfectly good piece of concrete is absolutely nothing. Standalone stories. Unexpected situations. Very little sense of escape.

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.

**Some letters are meant to be read. Others are meant to be found.** Jo has spent nine days running from a town that knows her name. She writes letters because paper is easier to trust than people. Each one begins with a number-Day One. Day Four. Day Nine-and each one tells a slightly different version of what happened. Before she ran, there was Lane. Her best friend. Her sister in everything but blood. The girl who knew every secret worth keeping. And there was Cole. A boy who hurt someone Jo loved, and a plan that began with nothing more than a few questions and a little curiosity. It was supposed to be simple. Find the truth. Make him pay. Go home. But plans have a way of becoming something else once people start making choices of their own. Now Jo is somewhere in the middle of nowhere, writing to a girl who may never read her letters. And the farther she gets from home, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between what happened- and what she needs to believe happened.

He stopped dreaming long before he stopped looking at the stars. Six years later, someone makes the mistake of asking him to dream again

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.

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.

It's almost ten years since Komachi Hanaie died. Ise has spent a decade not saying her name. At sixteen she was the most beautiful girl in the school, and the most alone. She answered a compliment about her name by explaining what it used to mean. She told him they would never celebrate each other's birthdays. She was cold, exact, and entirely without fear - and she asked him for one thing. To be the witness. Ten years later he still has not gone to her grave. A quiet novel about beauty carried as an inheritance, about a mother who does not come home, and about the distance between wanting someone and loving them. Complete. 42 chapters. Originally written in Japanese.

Harmony and Leif. Two souls addicted to pleasure, to chaos, to each other. Together they built their own universe where winter settled quietly over the fjords and summer nights refused to grow dark. Some called it love. But perhaps it was something beautifully wilder: a chemical madness disguised as obsession. Because when you love too deeply, it doesn't fade- it lingers in the broken corners of your soul and follows you like a ghost. This is a story about youth, the illusion of first love, and the quiet ache of remembering what almost was.

Some questions refuse to let go. When twenty-one-year-old Hannah Morgan leaves her small hometown to study neuroscience, she carries little more than a suitcase, a notebook filled with questions, and the unwavering support of the grandmother who raised her. She believes she's beginning an ordinary college education. She has no idea she's taking the first steps toward one of the greatest scientific challenges in human history. As Hannah watches the person she loves most begin to lose the memories that define a lifetime, a single impossible question begins to consume her: What if memory didn't have to disappear? Dismissed by colleagues, tested by failure, and forced to sacrifice more than she ever imagined, Hannah devotes decades to a vision that others call impossible. What begins as grief becomes an obsession, and eventually a revolution that will challenge everything humanity believes about memory, identity, and what it truly means to leave a legacy. The Architect's Journey is a sweeping founder story about love, perseverance, innovation, and the extraordinary cost of refusing to give up on an impossible dream.

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 alt_ctrl All rights reserved.

Some loves don't end. They just go silent. Between "I have to" and "I love you," something shifts. And sometimes without warning you find yourself wondering: will what they once felt ever find its way back? Athens keeps breathing. The air still smells like jasmine. But time doesn't move forward. It circles. A forgotten photo. A single comment. And suddenly, everything that was buried starts breathing again. Not as memory. As unfinished life. Andreas learned silence to survive. Charoula walked through fire and stayed standing. Two people on the same avenue, in different lanes. Athens, at night. Bouzoukia. Loss. Second chances. And a love that refuses to end. ✍️ Odysseas Nostos

Dum Vivimus, Vivamus While we live, let us live. There is a version of everyone that belongs to the outside world. The version people know. The version they talk about. The version they think they understand. Magnolia Bennett has never had much trouble being that version. At school, she is clever, friendly, dependable, and remarkably good at listening. She knows people well enough to notice the things they leave unsaid, though she has never been particularly interested in asking why. Then a philosophy project puts her with Leonard Whitmore, a boy whose reputation seems to have arrived long before he did. Everyone has a story about Leonard. Magnolia isn't sure she believes any of them. Three weeks of working together should be simple enough. But school has a way of turning ordinary things into something else. A conversation becomes a rumour. A friendship becomes a suspicion. A mistake becomes a reputation. And while Magnolia watches the people around her change, she begins to notice something stranger: People are rarely who they appear to be. Sometimes they aren't even who they believe themselves to be. Between classrooms, theatre rehearsals, friendships, arguments, secrets and the ordinary disasters of growing up, Magnolia begins to discover that everyone carries a life the rest of the world cannot see. Some hide it well. Some don't. And some are still trying to figure out which parts of themselves are real. Dum vivimus, vivamus. While we live, let us live.

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. ☕ 💗

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.

"Aku mengerti kamu tidak bisa pergi. Aku mengerti ada orang yang bergantung padamu. Dan aku mengerti bahwa kamu memilih mereka. Dan aku harus memilih diriku sendiri." Dara sudah memiliki visa ke Aldara. Tomas sudah memiliki klinik di Cangkang. Mereka tinggal di kota yang sama, dengan cinta yang sama, dan dua masa depan yang tidak bisa disatukan. Dara tidak bisa menunggu lagi. Tomas tidak bisa pergi begitu saja. Dan di antara mereka, hanya ada satu pertanyaan yang tidak punya jawaban mudah: apakah cinta cukup untuk membuat seseorang tetap tinggal-ataukah cinta justru yang membuat seseorang pergi? Dara & Tomas adalah cerita tentang perpisahan yang tidak terjadi karena cinta habis, tapi karena cinta tidak cukup untuk menjembatani dua pilihan yang sama-sama benar.

Nothing happens to Andrei Voicu. Things happen to other people. A teacher, a woman, a man who slept four beds down from him at eleven years old. Small things, precise things, arriving years late and answering exactly what each of them did. He keeps a list. He is a careful man, and it is a careful list, and what frightens him about it is not the eleven names. It is that he cannot remember starting it. A prologue and twenty-one chapters. Updates Tuesdays and Fridays.

Trigger Warning: Themes of severe academic burnout, emotional exhaustion, depressiveness, and dark dream imagery. Ten swords in a dark dream. A candle flickering against the storm. A mountain of schoolwork that never shrinks. For anyone who has ever felt like they are drowning in plain sight, Something Warm follows a young student navigating the quiet horror of severe academic burnout. As heavy grey skies mirror an internal storm, every simple act-from fetching water to opening a laptop-feels like lifting mountains. When the final thread breaks in total darkness, there is nothing left to do but surrender to the weight. This is a story about the absolute zero. The end of a painful cycle, and the quiet, unearned grace of the morning sun arriving when you least expect it.

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