Literaryfiction Stories

Kalyani was never anyone's first choice. At eighteen, in Mumbai that has already quietly decided her worth, she is given to a man who does not want a wife - only someone to fill the silence his grief left behind. Set in 1840s Maharashtra, this is the story of a woman who asked for nothing, was promised nothing, and still found ways to love - a house that wasn't hers, children that weren't hers, a life that was never quite hers. The question is not whether Kalyani endures. It is what endurance costs a person. And whether anyone will notice before the price becomes too high.

Seeking an escape from his overbearing mother, Evan McKenna fills his free time with hockey practice and extracurricular activities, counting down the days until he graduates. Hoping to keep a routine, and after being diagnosed with severe anxiety, Peter Delacroix hides behind the front desk of his father's quiet hotel. When his best friend starts an astronomy club to help him socialize, nobody expects Evan McKenna to walk through the door. As Evan struggles with acceptance and his ever-changing plans for the future, Peter slowly forms a bond with his club members and attempts to reconcile with his past. With the astronomy club's preparation for a meteor shower and an eclipse on the horizon, Evan and Peter have two hundred days to make sense of their hectic lives before parting ways forever. Content Warning: Descriptions of abuse, alcoholism, and homophobia as well as discussions of mental health and sexuality. Please use discretion while reading. Cover by @lantea-

{ ROUND 3 ONC2026 QUALIFIER } 🏅 { ONE OF THE NANO WATT 2026 LONGLISTER }🎖 ~~~~~~~~~~~ -•-•-•-•-•-•-•-• -•-•-•-• Five years. Five failures. One broken promise. When Hari leaves Samastipur for the jagged skyline of Mumbai, he thinks he has already lost everything. He is wrong. To survive the "city of illusions," he must lose his ego, his past, and his privacy. In the dark belly of a warehouse, amidst the smoke and the steel, he encounters the people the world forgot and the one man who leaves footprints on his heart that change the path of his life forever. A tale of sacrifice, struggle, and the search for a foothold in a world that never stops moving. ******* One request I did like to make- please do not copy, repost, or plagiarize this work in any form. This story is personal, and it took time, effort, and heart to write. Copyright © February 2026- Prosperion X. ❣️Happy Reading ❣️

My mother loves me. She wakes at dawn to simmer silver ear mushroom soup. She knows every teacher's number by heart. She gave up her own dreams so I could play the piano. Everything she does, she does out of love. So when my right hand goes limp and dead, everyone says it's my fault. The doctors can't explain it. The teachers say I'm stressed. My classmates mimic me behind my back, like I'm putting on a show. And my mother just stares at me in silence, like I'm a doll she can't fix. But no one ever asked me - Do I even want this hand anymore? This is a story about love, control, and silence. About a girl who learns to say "no" to the world, with a hand that refuses to obey.

Book 2 in "Daughters of Eve" trilogy Before she became the girl who ran away, she was the girl who stayed. Adeline grew up in the second pew from the front as the preacher's daughter. She knew the rules of her home, the kind of love she was taught never to question, and the version of herself that had been decided for her before she was old enough to have a say. Then there was Darryl. Patient, steady, certain. He wanted to leave this town and he wanted to take her with him. And Adeline wanted to go. But wanting and doing are different things. This book lives in the space between leaving and staying. Where you can see the door and cannot make your feet move toward it. Where you love someone enough to want to follow them and are too afraid of yourself to try. Where you stand at the edge of something for so long that by the time you're ready, it's already gone. Because loving Darryl had been easy. Choosing herself had not. Small town roots. Inherited faith. First love that wasn't enough to save her. This is everything that happened before she left her home.

Book One of The North Star Chronicles Her name is on a form. Jonquil, a blank, and a numeral. Eisen was the fourteenth embryo misplaced by a Manila fertility clinic. She was raised for eight years by a family who believed she was theirs - and handed back when the paperwork caught up. Not abandoned. Returned. Like a coat that didn't fit. Fifteen years later she is a photography student in Chiang Mai who has made an art of the locked door. Flawless pictures that give nothing away. Her name kept off every list. A calendar turned to face the wall. She has one rule, and it has kept her alive: let nobody in, and nobody can ever again decide you don't belong. Then a clumsy boy brings eleven photographs to a critique and is laughed out of the room - and Eisen does the one thing she has never done in her life. She looks at him instead of away. What follows is a found family that refuses to let her go. A mafia leader's brother who could learn everything about her with two phone calls, and won't make them. And a date circled on a calendar that she has never let a single living person see. Some rooms you survive by leaving the camera outside the door. This story deals with sexual assault and its aftermath, the long grind of the legal system, child abandonment, and organized crime. The assault is never depicted on the page - the book is about survival, healing, and found family, not the wound. Please read with care.

An arranged marriage. Two strangers. One home. It should have been simple. It wasn't. Not because of betrayal. Not because of tragedy. But because some truths take years to recognize.

Jake once ran toward a future. Now he runs from his past. Homeless, injured, and carrying a mistake he can't outrun, Jake drifts through the city with nothing but a mismatched pair of running shoes and a memory that won't let him breathe. But when he discovers a pair of discarded runners behind a gym, something stirs something he thought he lost forever. Strides Between Us is a contemporary novel about resilience, mentorship, fatherhood, and second chances. Through the quiet moments and the hardest truths, Jake must confront the life he left behind... and the daughter he still aches to protect. For readers who love: • emotional, character-driven stories • running culture and comeback arcs • themes of homelessness, chronic pain, and hope • the bond between parents and children • redemption stories grounded in real life This preview includes Chapter 1, with more chapters to follow. Educators & reviewers: To request the full ARC or the Grade 9-12 curriculum alignment companion, contact: 📧 stridesbetweenus@gmail.com

When Raghav Das receives an unexpected message from a woman he barely remembers from school, he assumes it is another coincidence life likes to arrange. It isn't. Ananya Mishra has carried one quiet certainty for twelve years: that some people change your life simply by being exactly themselves, even if they never know they did. Across government postings, lonely bungalows, spare rooms, unfinished stories, and the ordinary work of building a marriage, two people learn that love is not found in grand declarations, but in the rare courage of seeing another person without trying to change them. A quiet literary novel about memory, attention, ambition, and the lives we slowly write into one another.

A collection of unnamed moments where longing, intimacy, abandonment, and self-discovery meet. No names. No faces. Only stories of how they began, why they mattered, and when they ended.

classic tradition of Anton Chekhov", "atmospheric short story", "psychological realism In a town bathed in a warm, buttery-yellow light, Fyodor Pavlovich Sveshnikov walks the narrow streets with strict, old-world decorum. His beloved Dashenka is away on an extended journey, and he is fiercely determined to keep their world exactly as she left it. Every day, he steps out to perform a precise, sacred ritual: buying her favorite cherry pastry from the local coffee-house and a fresh volume of poetry from a scraggy bookseller. Yet, beneath the town's vibrant, noisy surface, a heavy quiet follows his footsteps. The shopkeepers and neighbors don't offer casual greetings. Instead, they treat Fyodor with a gentle, agonizingly tender kindness, participating in his routine and watching him go with sorrowful, silent eyes. What is the quiet conspiracy holding this town together?

He sat in the corner and watched everyone. She smiled at everyone and let no one in. When two people who've learned to protect themselves from exactly each other finally start talking - the question isn't whether they'll fall. It's whether the wounds they're carrying will let them. A dual-narrative philosophical romance told in two voices, two silences, and one sentence that almost ended everything. Some wounds aren't yours to begin with. You just inherited them.

A couple in a coma. Nine seconds of death. A city ruled by their divine versions. Giorgio and Loredana are returning from the Milan Furniture Fair when a van hits their old Panda with a Trieste license plate. For a few seconds, their hearts stop at the same time. When they open their eyes again, they are no longer in the car. They have entered Me like ghosts, the suspended capital of Pride: a kingdom built by the human psyche, dominated by two Towers and a sovereign couple. Over, King of Pride, rules from the Crystal Tower. It is splendor, culture, perfection, and the need to be admired. Narcisa, Queen of Pride, reigns from the Anthracite Tower. It is pain, sacrifice, guilt, and the need to finally be recognized. No one in Me can see Giorgio and Loredana. They, however, can see and hear everything. While their bodies lie in the same hospital and their daughter Giovanna calls them from the world of the living, the couple discovers an impossible truth: Over and Narcisa are not merely deities. They are their deepest forms. Giorgio has transformed culture, music, and poetry into a stage on which he can prove his superiority. Loredana has transformed pain and sacrifice into a tribunal before which she can feel innocent. To return to their daughter, they will have to navigate incompatible memories, family wounds, and a Pantheon born of fractures in their character. But Me recognizes only the Ego. And no one, in the realm of the Ego, has ever truly uttered the word We. ME - The Beast in Me is a Psychantasy novel that blends psychological fantasy, myth, family memory, and symbolism. The Beast does not come from outside. The Beast knows your name.

Scars of Tanoa A man picks up a rifle to protect what's left of his home. By the time the war lets him put it down, he's not sure the man holding it is still him. An unofficial fan-fiction novel set on Tanoa, born from the author's own Arma 3 campaign mod. War, complicity, and the cost of doing what has to be done. Nobody stays clean.

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, friends, if nothing else, pity him. Understand why she allowed him the greatest mercy of them all. Forgetting.

Long before the ink woke up on his skin, Asdar was a young priest with a wolf inside him he hadn't yet learned to name. This is his account - five chapters moving through Bambara, Kiswahili, and reconstructed Dacian, tracing what it meant to be seen as himself for the first time. A companion volume to The Memory Cartographer - Zavet, told in the voice the main Chronicles never had room for.

Ethan Parker has spent his entire life believing that love, success, and happiness must be earned. When a prestigious writing competition forces him to confront old fears, forgotten journals, and the quiet voice in his head that insists he is never enough, Ethan begins a journey of self-discovery. Sometimes the hardest thing in the world isn't becoming extraordinary. It's believing you were worthy all along. A heartfelt coming-of-age novel about self-worth, friendship, fear, and learning to bloom without asking permission.

In Chapter 1 - Crossways, Tony spends the weekend with his sister and her family, and gets a late start for home Sunday night. Too tired to continue, he parks on the side of the road for a short nap. He wakes up too late to make it to work on time. But, as he'll soon discover, losing his job will be the least of his worries. Chapter 1 is less than 1,000 words. I'll add additional flash-fiction stories as I write them, each under 1,500 words. I hope you enjoy them, and I'd love to hear what you think. ~Simultaneously published on PoetrySoup and Royal Road.

Seven women at decisive moments in their lives face loss, silence, and rediscovery. A mother who, after a fever, can only speak a mysterious language that no one understands. A woman who starts running every night and, through running, finds the body she had forgotten. Two sisters sharing the vigil of their dying mother. A biracial teenager who invents words for feelings that have no name in either English or Portuguese. A street dancer who discovers that an abandoned building holds the memories of everyone who ever lived there. A woman who enters a salt labyrinth to confront the younger version of herself. And a seventy‑three‑year‑old woman living alone in Torres, learning that being alone is not the same as loneliness. The book explores identity, heritage, body, grief, and the human capacity to create new languages to name what once seemed unnameable.