Literaryfiction Stories

Anna lives a deliberately colourless life-one spent in the background, where asking for anything comes with a price she learned to stop paying long ago. At school, on the bus, at home, her world has been built on silence, routine, and the certain safety of going unnoticed. It's a balance she maintains meticulously, because being seen has never ended well for her. Then, one day, that balance fractures after a brief moment of accidental acknowledgement-small, meaningless, fleeting, and completely impossible to undo. Now, Anna is forced to confront the quiet life she's built. She begins to question whether survival is the same as living... and what it might cost to want more. She finds herself wondering whether the price is too low-or far too high. Because once you're noticed by someone, the world doesn't always let you disappear again. Highest ranking: #1 literaryfiction 01/03/2026 - Ongoing.

Life is like a rollercoaster, it has its ups and downs, but it's your choice whether to scream or enjoy the ride... When life's rollercoaster throws you off track, do you scream, or do you hold on tight? For Ira and Rudraksh, the journey is far from smooth: one suffocating under the weight of failure, the other nursing a heart shattered into pieces. Two strangers caught in life's ugliest turns, where every step forward is a fight against invisible battles. This is not a story of being saved by each other, but of learning to live despite the wreckage, of finding the courage to stand when the ground never stops shaking. But if their paths converge-bringing their emotions and differences-will they find solace in each other, or will those very differences pull them apart? ✨️✨️✨️✨️✨️✨️✨️✨️✨️ Copyright © 2026 Jambudweep. This content is protected under applicable international copyright laws. Unauthorized reproduction, adaptation, translation, or redistribution on any platform without the author's explicit written permission is prohibited. Original publication: Wattpad.

Set against the events of the Kashmiri Pandit Exodus, Kasheer: The Home We Lost is a story of memory, displacement, and everything that was left behind. In the winter of 1990, Shivanshi Bhat and Vivaan Kaul are children growing up in a place that feels permanent-until one night, it isn't. As fear spreads and families begin to leave, their lives take different paths. Shivanshi leaves early with her family, carrying fragments of a home she cannot return to. Vivaan stays longer, his family forced into uncertainty, loss, and the harsh realities of displacement. They do not say goodbye. They do not know if they will ever meet again. Years pass. Lives are rebuilt. Identities shift. In a world far removed from Kashmir, Shivanshi Bhat and Vivaan K. meet again-no longer as the children they once were, but as strangers shaped by everything they survived. There is no recognition. Only a quiet familiarity neither of them can explain. As the past begins to surface in fragments-through memory, silence, and things left unsaid-they are forced to confront a truth that neither of them was prepared for: Home was never just a place. And some connections do not disappear, no matter how much time or distance stands between them. They are two people shaped by history trying to find each other again.

On the edge of a quiet town, where the road curves and the night settles in, an old man sits on a porch and tells stories. He doesn't tell them to crowds. He doesn't tell them for answers. He tells them to the night-and to anyone who happens to wander by. Each story carries something different: something lost, something carried too long, something mistaken for truth, something that refuses to leave. They are not stories meant to fix you. They are stories that sit beside you... until you're ready to hear them. Welcome to the porch. The night is already listening.

This is the tale of how Telikos, once a bustling, beautiful city, was turned into but a small, unnaturally-shaped town whose residents, if they had not already died, were those condemned to the galleys.

In a world where power decides whose talent survives, a young woman returns to reclaim what was stolen from her blood. Born to a seamstress erased by cruelty, Kallika grows up carrying unfinished dreams, silent wounds, and an inheritance the world tried to bury. Years later, she enters an empire built on lies - not with anger, not with violence, but with memory, patience, and extraordinary art. This is not just a story of revenge. It is a journey of destiny, justice, and transformation. Of a woman who turns pain into power, and silence into truth. When the past returns wearing silk, empires begin to tremble. ✨ A character-driven story of inheritance, art, and quiet justice.🌺🌺🌺🌺🌻🌻

He is the weight of metal, the trace of oil, and the time that demands patience. She is the vertigo of light, the gleam of glass, and the urgency of now. In the silence of a workshop forgotten by progress, two rhythms collide. He mends what the world casts aside; she seeks the angle the world longs to see. Between the shutter that clicks and the screen that accelerates, an interference is born - one that no algorithm could have foreseen. But the light that reveals is the same light that consumes. In a city that demands total exposure, what remains for those who choose the shadows? An elegy for that which cannot be edited. The final encounter between the grain that resists and the pixel that devours.

Every afternoon, at the same time, her cat slips out of the house. One day, 12 year old Keiko follows it into the woods and finds a small temple that only comes alive at night, when blue lights appear, animals gather, and the stars begin to whisper. With the help of a strange boy who watches the sky through a telescope, she learns the truth: each disappearing star carries the last words of someone who died unheard. But the boy is tired. And to listen, someone must take his place. · · ─ ·✶· ─ · · Prompts: ⚝・┆5. Every day at the exact same time your cat slips out of your home. One afternoon, curiosity gets the better of you and you follow, only to discover it's living a secret life you never imagined. ⚝・┆69. The stars are disappearing one by one, and only you can hear their whispers. ⚝・┆78. You begin to realize that nothing is quite what it seems.

'He had spent his life chasing a reflection, never noticing the life waiting for him behind his own back.' A mirror. A lighthouse. A curse whispered across generations. Silas Hale dreams of a lighthouse that calls him, and a mirror that whispers his name. Every time he follows it, misfortune follows too. The wind never quiets. The mist never lifts. And the sea ... waits for him to return. Prompt-34. "You have to sail the seven seas to find the lost treasure, but treasure means different things to different people, what treasures will you find at worlds' edge ."

One ordinary girl wakes up inside a palace of colours. They call her princess. She calls it prison. Here, every room has a rule: speak soft, smile soft, want soft. She obeys-until the day she realises, If fitting means I vanish, then I choose to be the loudest thing in this loud kingdom. A quiet revolt. A girl who learns happiness isn't wearing their mask-it's burning it.

A single camera flash in Bangkok awakens buried memories of lost love for 45-year-old Quan. In a whirlwind affair with charming expat Jake, she rediscovers passion, confesses long-held secrets, and claims stolen joy amid duty. Sensual, emotional midlife romance-will fleeting happiness last? A sensual, emotionally resonant novelette about a 45-year-old married Korean woman, Quan, who experiences a profound sexual and personal awakening during a trip to Bangkok to help her daughter Cindy settle into university. While buying a vintage Polaroid camera for Cindy's graduation gift, Quan meets Jake, a charming American expat writer. When he unexpectedly snaps her photo, the camera's flash triggers buried memories of her first love, Johnnie-a brief, passionate teenage romance with an American military dependent that ended abruptly twenty years earlier when he moved away. The flash reopens old wounds: Quan had become pregnant by Johnnie but never told him; instead, she married a classmate and raised the child (and a second) in a loveless, duty-bound marriage to a wealthy but distant Korean businessman whose family never accepted her. Encouraged by her independent-minded daughter Cindy, Quan tentatively reconnects with Jake. What begins as curiosity blossoms into a passionate, liberating affair over two intense nights filled with rooftop dinners, dancing, wine, and deliberate lovemaking. In pillow talk after their second night, Quan finally confesses her long-held secret about Johnnie and the true paternity of her first child, releasing decades of guilt. The story ends bittersweetly: Quan returns home to her unchanged life in Korea, quietly placing Jake's Polaroid atop the old one of her and Johnnie in a hidden shoebox. Yet a tender morning-after conversation with Jake reveals they plan to continue the affair during her future visits to Bangkok over Cindy's four university years-offering stolen weeks of joy amid duty.

She never feared love. She feared disappearing inside it. She had seen it happen too many times - women who slowly shrank... women who softened until they became silent. Mothers. Aunties. Grandmothers. Strong women who became shadows in their own homes. She promised herself she would never be one of them. Independent. Intentional. Unapologetic. She built a life that belonged entirely to her. Then she met him. He didn't try to control her. He didn't try to cage her. He didn't demand obedience or submission. He simply stood there - calm, steady, observant. And somehow... that unsettled her more. Because what happens when the kind of love you prepared to fight against... is not a fight at all? This is not just a romance. It is about boundaries. It is about softness that refuses to shrink. It is about the kind of man who doesn't need to dominate to feel powerful. And the kind of woman who refuses to disappear. Coming soon.

In every structure, there is a point of failure. I just didn't realize I was the only thing delaying it. Being an engineer means understanding loads, tension, and balance. For a decade, I applied that logic to my marriage, quietly shoring up the foundations while my wife stood in the center of a home I was killing myself to maintain. Then came the day I stopped. I set a test I thought we would pass: a simple request for her to fight for us. But the divorce moved with a speed that stunned me, leaving me to sift through the blueprints of our past to find where it all went wrong. From the quiet questions of my children to the clarifying pain of the aftermath, this is a story about the weight we carry-and the freedom found in finally letting the sky fall. A fictional short story based on real-life events. New chapters published every Monday and Friday evening. If this story resonates with you, please consider adding it to your Library and leaving a Vote (Star). It helps other 'Engineers' find their way to this story.

You wake up in your childhood bed with a bruise on your forehead and no memory of how you got home. The friends who celebrated you the night before all have different versions of what happened. The more you search for the truth, the worse the migraines become. Your mother warned you about them. Now you have to decide which is more dangerous: losing your memory or recovering it.

Wiphala is a remote estate that does not exist on social media, is never advertised, and can only be reached through word of mouth. Those who manage to secure a stay all say the same thing: "No one comes back the same." There, certain trees -known as The Elders- respond to absolute honesty. They grow. They expand. They reshape the landscape. Emma arrives searching for something she cannot name. But Emma is not Emma. She is Carol -a journalist who, after the highly publicized death of her son, staged her own disappearance. In Wiphala, she will discover that some trees do more than grow from truth... Some embody what we believed was lost forever. Tender, symbolic, and deeply human, Diary of a Tree with a Wide Canopy and Shallow Roots explores grief, identity, inherited silence, and the fragile hope that survives even in shallow ground. Enter gently. Some secrets are waiting to be trusted with you.

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. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ -•-•-•-•-•-•-•-• -•-•-•-• Written for ONC 2026 Prompt No. 29 :-- You'll meet many people in your life. Many will come and go, but some leave footprints on your heart.

This novel is told through a series of letters from an unnamed man to a woman named Lorelei, tracing his life from a quiet Southern childhood through law, politics, and eventual stability as a small-town mayor. Years earlier, in college, he briefly met Lorelei, a sharp, restless girl who challenged his need for structure. He lost her before ever truly knowing her, and built a life defined by logic and control. When she unexpectedly reenters his life years later, their connection unfolds slowly and quietly. As she begins to fit into his town and his world, he is forced to confront everything he thought he understood about certainty, love, and himself. It is a soft, reflective story about timing, missed chances, and a love that grows gradually in the space between what is said and what is felt.

People think staying out of things is the same as being innocent. It isn't. It's just quieter. Nathan is a university student who believes observation is neutral until one ordinary moment forces him to intervene. Samuel Phiri is a detective returning from suspension, unwelcome and untrusted, dropped back into a system that never wanted him comfortable. Their stories begin separately. They will not stay that way. Silence Isn't Neutral is a slow-burn psychological crime thriller about responsibility, violence, and the moment you cross a line you can't step back over.

In 1991, twenty-nine-year old Corrie Frederick wants to get out of the shadow of her mother Sophia, who is a world-renowned pianist. What better way than to prove that with the Nicholas Leblanc Emerging Pianists Competition? It is being hosted by the conservatory that she used to go attend years prior but she lost a scholarship to someone else. Someone she felt didn't really deserve it. With the support of her best friend, she decides to play one of the famous Louisiana composer Nicholas Leblanc's most difficult pieces. And that's where the nightmare begins. In 1891, a young woman by the name of Marie Fontenot wants nothing more than to compose her own music but her cruel and strict mother will not allow it. She feels trapped and alone, only finding solace in her secret music writing. But there is one person that she holds onto and loves. Her best friend, James Moreau. She has been in love with him for ages and now that he is recently widowed, she believes that she has a chance with him and the party at Euturpe Leblanc's home in Fontaine is going to be the day that she confesses to him. But when James rejects Marie, she is inconsolable. The man she despises most in the world, Nicholas Leblanc finds her outside but due to them being found alone without her companion, she must marry Leblanc for the sake of propriety. And she must give up music forever.

Elia was only a child ,a heartbeat of laughter, a flicker of light in a quiet town that forgot how to listen. Then one day, the rope stopped turning. Years later, someone still remembers. Someone still hears the rhythm. And someone is finally ready to step into the silence that began it all. My story is told in 39 haunting fragments,21 Jumps and 18 Stops. This story moves between innocence and vengeance, love and grief, sound and silence. "Because what word is there for a child who disappears and never gets to grow old?"