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.

In the silk-producing valleys of the Kingdom of Naples, Renza, the daughter of a respected silk merchant, has been raised within the careful order of family and tradition. Lucien arrives as a restless outsider, marked by a past he cannot escape. Around them move others bound by secrecy and survival, including a spy for the Inquisition trained to live between two worlds. As tensions deepen and suspicion spreads through Silk County, their lives draw toward a tragic event history has nearly erased. Echoing the ancient myth of Galatea and Acis in a 16th century setting, Silk County explores how love endures in fragile and often dangerous spaces, where even the most delicate threads can bind souls across time. #ONC2026 contest. Story is complete.

They called it The List. Not officially. Never on paper. But every woman in the compound knew-when the gray van came, someone's name had been added. Folake wrote her own name down first. Kemi jumped from a balcony rather than be taken inside. Funmi has spent twelve years searching for a man who vanished. And Nneka kept a box under her bed for twelve years-until today. Now their stories are connecting. Through a notebook in Enugu. Through a forum post in London. Through a name no one has spoken in twenty years: Tunde Adebayo. The List was meant to erase them. Instead, it's about to make them impossible to ignore.

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.

Fall, 2022: On the Bayou of Southern Louisiana. Ozzy, a 14-year-old artistic honors student, is looking forward to starting high school and the talented theater program. But a whirlwind trip to the ER and an MRI reveals Ozzy has a brain tumor - and later, a pediatric cancer diagnosis - changes everything. During a year-long fight for a cure in the hospital, hope comes to Ozzy and their Mama through art, music and letters from friends, family and even strangers. There are so many that some remain unopened, collected in a box that goes home with Ozzy after they are discharged from the hospital a year later. The box sits in Mama's closet for over two years. Neither Ozzy nor Mama have opened the box as they struggle to return to "normal" life when "normal" is no longer possible. Until today, 2026: when what begins as spring cleaning turns into opening the box, reading its letters, and finding a mysterious adventure in one that neither Ozzy or Mama ever saw coming. And it just may be the adventure 17-year-old Ozzy and their Mama need to reveal the unexpected, ordinary magic that can help them heal, move forward- and live. ONC 2026 Prompts Used: #79 (Main) - Additional: #16, #28, #69, #104. Stacie Eirich @spacetodream

NEW EPISODES TUESDAYS & FRIDAYS Launching the first day of spring - March 20 When Korea's most trusted "everything app" weaponizes her private medical data, artist Maya Kim is thrust into a system designed to predict-and control-her life. To fight back, she must expose a chilling network of government-backed surveillance before it strips her of her autonomy, her art, and her right to choose. The Algorithm of Spring is a near-future techno-thriller set in Seoul, blending high-stakes conspiracy with the emotional intensity of a K-drama.

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.

Bounty hunters surveil a bold fugitive disguised as a guard escorting slaves to market. Episode 1 - The Last Coffle Reading time: 14 minutes

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 whose footprints will 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.

Finding a penny on the ground is considered good luck. But what about finding a dead body? Probably not. Instead of an ordinary day for Felix, he finds someone dear to him on a riverbank, surrounded by both blood and confusion. What he realizes is that this isn't the first time. It's the second. And whatever happened before is happening again. Something is connected. Something is off. But what? As unbearable past secrets unveil, friendships break, trust wears thin, he realizes that those that truly hurt you are the ones closest. He's left to wrestle with grief, guilt, and the horrible realization that the truth hurts more than it heals. And questions. Many, many questions. Statement One features Felix's case on how this happened and went down, told from entirely his perspective as he pieces together the events that led him there, and the case that would come to define him.

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.

What comes after the main event? Neither a collapse nor a rebrand. A quiet choosing. Of a life that is yours. After years under the spotlight, Kim Seokjin leaves Seoul for London to start over quietly-far from the stage, the cameras, and the life that once defined him. In a new city, he builds a different kind of routine: working at a small Korean restaurant, getting lost in unfamiliar streets, and learning how to belong to himself again. But the past doesn't stay still. Old friendships, shared history, and the people who still know him best continue to find their way back. Background is a soft, emotional post-fame fiction about healing, distance, home, and the love that remains when everything else changes. (An ongoing novel.)

ME - The Beast in Me is a psychological myth set in the suspended city of Superbia, where the Ego becomes a god, the mind a labyrinth, and identity a mask you can't take off. If you enjoy books like Percy Jackson but want a darker, more adult myth, this novel transforms classical hero trials into inner battles. Instead of Greek gods, Superbia's Pantheon rules the psyche: Narcisa Covert - the Shadow Goddess, mother of personality disorders. Overer - the Lord of Excess and Perfection. Sixteen semi-divine archetypes shape the soul's journey. The book unfolds in Thirty Acts: ten Admirations, ten Martyrs, ten Excesses - a descent into the self where the Beast is never outside you, but within. If you're searching for Percy Jackson-like mythology for adults, this novel turns divine trials into psychological truth. The Beast doesn't come from outside. It comes from you.

She's tired of living. Not because life is hard but because she's lived it too many times. Love always ends the same way:in pain. Answers never stay answers, they turn into new questions. And every new life becomes just another attempt to understand why any of this matters. But what do you do...when even after thousands of lives, the meaning still slips through your fingers? When all that's left is emptiness and a question you can no longer outrun?

Between nuances and twists, we follow Melissa's trajectory. An ordinary woman who strips her journey bare, revealing the pains and joys of a common yet profound life. In her search for internal answers, she invites us to see the world through her perspective, where the everyday often becomes a prison. In this attempt to break her bonds, Melissa confronts an implacable reality: what is the price of freedom when life demands our most precious possessions? Between the delirium of her personal philosophy and the rawness of her choices, the narrative forces us to question the boundaries between ingenuity and survival.

"Two shadows stood on a quiet street-one lonely and in despair, the other intimidating and proud. In the silence of the valley, a story of pain, judgment, and the uncertainty of life begins."

Some things lost in the giving can still be found again. Miriam Alderton has spent thirty-one years doing everything right-raising children, loving a husband, and tending a garden that is the finest in the county. Now, at fifty-eight, with the house quiet and her children grown and gone, she stands in her lavender field and asks herself a question she doesn't quite know how to answer: Who am I, outside of everything I have done and everyone I have loved? Saoirse is a single mother, a translator, and a woman who has traveled far to find a slower pace of life. She arrives in the little village of Hathwell with her daughter Nell, too many books, and the quiet exhaustion of someone who has poured every ounce of herself into one beloved person-and is only now realizing she has lost the thread of her own identity somewhere along the way. Together, amidst shared mornings, garden rows, and cups of tea gone slightly cold, two women who have both been quietly lost begin, at last, to find their way back to themselves. The Lavender Between Us is a gentle, luminous story about motherhood, friendship, and healing-and the beautiful truth that it is never too late to remember who you are, and who you are still becoming.

"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 ."

Set in The St.Michael Orphanage