Microfiction
The Third Knock
Every year on the night they met, Mara and Julian knocked three times on a stranger’s door. They did not speak about why three. They did not remember deciding it. The number had arrived the way habits sometimes do—half joke, half dare—then calcified into something that felt older than both of them.
By Lawrence Lease14 days ago in Fiction
The Moment Before You Finally Move
The first sign wasn’t a sound. It was the way the light behaved. Mara noticed it while she stood in her kitchen with the faucet running too long, her hands held under the stream like she could rinse off a thought. The morning should have been clean and ordinary—gray Dallas daylight, thin and patient, the neighbor’s sprinkler ticking somewhere outside—but the sunlight coming through the blinds didn’t land right. It didn’t stripe the counter in neat bars. It hovered, softened, like it was deciding whether to commit.
By Lawrence Lease14 days ago in Fiction
The Seventh-Floor Pause
The elevator in the Rookery Building was older than the people who rode it. The brass numbers above the door had dulled into the color of old pennies, and the mirror at the back held everyone’s face a second too long, like it was deciding whether to keep them.
By Lawrence Lease15 days ago in Fiction
The night everything changed. Content Warning.
As soon as I saw it, I knew what needed to be done. I left without a second thought. I ran straight into the pouring rain and was soaked within seconds. I shivered and pulled my cloak tighter, but the buttons were broken and I couldn’t close it properly. One was missing, and the rest hung from loose threads. A cold draft slipped through, the wind flowing freely.
By Minou J. Linde15 days ago in Fiction
