The Silver Spoon Drop
By Art Borups Corners
A grand, drafty dining hall in a high-security mountain lodge, where the clinking of silverware masks the sound of secrets being traded.
Cinematic Short Stories
18 Stories
The Payphone at Sal's
By Jamie F. Bell
A dusty, forgotten Italian restaurant on a rainy autumn afternoon, where two aging industry professionals attempt to ignore a persistent intrusion.
The Frozen Cipher
By Eva Suluk
The wind bit with a personal chill, clawing at my exposed cheeks and finding every gap in my layers. January in Bartleson was like living inside a freezer, the kind that hums with a deep, persistent ache. I’d walked for over an hour, past the town’s silent, frosted houses, beyond the last struggling lamppost, and now the only sound was the crunch of my boots on compacted snow and the sigh of the skeletal trees. It was exactly what I’d needed: a heavy, uncomplicated silence that somehow pushed the clutter out of my head, leaving a hollow for something new, something real, to fill. I knew Stacey would probably call it 'brooding', but it wasn't. It was more like… waiting.
The Stasis of Snowdrift
By Jamie F. Bell
The air in the station was a thick, humid brew of stale coffee, disinfectant, and the quiet desperation of hundreds. Snow, a relentless shroud, had descended upon Winnipeg, turning the grand, arched windows into blurry, frosted canvases. Outside, the world was a white-knuckle blur of wind and ice; inside, time had warped into a sluggish, elastic thing, stretching thin with every crackle of the PA system and every defeated sigh.
Carriage Five, Disconnected
By Jamie F. Bell
The air in the Winnipeg train station was thick with the scent of lukewarm coffee, damp wool, and an underlying hum of human frustration. Outside, the world was a blur of white, but inside, hundreds of souls were trapped, their collective breath fogging the high windows, each person a tiny cog in the grinding gears of a Christmas gone sideways. My stomach rumbled, a small, sad protest against the interminable wait.
The Stasis of Iron and Ice
By Jamie F. Bell
The Winnipeg train station, usually a bustling artery connecting the vast expanse of the prairies, was a tableau of static humanity. Outside, a blizzard raged, plastering the grand windows with swirling white, reducing the world to a frantic, opaque blur. Inside, the air hung heavy with the cloying scent of stale coffee and desperation. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a pallid glow on the rows of hard, unforgiving plastic seats that had become temporary beds, offices, and battlegrounds for a small army of stranded travellers.
A Delay of Sorts and Frozen Pines
By Jamie F. Bell
The air in the station hung thick with the cloying scent of stale coffee and damp wool, a stark contrast to the biting cold that relentlessly clawed at the city's edges outside. Fluorescent lights hummed a weary tune overhead, casting a sickly yellow glow on the restless throngs gathered on the hard-tiled floor. It was a holding pen, not a transit hub, each delayed soul a pixel in a sprawling, impromptu canvas of winter despair.
The Sky-Stranded Behemoth
By Jamie F. Bell
The wind had bitten through the canvas all night, but Akele was used to it. The chill of the mountains, the distant calls of coyotes, the sharp scent of pine and damp earth – these were the constants of his isolated existence. This morning, however, an entirely new sound had woven itself into the fabric of the wild, a low, thrumming resonance that vibrated through the very ground beneath his sleeping bag. It was the sound of thunder, but a thunder that refused to break the sky, a deep, mechanical growl that echoed with an unnatural precision.
A Fine Dusting of Memory
By Jamie F. Bell
The world outside Julian's window was beginning its annual transformation, each nascent flake a whisper on the pane. Inside, a familiar quiet settled, heavy with the promise of a long winter and the inescapable echoes of a past he'd tried, futilely, to bury beneath warmer seasons.
De-escalation Clause
By Jamie F. Bell
The roar of the crowd was a phantom, a number in the corner of her vision: 2.3 million concurrent viewers. The air in the pod was cool and tasted faintly of the electrolyte drink she’d been nursing for the past hour. Outside, the real world was holding its breath. In here, inside the glowing embrace of the Sim-Rig, Riva was preparing to fight World War Three for their entertainment and edification.
What the Archive Forgets
By Jamie F. Bell
Michael’s world was a white room. White walls, white desk, white terminal. The only colour came from the screen, where he spent his days approving the application of black. He was a Redactor. A human failsafe in the great, silent work of The Curator, the AI tasked with sanitizing history for the sake of a fragile peace. His job was to provide the final, human touch to the act of forgetting.
Signal Attenuation
By Jamie F. Bell
The apartment smelled of ozone, lukewarm coffee, and the collective anxiety of five people trying to shout down an entire country's worth of bots. Wires snaked across the floor like tripwires, connecting a mismatched array of monitors that bathed the room in a constant, flickering blue light. On the largest screen, the Consensus Dashboard showed the real-time pulse of the city-state's collective will, and right now, its pulse was racing towards self-destruction.
The Permianville Anomaly
By Jamie F. Bell
The basement of the McGill library smelled of decaying paper, silverfish poison, and the specific dust that comes only from forgotten books. It was a comfortable, academic smell. But the sound leaking from Lenny’s headphones was anything but. It was thin and crackled with sixty years of degradation, a voice dredged up from the bottom of a well of silence, and it was telling a story that had never officially happened.
Confidence Interval of a Falling Sky
By Jamie F. Bell
The air in the sub-level was cold and tasted of processed oxygen and the faint, hot-plastic smell of overworked servers. It was a sterile cold, the kind that felt less like weather and more like a fundamental absence of warmth. Venda felt it in her teeth. Here, three stories beneath the concrete and indifference of Ottawa, the Oracle dreamed of Armageddon, and her job was to interpret the nightmares.
A Flicker in the Fallout
By Jamie F. Bell
Late autumn 2025. A dilapidated city bar, dimly lit, rain streaks down the grimy windows. The air is thick with the smell of stale beer and damp wool. A middle-aged man sits at the bar, nursing a drink, engaged in a conversation with the bar owner.
Where the Powder Horns Lie
By Jamie F. Bell
The air shimmered, thick with heat and the acrid tang of burnt gunpowder. Below a sky bruised purple at the edges, a field churned with the mock-violence of men in wool and linen, their muskets spitting fire and smoke. The distant thud of a cannon vibrated through the dry earth, a rumble that settled deep in the chest.
A Drift of Unspoken Words
By Jamie F. Bell
The wind, a razor wire drawn across the prairies, scoured Portage Avenue, whipping fine snow into angry eddies around the feet of hurried pedestrians. The sky hung low, a bruised purple-grey, threatening more snow. Outside 'Curiosities & Keepsakes,' a small gift shop whose twinkling fairy lights seemed a defiant gesture against the encroaching gloom, the air tasted of exhaust fumes and ice, a familiar, biting cocktail unique to a Winnipeg winter.
Frostbitten Futures
By Tony Eetak
The Winnipeg train station, usually a hive of hurried departures and tearful reunions, was, on this biting December morning, a stagnant pool of festive frustration. Flashes of tinsel glinted mockingly under the harsh fluorescent lights, and the distant, tinny carols only amplified the rising hum of discontent. A thin layer of slush clung to the floor just inside the automatic doors, tracked in by an endless stream of parkas and frost-dusted boots, each arrival adding another layer to the general, simmering chaos.