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Poetic / Lyrical

An Unscheduled Pickup at the Portage Bridge

By Eva Suluk

The weight of the canvas messenger bag was all wrong. Kyle had been a bike courier for six months, and he knew the feel of documents, hard drives, lunch orders, and illicit party favours. This was different. It was a dense, irregular weight that shifted when he moved, accompanied by a faint, metallic clinking. The instructions from his handler, a man he knew only as 'Mr. Pat', had been explicit: 'Don't look in the bag. Don't be late. Don't be noticed.' He was failing at the last one already; his sweat-soaked t-shirt was plastered to his back, and he felt like every tourist's camera was pointed directly at him.

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Post-Apocalyptic

Splintered Threads

By Jamie F. Bell

The Conduit’s central atrium, usually a quiet drone of individual Spheres, felt heavy with the new 'Proximity Protocol'. Jae leant against a cool, exposed conduit pipe, the hum of the air recyclers a familiar thrum against his cheek. Fluorescent panels above cast a sterile, even light over the carefully spaced clusters of ergonomic chairs, each occupied by a person lost in the shimmering world projected from their personal device. The engineered quiet was a paradox, a monument to a world that had forgotten how to simply *be* together.

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Western Style BL

The Long Drift North

By Jamie F. Bell

The long, tired highway stretched itself thin across the autumn plains, a frayed thread leading back to a town Casey had tried to forget. The air, already sharp with the scent of damp earth and coming frost, seemed to carry the weight of old choices, pressing in on the quiet hum of his worn-out truck. Every mile brought the past closer, a past tangled with the one person he both longed for and dreaded to see.

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Western Style BL

The Gnome Queen of Ocean Parkway

By Leaf Richards

The plan was simple: meet Ben on the platform, look him soulfully in the eyes, and deliver the speech Frederick had been rehearsing in his bedroom mirror all morning. It was a good speech. It had pathos (‘I feel like we’re drifting’), a clear objective (‘I need to know you’re as serious about this as I am’), and even a little flourish of vulnerability. He’d practiced it so much the words felt smooth and polished in his mind, a perfect tool for the delicate emotional surgery he was about to perform.

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Psychological Thriller

A Prestidigitation of Falling Leaves

By Jamie F. Bell

The autumn air carries the scent of roasted chestnuts and damp earth. A small, shifting crowd has formed a ragged semicircle around a patch of flagstones near the grinning Cheshire Cat. At its centre, a boy no older than seventeen commands the attention of a handful of tourists and bored parents with nothing more than a deck of cards and a quick, captivating smile.

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Psychological Thriller

A Treachery of Pocket Watches

By Jamie F. Bell

The late afternoon sun throws long, distorted shapes across the flagstones surrounding the bronze figures of Alice and her companions. It's the awkward hour in Central Park when the tourist tide has ebbed but the after-work joggers have yet to arrive, leaving the space in a peculiar, quiet limbo. A cool breeze rustles the already-browning leaves of a nearby oak, a premature hint of autumn in the August air.

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Western Style BL

A Geometry of Folded Napkins

By Jamie F. Bell

The air in the kitchen of 'Gino's Slice of Heaven' was a tangible thing—a mix of garlic, scorching cheese, yeast, and the metallic sweat of teenage boys working too hard for too little. The ticket printer chattered relentlessly, a mechanical insect spitting out orders. It was Friday, it was August, and the entire neighbourhood seemed to want pizza at the exact same moment.

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Comedy

The Puck's Lament

By Jamie F. Bell

The oppressive summer heat hung heavy in the stale air of the old university theatre. Dust motes danced in the single shaft of sunlight that pierced a grimy window high above, illuminating the peeling paint on the walls and the worn crimson velvet of the empty seats. On the bare stage, two young actors, Jeff and Laura, were locked in a silent struggle against the sheer, unadulterated badness of a script called 'Slap Shot Dreams'. Their director, Coach Reese, a man whose passion for 'the craft' bordered on manic, watched from the front row, his knee bouncing a steady, unsettling rhythm against the armrest.

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Science Fiction

The Hum of Burnt Wires

By Jamie F. Bell

The scavenged data-slate felt hot in Corey’s hands, a dangerous warmth that had nothing to do with its overworked processor. Below him, the Undermarket seethed with activity, a chaotic mess of noodle stalls, vapour lounges, and black-market component shops, all packed under the perpetually dripping underbelly of the city’s pristine upper levels. Every public console, every glowing advertisement, every citizen’s wrist-mounted interface was a node in the Stream, the curated flow of information that kept the city stable. And the file he possessed was a virus aimed at its heart.

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Cinematic

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.

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Hardboiled Noir

The Positive Sentiment Filter

By Jamie F. Bell

Tomase’s apartment was a white box. The company, VeriFact, encouraged a minimalist aesthetic for its remote 'Content Shepherds'; it was meant to promote mental clarity. But the blank walls only seemed to amplify the noise in his head. On his central monitor, the Queue refreshed. A ceaseless, cascading flow of human opinion, distilled into bite-sized chunks for his judgment: a conspiracy theory about weather control, a celebrity's fabricated death notice, a grainy video of a fistfight. His job was to be the human backstop for the AI filter, the final arbiter of a reality he was beginning to believe was entirely negotiable.

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Hardboiled Noir

A Curation of Ghosts

By Jamie F. Bell

The air inside St. Jude’s Hospital for Children was thick with the dust of thirty years of silence. It wasn’t ordinary dust; it was a fine, grey powder composed of desiccated plaster, decayed records, and the faint, persistent trace of caesium that set the teeth on edge. Brandon played their headtorch beam across the reception desk, the light catching on a plastic teddy bear, its eyes and nose melted into a single, grotesque tear. The official history, the one narrated by the soothing voice of the Archive AI, called this place 'stabilised and memorialised'. The reality was just rot.

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