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Surreal / Absurdist

The Glacial Hand of Directive 7

By Jamie F. Bell

The wind, a razor-thin blade off Lake Huron, cut through Julie's scavenged parka. Each gust kicked up miniature blizzards from the packed snow, stinging her exposed cheeks until they felt like raw meat. The city's silhouette, usually a comforting cluster of lights even in its current state, was a suffocating mass tonight, punctuated only by the piercing white beams of the Sector Towers and the occasional sweep of a surveillance drone's searchlight. Streetlights, rationed and flickering, barely pushed back the encroaching indigo gloom that swallowed the cobbled lanes of what used to be the Distillery District. Now, it was just District Seven, a designated zone for 'permitted enterprise' – mostly government-sanctioned fabrication workshops and and a few heavily monitored communal kitchens. The air tasted of burnt oil and frozen exhaust, a constant reminder of the regime’s efficiency and the cold, unyielding grip it held on every breath.

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Grimdark Fantasy

A Calculus of Acceptable Losses

By Jamie F. Bell

The office smelled of damp velvet and cold coffee. A single fluorescent tube on the ceiling flickered with an incessant, irritating buzz, casting long, wavering shadows over piles of scripts and precarious towers of account books. It was a room that had seen too many late nights and absorbed too much anxiety, and tonight was no different.

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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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Psychological Thriller

Kintsugi for a Fractured Playlist

By Jamie F. Bell

The old park bench is long enough that two people can sit on it and pretend they are alone. A careful, deliberate distance separates Dan and Ryan, a silence measured not in inches, but in unspoken apologies and the painful memory of last Saturday night. A single white wire snakes between them, connecting them to the same song but not, it seems, to each other.

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Western Style BL

A Trellis for the Unruly Vine

By Jamie F. Bell

The community centre's workshop smelled of sawdust, old paint, and the faint, lingering odour of decades of bingo nights. It was a cavern of organized chaos, filled with half-finished projects for the upcoming BayFest. In the centre of it all, looking like a skeletal whale beached on a sea of drop cloths, was the frame of the Historical Society's float.

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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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Dystopian

Every Door Looks the Same After Midnight

By Jamie F. Bell

The apartment was too quiet. Not peaceful quiet, but the dead, airless quiet that follows a slammed door. I woke up with a jolt, the sheet tangled around my legs, the space next to me in the bed cold. It was 3:17 AM. The blue light of a passing sanitation truck swept across the ceiling, and in that brief, sterile illumination, I knew he was gone.

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Swashbuckling Romance

Pressure Behind the Eyes

By Jamie F. Bell

Billy kept his eyes on the window, but he wasn't looking at the monotonous black of the Trans-Canada Highway. He was watching the reflection of the man two rows behind him. The man hadn't moved in an hour, not really, just a slight shift of his bulk, a rustle of his cheap nylon jacket. But his stillness was wrong. It was a predator's stillness. Billy's own reflection stared back, wide-eyed and gaunt, a stranger's face he was starting to get used to.

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Stream of Consciousness

Gravity and the Rogers Pass

By Jamie F. Bell

The world had shrunk to the narrow tunnel carved out by the headlights. Beyond it, there was only an impenetrable, absolute blackness where mountains were supposed to be. The road snaked onwards, a ribbon of pale grey asphalt that appeared seconds before they were on it. The engine whined, a high, strained sound as it fought against the steep grade, and the only other sound was the howl of wind rushing past the wing mirrors.

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Science Fiction

All Our Analogue Ghosts

By Jamie F. Bell

The cabin still held the faint, lingering scent of his father: pipe tobacco, damp earth, and something metallic like old circuitry. Philip sat before the settlement’s archive terminal, its thick glass screen humming with a soft green light. Outside, the perpetual drizzle of the Pacific Northwest coast pattered against the cedar shingles of the server house, a sound that was usually comforting. Tonight, it felt like a thousand tapping fingers, demanding an answer he didn’t have.

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Western Style BL

Ash and Embers

By Jamie Bell

The night had swallowed the last blush of sunset hours ago, leaving the forest a study in deep charcoal and sharper shadows. A small campfire, built precariously close to the edge of an old logging road, fought against the chill, its orange glow painting the faces of two figures in fleeting, dancing colours. The air, crisp and tasting of woodsmoke and damp earth, pressed in, a silent witness to the quiet unraveling and tentative re-knitting of teenage hearts.

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Cinematic

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.

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