Browse interactive stories
- adventure◐ Teen
Ninety Fathoms to Anywhere
The sea rose in the night and never stopped. By morning the mountains were islands. Our city was gone. Then Sefu texted about Dad's will. We hadn't talked in three years, but the boathouse was still there. So we both showed up at dawn.
6 writers - horror◐ Mature
The Understudy Always Knows the Lines
I got the call at 3am. The lead actress at Verrick Theatre walked out mid-run, nobody knows why. They wanted me. The theatre's an hour past the last gas station, black stone building, no sign out front. First day I get to the dressing room and I see it—something taped to the mirror at eye level. My hand shakes reaching for it.
6 writers - sci-fi◐ Teen
Quorum of Salt
I've been scraping salt off the lettuce beds on Shift 749. Same task for nineteen years. My hands are white with it. Today I'm half asleep when the wall-screen flickers behind me. MOTION 4,114: TERMINATE THE SLEEPER IN BAY 9. A vote counter appears. 200. 201. 202. It climbs fast. I freeze. The ship doesn't have a Bay 9.
6 writers - mystery◐ Mature
Nobody Reported the Tide
Marsh was reading drowning files at 3am when the pattern hit him. Six bodies from Saltcreek. Six insurance claims filed three days before each one drowned—all for water damage to the same beach house. A house none of them owned. He printed them all, spread them on his desk, and stared until it clicked: nobody reported the tide.
6 writers - mysteryEveryone
The Lighthouse Keeper
I'm on the dock at 11pm and the old lighthouse is flashing. Not blinking like it's broken—steady, intentional, twice every minute. Perfect rhythm. The town said that door's been locked since the '80s. No one climbed those stairs. But that light keeps going. And I'm standing here wondering if I'm about to learn something I shouldn't.
6 writers - horror◐ Teen
Someone Joined the Group Chat
Our family group chat is called Fam ❤️. Five people. Me, Mom, Dad, my sister Zoe, my little brother Sam. Tonight my phone buzzed and the header said 6 members. The new one had no name. No profile photo. Just a gray circle. Mom: "who is this??" Three dots. Typing. Then it sent one photo. Our living room. The couch. Dad's mug on the coffee table, still steaming. Taken from inside the house.
5 writers - sci-fiEveryone
The Lending Library of Tomorrows
Behind the laundromat, where there had always been a plain brick wall, Milo found a little door no taller than he was. He ducked inside. A small clockwork librarian slid a card across the counter. Tiny gears ticked inside her chest. "We lend tomorrows here," she said. "Borrow one good day from your own future and spend it today. Just return it by the deadline on the card."
5 writers - sci-fi◐ Mature
Subtraction
The Bureau gave Mira one job: erase General Vael Tisseren from the world's memory. Forty years of his crimes sat in her terminal, ready to delete. But the machine didn't really delete. It digested. Every file she picked turned into a soft warmth that filled the room, like the data breathed out one last time before it died. Mira cracked her knuckles and opened the first file.
5 writers - sci-fi◐ Mature
The Other Hand on the Wheel
The dispatch slip is short: hand the package to yourself, ten minutes ago, do not open it. Under Mara's dash, the retrochron unit hums like a trapped wasp. The meter counts backward. Rain runs UP the windshield into the sky. On the seat beside her sits a brown paper package, taped shut, no label. The clock hits her drop time. Headlights swing into the lot behind her.
5 writers - sci-fi◐ Teen
Forty-One Thursdays
The alarm reads 6:14 a.m., Thursday. Maren already knows the rain starts at 6:51. She has watched it begin forty times now. Ward C smells like cleaner and cold coffee when she clocks in. Same chart. Same silent man in Bed 9 who hasn't woken in two years. She is wiping his arm when his fingers twitch and grab her wrist, hard. He has never moved before. "Day forty-one," he whispers. "Don't let it reset."
5 writers - horror◐ Mature
The House Remembers Its Tenants
The agent didn't tell them the price until the drive home, and she said it like an apology. Sixty-one thousand. Eleven rooms, a wraparound porch. Mara signed before Daniel finished reading. That first night they slept on a mattress in the parlor. Above them, a floorboard creaked. Then again, slow and even, like someone pacing the room overhead. They were alone in the house.
5 writers - sci-fi◐ Teen
The Tuesday That Wouldn't Stay Buried
Mara fixed watches in a little shop that smelled of brass and old oil. On Wednesday she buried her brother Tomas, who had stepped under a delivery truck on Tuesday. That night she sat alone and wound the dead clock he'd left her. The mainspring caught hard, like it snagged on something. Then every hand in the shop began spinning backward.
5 writers - adventure◐ Teen
The Ninety-Mile Silence
The Cessna came down hard in a patch of black spruce. For a long minute Mara heard nothing but her own heartbeat. Then her cousin Dell coughed in the seat beside her, alive, his glasses cracked but still on. The radio was dead except for one thing: a clean tone, repeating, over and over, on an old frequency. A tower beacon. Somewhere out there, someone had left a light on.
5 writers - adventure◐ Teen
The Vault Under Glasswater Falls
Glasswater Falls thundered behind us as we squeezed into the cave mouth. Three headlamps swung across wet limestone. Old Hennig's map promised a miner's vault down here, and there it was: a steel door, factory-gray, slick with damp. But the scratches around the lock looked fresh. Somebody had been here recently. "Guys," Priya whispered, "that's not rust."
5 writers - fantasy◐ Mature
Marrow and Marigold
The plague killed faster than Veska Tallow could bury anyone. The marigold beds outside her workshop were full, so the new dead waited in the yard. By candlelight she pressed her thumb to a femur and the bone told her its truth, the way bones always did: fever first, then drowning in your own lungs. She had read ten thousand deaths this way. But the rib in her other hand stayed silent. No fever. No drowning. Nothing at all.
5 writers - fantasy◐ Teen
The Cartomancer's Last Hand
Under the old stone bridge, Mireille reads deaths for spare coppers, and her cards never lie. Tonight the river fog smells like iron. When she deals her own hand, the Drowned Queen stares up at her, the card that means your hour is near. Then the painted woman lifts her chin and steps right off the card. Wet hair, cold eyes, a real woman now. 'You dealt me,' she says. 'So sit. We play until dawn. Win, and you live.'
5 writers - fantasy◐ Mature
The Debt of Hollow Bells
Maren had rung the hollow bells over six hundred graves. Each toll dragged a dead soul up just long enough for one last word. She'd done it so long it bored her. But tonight the bell rang before she touched the rope. One cold iron note rolled across the frozen yard. She opened her casebook to write it down, and the page was already full, in handwriting that was not hers.
5 writers - sci-fi◐ Mature
Ash Vector
Dr. Mara Okafor hadn't slept in forty hours. On the quarantine moon Cessil-9, eleven mine workers had each spoken one strange word into the comms log, then gone quiet. When they woke, they answered to other names and wept for cities nobody had ever heard of. Their blood was clean. Whatever this was, it wasn't in the blood. It was in the voice. The comms log blinked on her screen, waiting to be played.
5 writers - sci-fi◐ Teen
The Quiet Hour Protocol
Everyone knew the Quiet Hour. At 3:00 a.m. the whole city paused for sixty seconds, then woke up never noticing. Nobody dreamed through it. But tonight Mara was awake, stuck on a calculus problem with cold coffee, when every light, every screen, every humming fridge died at once. The clock read 3:00:00. The silence was total. And Mara realized she was the only thing still moving.
5 writers - horror◐ Mature
The Skin of the Lake
The reservoir dropped forty feet that summer, and the old town of Hesper rose up out of the water at last. My crew got hired to map and catalogue the place before the floods came back in fall. On my first dive, my lamp swept across a kitchen. There it was: a table still set for four, the plates rinsed perfectly clean by the lake.
5 writers - horror◐ Mature
What the Hospice Cat Knows
The night shift is quiet except for the machines breathing down the hall. The gray cat, Marrow, walks ahead of me like he owns the place. By March I figured out the rule nobody says out loud: wherever Marrow curls up to sleep, that bed is empty by dawn. Tonight he stops outside Room 14. Then he turns and looks straight at me with flat yellow eyes.
5 writers - horror◐ Teen
The Mirror Maze Keeps One
The boardwalk had been condemned since before any of us were born, but the dare never died: six kids, one flashlight, the Hall of Mirrors at the dead end of the pier. Salt wind rattled the boarded ticket booth as we squeezed inside. The air went still and warm, like breath. Then our six reflections stepped in beside us, perfectly in time. "Okay," Maya whispered. "Now what?"
5 writers - horror◐ Teen
Static on the Baby Monitor
The Brubaker house always smells like other people's dinners. Mara has babysat three-year-old Theo eleven times now. Same rules every time: monitor on, door cracked, bed by eight. It's 9:40 and the living room is dark except for the little green screen. Theo is a small white smudge, asleep on his side. Then the screen hisses with static, and when it clears, the smudge is sitting straight up, facing the camera.
5 writers - horror◐ Teen
The Tenants Below the Frost Line
The realtor called the staircase a "feature." It dropped past our new cellar, past a wine room nobody asked for, all the way down to a cold concrete floor. In Hollow Marsh, every house had one, each deeper than the last, like the town was competing. Our first night, Mrs. Edevane from next door knocked. "Whatever you do," she said, "don't go past the frost line."
5 writers - horrorEveryone
Don't Wake the Library
Milo woke to a soft click. The last light had switched off. He'd dozed off in the beanbag, and his comic had slid to the floor. The library was closed, dark, and locked tight. It smelled of dust and old glue. Then he heard it: every shelf was breathing. Books slid their spines a half-inch out, then back, in and out. A voice whispered, "Stay quiet. Don't wake them all the way."
5 writers - horrorEveryone
The Scarecrow Counts to Twelve
Every harvest, the scarecrow in the high field turns on its pole. It points one straw arm at a house, and before the snow that family packs up and leaves. They never write back. This year Wren counted the empty homes: eleven gone. Last week the scarecrow turned. Its arm now points straight at Wren's own front door. That makes them the twelfth. This morning the crows stopped singing all at once, and the field went dead quiet. Wren stands at the fence, heart pounding, and decides not to wait for the snow.
5 writers - horrorEveryone
The Sleepover That Wouldn't End
The clock blinked 7:02 a.m. again. Same gray light on the curtains, same five kids in the same sleeping bags, same syrup on the same five plates. The pancakes tasted like wet cardboard, just like before. Pip counted on her fingers. "Guys," she whispered, "this is the fourth morning. The fourth time. We keep starting over." Mara dropped her fork. "Okay. So how do we make it stop?"
5 writers - mystery◐ Teen
Signal Lake Has No Echo
Camp Verity had been shut for nineteen years. The cabins smelled like wet paper and the dock sagged under your feet. Mara set the recorder on a tree stump while Devon clipped on the mics and Priya filmed the dead waterfront of Signal Lake. "Episode one," Mara said. "Why does a whole town pretend this place never existed?" Then they noticed something weird. When Priya yelled across the water, the lake gave back no echo at all.
5 writers - horror◐ Teen
The House That Listens
We got the house for almost nothing. The agent said the price was low for a reason, then waited until we'd signed to explain. Every family who lived here stopped talking eventually. "Not moved away," she said. "Stopped speaking. All of them." That first night, my sister Mara and I sat in the empty living room. Whenever we spoke, the house went very still. Like it was leaning in to hear.
5 writers - sci-fi◐ Teen
Lightspeed Severance
My pod hissed open ninety years too soon. A calm voice from the ship said, "Crewmember Vey, the others have voted. Unanimous. You will be left on the planet below." I sat up, freezing and dizzy. There was no planet on any chart out here. Through the window I saw it anyway: green, cloudy, real. "Why?" I croaked. The ship said, "They asked me not to tell you."
5 writers - fantasyEveryone
The Cartographer of Forgotten Coasts
The morning the sea turned to glass, Edda woke to total silence. No waves, no birds. From her window the whole harbor looked frozen smooth and shining. She sat at her desk and, almost without thinking, dipped her pen and inked a brand-new coastline onto a blank chart: cliffs, a bay, a row of sharp rocks. None of it was real. By the time the ink dried, a fisherman was pounding on her door, shouting that ships were sailing toward land that had never been there before.
5 writers - mysteryEveryone
The Last Train to Nowhere
A man woke up on a cold bench in an empty train station. He had no idea who he was. His pockets were empty except for one thing: a train ticket. It read "Departure: Now. Destination: Veliska." He had never heard of Veliska. The big board above him was blank. No people, no trains, no sound. Just him and a ticket to a place he didn't know.
5 writers