All Stories, General Fiction

Ghost by Margaret Wells

Text 9:40 pm “It’s not the same without you [shrug emoji].”

Text 9:41 pm, Spotify link, “Tu Orgullo” [Your pride]

Text 9:42 pm, Spotify link, “Estoy Aquí” [I’m here]

Part of me wanted to type, are you fucking kidding me, after four years, still with this bullshit? What part of “we’re divorced” is not resonating with you? The other half of me knew that there was no possible way to reply. Every reply would be the wrong reply. To respond to the substance—really, my pride was the problem, you cheating bastard?—would be to invite more back and forth. (That our split was all about my pride was one of his constant refrains.) To remind him that I’d asked him to stop sending texts like these would bring the rejoinder that he knew that already, but couldn’t I see his true and beautiful love, a true and beautiful love that existed in and around the totally incidental cheating that went on sporadically ever since we got together when we were twenty-two? Couldn’t I see that he had given me every reason over decades to fight for him and for our relationship? What was wrong with me?

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

This Winter by Louie Richmond

Tuesday morning and I’m driving. It’s cold outside and the windscreen is cloudy. I can see only through the little circle I have made by wiping my gloved hand against the glass. The circle keeps closing up, the world keeps getting smaller. There is nobody on the streets and the sky is low, the only motion outside the steaming shapes of stranger’s cars, indistinct forms defined against the grey by their movement.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Boundless Growth by Simo Tchokni

‘And all of this is replicated across twenty datacenters.’

With a flourish, Davide draws a large rectangle around the messy, sprawling diagram he’s drawn on the whiteboard. He turns around. ‘Any questions?’

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