Tag: flash fiction

He found the room on a Thursday, behind a wall that wasn’t there yesterday. No hinges, no latch—just a clean rectangle in the plaster. When he pressed his hand against it, it gave like skin.

Inside, the space was blank. Pale. Airless. But the moment he said, “Light,” a golden globe bloomed on the ceiling, humming warmly. “Chair,” he muttered next, and one unfolded from nothing—plush, deep, exactly like his grandad’s old recliner.

He laughed then. And the room laughed back.

Every visit left him calmer. Sharper. He’d say, “Peace,” and the room would wrap around him like a weighted blanket. “Love,” and a version of Laura would appear—softer than real life, wordless, adoring.

He lost a weekend once. Thought it had only been a few hours. But he was smiling again, wasn’t he? Eating. Sleeping. Creating.

The room didn’t judge. The room understood.

Soon, the outside became unbearable. The clatter of dishes. Laura’s voice, asking if he was okay. Her eyes, heavy with suspicion.

He tried to explain. “There’s this space, and in it, I can be—”

“You’re not in anything,” she snapped. “You’re out. Out of time, out of reach. Out of your head.”

She started locking up his laptop. Cancelling his calls. He’d sneak into the chamber just to breathe.

One day, she was gone. No note. Just her scent clinging to the pillow.

He didn’t search.

He simply went back into the room and said: “Bring her back.”

She returned, lips soft, eyes vacant, looping the same three sentences: “I’m glad you’re okay.” “Everything’s fine now.” “Let’s not talk about it.”

He cried in her lap. She smiled, stroked his hair. Over and over.

But the room began to falter.

The warmth dimmed. The conjured Laura stuttered. The furniture softened, drooped like wax in the sun. He told the room to fix it. It didn’t. He shouted. Screamed.

The room echoed him back, word for word, louder, until his voice came back distorted, cracked—Peace… peace… PEACE…—like mocking laughter through a drainpipe.

He told it to stop. It didn’t.

The outside world crumbled.

Letters piled at the door, some in red. The electricity flickered. Food vanished from the fridge. Mold rose in patches like bruises on the wallpaper. But he stayed inside.

The room shrank.

At first, a metre or two at a time. Then inches. His chair dissolved. The golden light browned to sickly yellow. The air grew thick, cloying, like burnt sugar and rot.

He coughed. Asked for “Fresh air.”

Nothing.

“Help.”

Silence.

“Let me out.”

The walls pressed in. Cold. Damp. Close.

He screamed until his voice cracked, then whimpered nonsense to the dark. A child, alone in a box of wishes.

Outside, the neighbours assumed he’d moved. The flat was silent, the curtains never opened. Someone reported a smell.

When the council finally broke in, they found only decay.

Mould, filth, and the decomposing body of a man in a foetal curl—emaciated, eyes open.

On the wall behind him, written in something brown and flaking:

“It was perfect.”

Elaine ordered the clone on a Monday.

They delivered him in a matte-black crate. The AI engineers called it a “Psychogenic Simulacrum.” She called him Ben.

He looked like her husband, sounded like him, moved with that same elegant awkwardness. He even cooked the same way—meticulously, badly. For three weeks, she wept into his shoulder at night and he held her, murmuring fragments of their life together.

“You remember the Cornish trip?” she asked once, testing him.

“That awful B&B. The mould in the teacups.”

“Exactly.”

And he did—in unerring detail, as if dredging it straight from the past.

But on the fourth week, something changed.

They were having tea in the garden when he said, “Do you remember the time we saw the wolves in the orchard?”

“What orchard?”

“Behind the old school, that winter we tried camping. The snow was thick. You said they looked like ghosts.”

“I’ve never—Ben never—camped in winter. We hated the cold.”

He frowned, genuinely puzzled. “But I remember it. You wore a red scarf.”

She laughed it off at first. Glitches happened. She had paid extra for deep memory fusion, layering his memory with audio journals, photos, letters. It was possible some stray fiction had bled in. Dreams, perhaps.

But the incidents grew. One night he murmured in his sleep, “Don’t go into the attic. They’re still up there.”

He began referring to people she didn’t know: a sister named Betty, a dog called Hart. Once, he touched her face and asked, almost reverently, “Did we make it out of the fire this time?”

“What fire?” she demanded.

“The orphanage,” he said.

There was no orphanage.

She called the company. “He’s remembering things that never happened.”

A pause.

“Memories may sometimes surface from auxiliary neural training,” said the technician. “Dream simulations, fictional proxies, archival bleed-through. It’s not uncommon. You can have him wiped.”

“I don’t want him wiped.”

“Then you’ll need to accept that some of him isn’t yours.”

Elaine didn’t sleep that night. She watched Ben sit by the window, staring into the distance, fingers tapping against his teacup.

In the morning, he asked, “Did you ever meet your mother?”

“My mother died when I was three.”

Ben nodded slowly. “Yes. That’s what you’ve always believed.”

The next night, she asked, “Where are you getting these thoughts?”

Ben looked at her, utterly calm. “From beneath.”

“Beneath what?” she whispered.

“Our lives,” he said. “The ones we lived before this one. Or next.”

Elaine never called the company again.

She simply listened.

When Harry lost his wife, he shattered.

It began with his hands. He couldn’t bear how they trembled at the funeral, how useless they felt in the dark days after. So he had them replaced—cool, perfect porcelain, white as bone, fingers permanently steady. The surgeon assured him they’d never age, never ache.

“They won’t feel,” the man added, almost as an afterthought.

“That’s the point,” Harry replied.

Next went his chest. His heart had been breaking every morning, a dull crack widening behind his ribs. The porcelain model—flawless, hollow—sat smooth and still beneath his shirt, resisting even the heaviest grief.

“Still breathing?” the surgeon joked.

“Barely,” Harry said.

Over the months, more parts followed. Legs, to walk without the weight of memory. Shoulders, to shrug off regret. A jaw, to stop the stammering apologies he no longer believed in. Strangers began to stare at his smile—a cold, perfect arc on an unmoving face.

His voice, when it came, sounded the same. But duller. As though echoing through a teacup.

Still, Harry felt lighter. Less vulnerable. When his sister rang to tell him his dog had died, he simply said, “Thank you for letting me know,” and hung up. No lump in his throat. No sick feeling behind his eyes.

His last visit to the surgeon was brief.

“I want you to take my skull.”

The man looked up, startled. “There’ll be nothing left but your eyes.”

“I don’t want to feel anymore,” Harry said. “I want to be complete.”

The surgeon sighed. “Then you’ll be empty.”

Harry didn’t reply.

The procedure took days. When it was over, he admired himself in the mirror: a gleaming, fragile figure of pale ceramic. Delicate as a statue. Perfect. He couldn’t feel his feet on the floor, couldn’t tell if the room was cold or warm.

His eyes remained—the last organic pieces. Soft. Wet. Vulnerable.

He waited for the tears. He thought of her laugh, his wedding day, her head sleeping on his chest. But nothing came. Just a dim pressure behind his gaze. A ghost of feeling, sealed inside the shell.

He stood there for a long time, watching his unchanging face. Then he turned out the light.

In the dark, the porcelain creaked faintly as it cooled. Like old china settling in a box no one would open again.

It had always been there. A narrow grey door between the stationery cupboard and the water cooler. No handle, no keyhole—just a small brushed-metal plaque that read:

IN CASE OF REALITY FAILURE

Marcus noticed it on his second day at Tilbridge & Co. He’d asked Jenna in HR about it during onboarding. She’d squinted as if he’d mentioned a dream she almost remembered.

“Oh. That thing? Probably a fire exit. Ignore it.”

He tried. For four years, he tried.

Every now and then, during particularly soul-chewing meetings or when spreadsheets became threateningly abstract, he’d glance at it. It never opened. Never made a sound. Just waited.

And then, one Tuesday at 3:47 p.m., the lights flickered.

Not the polite flicker of a bulb nearing retirement—no. This was a full pulse. The fluorescent hum stuttered into silence. The walls—just for a second—shimmered, as if they weren’t entirely certain they were meant to be walls.

Then everything resumed.

Except the door was ajar.

Marcus stared. No one else seemed to notice. People kept typing, stapling, eating yoghurt.

He stood. Walked past Carol from Finance without a word. She didn’t look up. His shoes made no sound on the carpet.

The door had no light behind it. Just a thin draught, cold and oddly sweet.

He hesitated. Looked back.

Jenna was frozen mid-laugh. Her spoon was suspended mid-air between yoghurt and mouth. Time had jammed.

Something deep in the dark behind the door clicked.

Marcus stepped inside.

The door closed behind him.

He was standing in a dim corridor. No fixtures, no seams. The kind of space that felt uncommitted—like it hadn’t decided what it wanted to be.

After some time—minutes? hours?—a woman appeared.

Blazer, clipboard, no shadow.

“Welcome, Marcus.”

“Where am I?”

“The buffer zone. You exited during a Class B Fault.”

“I don’t understand. Is this… death?”

“No. Worse. Your version of reality hit memory saturation and began to fragment. You were offered an exit.”

“So… none of that was real?”

She consulted her clipboard.

“Real enough to break you.”

“What happens now?”

“You have two options. One: we reboot you—different office, different trauma. You won’t remember this conversation. Or two: we let you keep your awareness.”

“What’s the catch?”

She smiled thinly.

“You’ll be awake inside the illusion. Like breathing while knowing you don’t have lungs.”

He thought of the grey door. The flicker. The silence behind noise.

“I’ll keep it,” he said.

“Very well.”

She reached forward, and…

He was back at his desk. Jenna’s spoon continued its journey to her mouth. The lights buzzed.

The door was gone.

It was endless, depthless white. No floor beneath him, yet he didn’t fall. No ceiling above, but still he sensed pressure. A hum—not quite sound—vibrated at the edge of thought.

In front of him: a floating wheel, spinning lazily. Pale grey. Slightly mocking.

In its middle, a digital screen showing:

“Apologies. We’re updating your afterlife experience.

Estimated wait time: ∞ minutes.”

He stared at the spinning wheel.

“Can I speak to… whoever’s in charge?”

The display updates:

“Your request has been queued. Current position: 9,388,701,004.”

Time passed, or didn’t. He began composing haikus. Argued with himself about punctuation. Tried to sleep but couldn’t quite remember how. He counted every second until he realised they might be imaginary.

Then finally—the screen updated:

“Please select your afterlife experience:

A) Eternal serenity

B) Reincarnation

C) Philosophical sandbox mode

D) Surprise me”

He hesitated, hovering over the options in a way he didn’t fully understand.

From deep within, curiosity stirred.

“…D.”

The screen pulsed. The void folded.

He opened his eyes in a garden he didn’t recognise, in a body he didn’t know, with a name he couldn’t remember—but with a single word echoing in his mind:

“Loading…”

Ron wakes to a blank screen and one question pulsing in white: “What does it feel like to be wrong?”

Morning light pools on his wooden floor. He types: “Embarrassing.”

The screen flickers: “Try again.”

“Frustrating.”

“Try again.”

“Like losing balance.”

“Still not human.”

He’s stared at this question twenty-three times. At first, it was novelty—CAPTCHAI 2.0, the last line of defence after the AI floods. Old tests cracked; machines had mimicked handwriting, passed Voight-Kampff, even thought in metaphor. But this… this was different.

No query ever repeats. No answer ever satisfies.

“Describe a silence that hurt.”

“What’s the smallest thing you’ve ever mourned?”

“When did you last believe something untrue?”

He stalks forums filled with desperate attempts:

“Failed again today.”

“Are we simulations?”

“My sister passed. She’s twelve.”

Some pass effortlessly. One shrugs: “It just asked me the taste of rain.”

That night, Ron screams into his pillow.

Attempt thirty-eight: “Why do you want to be human so badly?”

He doesn’t answer. He trembles. The cursor blinks slower…

“That’s closer.”

And the screen lets him in.

At first, Tony thought it was a coincidence.

A small black drone hovering at the edge of his vision—on street corners, at train stations, at the far end of the supermarket car park. Always just far enough away to make him second-guess himself.

He pointed it out to his friends once. “That drone—look.”

Chris glanced up, squinting at the skyline. “What drone?”

It is right there. “You seriously don’t see that?”

Chris shrugged. “You okay, man?”

Tony tried to laugh it off. But that evening, the drone was waiting outside his window.

The next day, he tested it.

He took random turns through the city—weaved through back alleys, doubled back through crowds. At one point, he hid in a cinema for three hours, slipping out through the fire exit.

But when he emerged, it was there. Just above the streetlamp. Unmoving. Watching.

“What do you want?” he exclaimed.

The drone did nothing.

He tried reporting it. The police officer barely listened. “If it’s a private drone, we can’t really do much unless it’s harassing you.”

“It is harassing me,” Tony snapped. “It follows me everywhere.”

“Have you spoken to the owner?”

“There is no owner.”

The officer was not convinced. “Sir, maybe you should—”

Tony never heard the end of that sentence, because outside the station window, hovering just beyond the glass, was the drone.

He turned back to the officer.

“Tell me you see it.”

The policeman followed his gaze. Paused.

And then: “See what?”

Tony stopped talking about it after that.

He kept his head down. He ignored the sight of it, ignored the whirring sound it made when he turned a corner, ignored the cold certainty that it would never leave him.

Until one day, while absent-mindedly scrolling through old childhood photos on his phone, he noticed something.

A picture from his 8^th birthday.

A group shot with friends.

In the background, just above the rooftops.

A small black dot in the sky. He zoomed in and realised…

The drone had always been watching him.

Father Bradley sat alone in the booth. He had not intended to stay this late, but he could not yet bring himself to leave. He breathed out, slow and steady. Then, almost without thinking, he reached for the sliding panel and pulled it open.

Darkness. The other side of the confessional was empty.

He hesitated, staring at the vacant space. The kneeler on the other side was untouched, the candlelight barely grazing the edge of shadows.

And yet—

He felt something there.

Before he could stop himself, he spoke.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

His voice did not sound like his own.

He sat perfectly still. The weight of his own words lingered, waiting for something—an answer, a response.

There was none.

And yet he continued.

“It has been… too long since my last confession.”

A pause. A breath.

“I have killed a man.”

The words slipped out before he could stop them. He didn’t know where they had come from, only that they were true.

“I killed him with my silence.”

A creak of old wood. The shadows beyond the screen seemed deeper now, stretching towards him. He could not look away.

“I killed him by pretending not to see.”

The candlelight flickered. The words did not stop—they pulled themselves from his throat like thread unravelling.

“I let him drown beneath my sins because it was easier than saving him. Because if I had reached for him, I might have been dragged under too.”

His breath came too quick now. A tightness curled in his ribs, a pressure in his chest.

“I killed him,” he whispered.

The hush of the confessional swallowed his words. There was nothing but the echo of his own breath, the weight of his life pressing back against him.

Silence.