Aug 1, 2025
Loyalty
Obat wished it hadn’t been his brother who’d betrayed everyone. He wished his brother hadn’t been so fucking wilfully blind… but that didn’t matter. His brother had chosen to believe the slick and selfish lies of someone who wanted power and didn’t care who was hurt to get it.
Chifadi was the only one who’d stayed with him, and Obat would never be able to repay his loyalty. Chifadi’s entire family was destroyed, he was alone, but when Obat left to hunt his brother down, Chifadi was waiting at the town gates.
Obat would never let Chifadi be alone again.
***
Aug 2, 2025
Confession
William stood at the door as Rafael tucked a blanket around Toby. When Rafael looked up, William knew his expression had given him away from the way Rafael’s face changed.
Out in the living room, Rafael started to speak, but William interjected, “I’ll make us tea.” and fled to the kitchen. He pressed his fingers into his eyes while the water heated.
The sound of Rafael’s feet on the tile floor made William snap around.
“It’s not important.” He turned away.
Rafael’s voice was so soft. “I think it is.” He stepped closer. “It might be the most important thing.”
***
Aug 3, 2025
Music
Sweat dribbled into her eyes; her hands were too mucky to wipe it away, so she blinked hard, winced at the salt sting, and kept going. This plant bed wouldn’t weed itself, and if she wanted to have dry beans for the winter, she had to clear it now.
The moans of the dead outside her electric fence kept her company as she worked. Music made them more active, so she’d stopped playing it.
When she heard the Hallelujah Chorus from beyond the fence, she thought her heart would stop. She looked and saw a face left behind years before.
***
Aug 4, 2025
Distracted
It’s so easy to forget what he’s supposed to be doing. He needs to look up when the thrift store opens, and an hour later, he surfaces from a cute set of linked threads telling the story of adopting a pair of kittens. And he still doesn’t know the store hours.
He tries to keep focused; he really does. But it keeps happening. Half an hour reading book reviews, two hours on recipe variations, five hours lost to ‘productivity hacks’, an irony which does make him stay offline for nearly a week.
It never lasts, though. He can’t stop himself.
***
Aug 5, 2025
Alone
Dien chafed his fingers together, then cupped them over the last of the embers in the brazier. He was the only one awake this early; he cherished the time to himself. The others were kind enough to ignore the fact that he didn’t belong in this hell-pit of a mine. It had taken a month before he could pronounce enough of the strange foreign language to tell them more than just his name.
He still couldn’t tell them that he’d chosen this, that his exile here was one he’d undertaken willingly. He didn’t think he’d ever tell anyone that secret.
***
Aug 6, 2025
Who Are You?
The box was shoved in the back corner of my grandparents’ attic, tucked under a pile of mildewed clothes. I’d nearly missed it when I was clearing the house.
A month after I’d finally finished slogging through the misery of probate, I finally opened it to find old videotapes. Lots of them, labeled with dates and names. I found myself tearing up at recordings of events I barely remembered.
Then something caught my attention. There I was, seven years old, but who was the identical girl holding my hand? The label said “Janet and Junie, twins”.
I’m an only child.
***
Aug 7, 2025
Red as Roses
Her blood was the wrong color, that was the first thing he noticed. Well, the second thing; he did notice that she started bleeding as soon as he pulled her through the safety barrier. He’d expected things to calm down once they were both inside the green zone, but she’d struggled as soon as she’d seen where he was going. He hadn’t understood her words, but his translator was glitchy on this planet.
He pressed his hand against the wound and yelled for help. He’d figure out why her blood was red later, when she wasn’t dying in his arms.
***
Aug 8, 2025
Bitter
He was giving up on wishing or hoping. Wishing solved nothing, there was no benefit in it. The only thing he should do was plan, act on the plan, and ignore everything that wasn’t directly connected to his future.
He couldn’t control his dreams, though. They kept torturing showing him the things he’d wanted before everything crashed to the ground. All those hopes, all the possibilities, all the love he hadn’t really had, no matter what he’d thought.
He’d been expecting to share this, and now he was just alone.
Seeing his old lover with a new baby didn’t help.
***
Aug 9, 2025
Exhausted
Ally leaped forward, aiming her weapon at the monster’s face. It twitched away so she caught it across the cheekbone instead of the eye, but the blow was enough to make the monster (a troll? an ogre?) fall back, letting her companions stab it in the squishy bits until it was dead.
She half-fell from the tree she’d landed in, crashing to the forest floor. As she landed, a glowing ‘scroll’ hung in front of her face.
“Great,” she muttered. “I’ll deal with you later.”
She hated this new world. Why couldn’t she have transmigrated to someplace with a café?
***
Aug 10, 2025
Hope
The morning rush was tailing to an end when the tall man walked through the door. Anse tensed – he usually came later, after Anse had tidied up the mess.
Today, Mr Tall and Elegant was looking at his phone while he waited, so Anse shoved his hair back and hoped he wasn’t as covered in old coffee and bits of foam as he felt.
“Hi, you’re here early,” Anse chirped.
The man looked at him, then nodded. “I have a meeting, and can’t come at the usual time.”
Fred said Anse was imagining the guy’s interest, but Anse had hope.
***
Aug 11, 2025
City in a Bottle
It was beautiful. The crystal bottle glinted in the sun, and the tiny city inside glowed with its own lights. If Xeilt squinted, xe could see miniscule beings through the tiny windows.
Xe wondered what their lives were like; if they had families, if they knew their whole world was preserved in this vessel. Xe looked out xer window up at the shimmery sky above the city.
<+>
Dr Centas checked the most recent addition to the Bottled Cities art collection. Sometimes, he thought he could see a little face pressed up against one of the windows, but that was ridiculous.
***
Aug 12, 2025
Groceries
She wrapped her fingers tightly around the bar on the rattling metal cart everyone in this world used to gather their supplies. Her guide had explained the process and taken her, with her arriving class group, on several field trips to different ‘stores’. He’d helped them make lists based on foods they wanted to produce. She’d chosen a dish with wheat-paste strands, cow’s milk, eggs, and smoked pork.
She checked her list, took a deep breath (she missed her spiracles – only one air intake was so strange), and plunged toward the doors, relieved again when they did, in fact, self-open.
***
Aug 13, 2025
The Sea
Alix shoved his toes deep into the sand. This beach wasn’t movie-style pristine. It was better, real. He couldn’t see where the water stopped and the sky started. He’d chosen this city because it was on the ocean, over his uncle’s angry remonstrations.
Alix didn’t know why Oscar was so dead set on him never going near a body of water larger or more natural than an Olympic size pool, but he was an adult, with a degree and everything, and he wanted to see something that wasn’t Nebraska’s endless dreary flatness.
It was everything he’d hoped for, and more.
***
Aug 14, 2025
Fishing
“It’s a relaxing hobby!” “It gives you time to yourself.”
Everyone had said she should learn to fish, so she’d read the blogs and studied the product review videos and finally gotten the supplies. No one had told her how expensive it would be to get everything, but she figured since the rest of her life was a shambles, she might as well try to focus on this new thing.
It was… well. It certainly gave her time to herself. She hadn’t decided about being relaxing yet.
Maybe when she figured out how she’d been transported to a different world.
***
Aug 15, 2025
Stretch
He stretched out, carefully presenting his cutest side to the mirror and not showing that he was watching the girl at the leg press watch him. He knew he needed to play hard to get for at least a couple more weeks.
It was frustrating to work this slowly. His last three ops had been faster paced, with more action, but this was for a good cause. It wasn’t like he didn’t have the time in his schedule. The exercises were assigned by his PT; it was just luck that he could combine recovery into setting up the next sting.
***
Aug 16, 2025
Longing
He missed home, is the thing. He’d moved for many reasons, and his new place was good – better (safer) than where he’d been. But sometimes, he’d see a photo of his old beach view, or the neighborhood he grew up in and he’d have to ride out a wave of longing that made the back of his throat sting.
But here, he could have his cat, and he didn’t have to explain why he thought he should be allowed to exist. So he breathed through the pain, and vowed to find a new beach. Maybe he could bring the cat.
***
Aug 17, 2025
Principessa
It wasn’t until she was nearly home on the subway that the full impact hit her.
She’d been hired as the lead dancer in a major production. She’d be dancing in front of huge crowds, maybe even royalty or other gentry. Her, the girl born on the wrong side of the gutter, barely even able to reach up to being street trash. And now she was Principessa of the whole show.
She had to sit down on one of the park benches near her flat to catch her breath.
She was so glad she’d never given up on her dreams.
***
Aug 18, 2025
Dinner
Jorge shoved through the door, three bags on his right shoulder, two in his left hand, and a container of his abuela’s tamales precariously balanced in his left elbow. He staggered to the kitchen counter, sliding the tamales down, then heaved a sigh as he dropped the bags to the floor.
“Is that you?” Matt called from upstairs.
What would he do if I said no? “No, it’s the tamale fairy!”
“Tamales!” Matt thundered down the stairs, followed by the ugly dog he’d adopted as soon as he felt comfortable.
Jorge was so glad he’d managed to rescue this man.
***
August 19, 2025
Names
Unexpectedly, it was changing the baby’s name which gave her trouble. Having to hide from everyone, giving up her entire life, that was hard – but taking her grandmother’s name away from the baby was wrenching.
She knew it had to be done. She wasn’t stupid. Changing a name, losing that connection, was worth saving their lives. But her grandmother had been the only person in her original family who’d cared about her at all, and it broke her heart to leave that behind.
Maybe her own grand-daughter could carry it. Maura wasn’t too uncommon.
Nothing like her own name: Starshine.
***
August 20, 2025
Retaliation
Becca had spent the whole day stuck at her desk, churning through the work. It was the busy season this month, but she was sure she could keep up.
“Come on, Rebecca, it’s lunch time.” Howard leaned over her, his chest shoved hard into her shoulder, one hand sliding along the arm of the chair too close to her leg. She grunted and shoved her chair back hard, suppressing her smile at his yelp when the wheels hit his toes hard.
“Sorry,” she said, not looking away from the spreadsheets on her screen. “Some of us actually do our jobs.”
***
August 21, 2025
Payment
“Oh come on,” he muttered, prying at the lock with his dagger. “It’s never this hard in the movies.”
Of course, movies were fake, and this – no matter how unexpected – appeared to be all too real. He’d refused to believe anything about this new world for the first month, but by then he was starving and filthy, so he’d given up. It didn’t matter if he was having a death hallucination or if he’d been magically moved to a different world. Either way, he needed dinner.
Dinner he’d been hoping to pay for with the coins supposedly filling this chest.
***
August 22, 2025
Otherwise Fictional
She stretched, pressing her palms against the floor, feeling the pull in her legs and butt. Slowly, thoughtfully, she dropped one hip, then the other, extending the stretch as far as she could.
This wouldn’t fix anything, not really, but it felt good and kept her at least a little limber. She’d read the gushingly excited pamphlets about how Reclamation Movement will fix ailments and bring longer life to practitioners.
It’s a lie, of course, but her husband bought her a full year’s membership in the crunchy granola gym, so here she was. Stretching her legs and also the truth.
***
August 23, 2025
Tomorrow?
He took a careful bite from the meat bun and chewed slowly. He had four to last him today and tomorrow. Stretching out the eating part would, he hoped, convince his paper-flat stomach that it was getting more than just a single bun. Tomorrow afternoon he had an interview at the weird café near the graveyard, so if he could just make it till then, he’d be… well. Not fine, but better. The other guy working there said staff could take home un-sold pastries, so at least there’d be food.
At this point, he’d do a lot for steady food.
***
August 24, 2025
Companionship
Xe lay back, staring up through the viewing panel. Xe’d known it would be hard to be alone for so long, but hadn’t realized just how long five planetary cycles really was, in practice. Too long.
Halfway through the second cycle, xe found instructions for making a companion. That took another half-cycle, but it was due to hatch any time now. All xe needed to do was wait. Having a companion wasn’t allowed, but xe figured no one would know. Xe could hide the companion when everyone woke up.
Xe couldn’t wait to pet its soft fur and warm body.
***
August 25, 2025
MKAL
This year, the mystery pattern called for six colors of yarn, two of which should be extra bright and un-matching. Jim dug into his stash, wishing it was bigger, but also happy that it could fit under his bed. He knew that if he had more room, he’d go overboard with yarn purchases.
He spread out his options, collecting the four ‘matching’ colors (all different gray shades) to one side, and picking a green he didn’t remember buying and the pink his sister had given him as a joke.
Now to wait for the first pattern clue to be posted.
***