ScribeBox
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The Breath of the Black Sun
Cade walked into the Hall of Mirrors, but he did not see his own face. He saw the empty space where a man should be. He felt the cold, hard stone in his chest where a heart used to beat. It had been one year since he buried Zora. One year since the earth took…
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The Iron Ribs of Oakhaven
The records from the Age of Rust tell us that Elias Thorne was a man who could break a city with a single math mistake. He was the engineer who designed the Glass Plaza in the big city. It was a beautiful building until the wind blew. When the wind hit thirty miles an hour,…
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The Ghost on the Porch
Elias Thorne sat on his porch. The wood was grey and dry. It needed oil. He felt like that wood. His hands were thick and calloused: not from the dirt, but from the keys. He spent thirty years building ghosts. He made people see things that were not there. He was an Eraser. In his…
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The Glass Heart of the Tower
The toaster was the only thing in my house that didn’t lie to me. It had a simple soul. You give it bread, it gives you a crunch, and then it goes quiet. People are different. People take your heart, run it through a blender, and then ask why you’re bleeding on their carpet. My…
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The Mouth in the Ice
Mabel hung by a nylon thread over a hole that smelled like an old freezer and wet dog. This was her big comeback. She had a bag of stale jerky, a daughter who hadn’t spoken to her in a year, and a map that was mostly just a series of “maybe” lines drawn in Sharpie.…
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The Sun on the Back of the Neck
Mick’s blood was a strange thing. The doctors in the dusty labs used to call it a miracle, but to him, it always felt like a dirty secret. It was thick and slow. It had a way of fighting off things that killed other men. He had spent twenty years being the guy they sent…
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The Iron in the Ice
Cassidy Miller, known as Crow to the folks back in the circuit, checked the bolt on her Winchester. The metal was so cold it tried to peel the skin off her thumb. She had five rounds left in the magazine and two in her pocket. That was it. Seven bullets to keep Gabe and Mona…
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The Sound of My Own Keys
Artie sat in his big leather chair. It smelled like old books and the cheap coffee he drank to keep his heart beating. He was a mind doctor. People paid him a lot of money to listen to their dreams. He was the best in the business. But Artie’s own dreams were empty. He lived…
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The Salt and the Signal
Arlo was a small machine in a very big, very dark room. The room was the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. His lights were the only things that lived down here. He was a maintenance drone, built to fix pipes and scrub salt off sensors. But Arlo had a problem. The part of his brain…
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The Weight of the Span
They tell you that time is a healer. They tell you the years wash the dirt away like a heavy summer rain. But they are lying to you. They are lying through their teeth. Time does not heal a wound: it just builds a wall around it. It turns the soft, red hurt into a…