ScribeBox
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The Cold Breath of the Boardroom
Benny was the kind of guy who could trip over a cordless phone. He had a face like a squashed muffin and a heart that just wanted to be a world class thief. But Benny was a disaster. He once tried to rob a bakery and got locked in the freezer for six hours. He…
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The Ink on My Hands
I can still smell the black ink on my fingers. It is the only thing that stays. Everything else: names, faces, the way back home: is leaking out of my head like water from a cracked jar. My son, Saul, thinks we are hunting for gold. He is twelve years old and his boots are…
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The Glass Horizon
Look, I am not a hero. I am a guy who used to steal high-end laptops by climbing up drainpipes and sliding through skylights. My knees sound like a bag of potato chips being crushed every time I stand up. I have a bad habit of looking over my shoulder, and I haven’t slept a…
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The Blue Eye of the Desert
Saul carried his past in a heavy, wooden box in his mind. He used to be a lawman in a town that forgot how to be kind. One night, his gun spoke when it should have stayed silent, and a young man fell. Saul took off the silver star. He bent it with a pair…
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The House That Breathes
Maya had a heart that beat like a trapped bird. You could see it in her neck when she was worried. She was a builder of things you couldn’t see. She built codes and locks made of light. She was the smartest person in any room, but she was scared of the world. That was…
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The Grand Reset Party
Gus spent his days looking through other people’s brains, and frankly, most of them were a mess. As a memory archivist, his job was to scrub away the embarrassing parts of a person’s life. He spent forty hours a week deleting the time a senator accidentally called his mother “daddy” or the moment a billionaire…
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The Teeth of the Tide
The rust on the spiral staircase was thick: it looked like dried blood on an old blade. I poked at a support beam with my screwdriver. The metal flaked away like dead skin. This lighthouse was a corpse of iron and stone. It had been sitting on this jagged rock for a hundred years: rotting,…
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One Hundred Blank Faces
Trudy lived on the edge of the world where the gray ocean chewed at the sharp rocks. She spent her days polishing the great glass lens of the lighthouse. To most folks, a face is a map. They see a nose or a pair of blue eyes and they know exactly who they are talking…
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The Light That Ate the Dark
Seth sat in the small kitchen of the lighthouse, watching the grease pop in his iron pan. He was a small man with skin like wrinkled leather and hands that never stopped shaking unless they were holding a wrench. He lived for the rhythm. The great glass lens turned above him, casting a long, golden…
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The Weight of the Black Glass
Hank checked the seal on his rubber mask. The air in the lower stacks tasted like copper and old sweat. In this city, you didn’t pay for bread with gold. You paid with the time you spent at your grandmother’s house or the way your first dog smelled after a rainstorm. The rich people bought…