On the Fringes of Reality

Where the ordinary world reveals its true nature

Category: flash-fiction

  • The Other Garden

    The child’s name was Iris. She had quick eyes and slow feet, which meant she noticed everything and stopped to look at most of it. A beetle hauling a crumb…

  • Sunday Short: Creep

    The restaurant is loud enough that she has to cup her hand around the phone. She’d left three story books on the shelf — Joel knows them all by heart…

  • Sunday Short: Radio Silence

    Day thirty-one. Or thirty-two. The light doesn’t change here. The slot in the door opens three times a day. Or it did. I’ve been refining the sequence. Eleven short, three…

  • Flash Friday: The Cure

    In the old country, before the priests came with their bells and books, there lived those who could swallow sorrow. They were born with hollow hearts, it was said, and…

  • The Unread

    He’d discovered his gift four years earlier. A story about a thing that lived in storm drains. He’d written it in a fever, posted it online, then spotted the thing…

  • Rain Check

    There’s naive, and there’s just plain gullible. Eight years at Hartley & Sons, eating lunch at my desk. Wearing cardigans in August. Nobody remembering my name at the Christmas party.…

  • Micro Monday: Dead to the World

    The scalpel traced the Y-incision across the cadaver’s chest. James concentrated on keeping his hand steady, aware of Dr. Winters watching from across the dissection lab. His appendectomy scar itched…

  • Last Words

    Maya’s phone held twenty-three recordings of people dying. Her latest was a homeless woman outside Tesco who’d clutched her hand and said “sorry” to someone who wasn’t there, her final…

  • Perfect You

    The Elevator Anthology – Part V The queue stretched three blocks. I’d been in 2035 for six hours and still didn’t understand what they were waiting for. A shop. Perfect…

  • Sunday Short: Shadows in the Abbey

    The parchment fell from between two stones like a whispered confession. Brother Osric had been checking the eastern wall—the autumn rains had loosened the mortar again—when the yellowed sheet tumbled…

  • The Naughty List

    The Latchkey – Part VI Santa had read approximately 847,000 letters that evening when he found the one that made him stop. The handwriting was spidery, uneven, as though written…

  • Sunday Short: Please Stand Clear of the Doors

    The Elevator Anthology – Part IV The voice had changed. Martin noticed it on a Tuesday morning, waiting for the lift to descend from the ninth floor. The usual automated…

  • Sunday Short: The Quarry

    Ralph Dawson heard his name. Clear and certain, cutting through the hammering of his heart and Freddie’s ragged breathing beside him. Not a shout or a threat. Just his name.…

  • Flash Friday: Safe Keeping

    You remember that day, don’t you? The one where everything changed. We were in that coffee shop on the corner, the one with the crooked awning and the barista who…

  • [working title]

    The Latchkey – Part V [Editor’s note: This incomplete draft was discovered in Andy Brooke’s WordPress dashboard on 14th November 2024. He hasn’t responded to emails or phone calls since…

  • Flash Friday: The Brass Key

    The Latchkey – Part IV I have served in the Hendersons’ household for seven years, and in that time I have learnt to read the rhythms of the house as…

  • Halloween Short: The Costume Closet

    Danny Marsh had spent three weeks on his zombie costume. Three weeks of YouTube tutorials watched on a cracked phone screen, of measuring corn syrup into teacups while his mum…

  • Flash Friday: The Glade

    Seth guided the drone over the treeline, thumbs working the controller. Up here, three hundred feet above the woods behind his new house, nobody could touch him. Nobody could shove…

  • Flash Friday: Traced

    The pattern appeared at 2:47am. Callum had been inside the Met’s facial recognition network for three hours, sifting through camera feeds across Zone 2, when he spotted it: the same…

  • Sunday Short: Going Up

    The Elevator Anthology – Part II The lift doors opened with a cheerful chime, and Zara stepped inside, smoothing down her interview suit one last time. Ground floor. She pressed…

  • Flash Friday: Going Down

    The Elevator Anthology – Part I The lift doors slid shut with their familiar whisper, leaving Louise alone with her thoughts and the weight of the revolver in her handbag.…

  • Flash Friday: The Seamstress

    There has ever seemed to me a solemn virtue in black cloth. Crepe, most especially, possesses a character distinct from any other fabric; it does not merely cover, it absorbs,…

  • Micro Monday – Introducing: The Latchkey

    The Latchkey – Part I You ever notice how your front door sometimes… moves on its own? Like you’re certain you shut it tight, but when you pass by again…

  • Flash Friday: Exposure

    Neil scrolled through his camera roll, half-listening to Hamilton drone on about quarterly targets. He needed the photo of the mockup—bloody ironic—from yesterday’s client meeting. Where was it? Holiday snaps…

  • Flash Friday: Don’t Make Me Cross

    Eight-year-old Oliver pressed his face against the car window as his mother pulled up to the zebra crossing outside Wychwood Primary. The familiar figure stood waiting with her red lollipop…

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On the Fringes of Reality is a collection of contemporary horror stories that explore the unsettling spaces where our ordinary world reveals its true nature. Each tale examines the familiar through a darker lens, finding terror in technology, relationships, and the everyday moments that suddenly turn strange.