On the Fringes of Reality

Where the ordinary world reveals its true nature

Category: flash-fiction

  • Flash Friday: Shared Occupancy

    The flat was too good to be true. Two bedrooms in Bloomsbury for eight hundred a month, available immediately. Nell had called within minutes of seeing the advert, expecting it…

  • Update: Echo Room

    Just a short announcement: I’m delighted to report that Echo Room is featured on Free Flash Fiction. If you’ve not visited Free Flash Fiction, you really are missing a trick!…

  • Flash Friday: Involuntary Redundancy

    The conference room door clicks shut, but I can still hear them through the ventilation system. Dr Garcia’s voice carries further than she realises. “The incident yesterday crossed too many…

  • Flash Friday: Lost Property

    The 7:23 to Paddington was already moving when Ben realised the earbuds weren’t his. He’d collected them from lost property that morning—black case, wireless earbuds, exactly like the ones he’d…

  • Flash Friday: Rose-coloured Spectacles

    Jude stretched in his king-size bed, Egyptian cotton sheets sliding against his skin as morning light streamed through floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Thames. His penthouse apartment gleamed with marble surfaces…

  • 8 Shorter Fiction Pieces That Pack a Novel’s Worth of Punch

    The best short fiction creates entire worlds in a few pages, leaving emotional scars that last for years. These eight pieces prove that word count means nothing when you get…

  • Flash Friday: Circuit

    Circuit marks a departure from the usual fare but I’d argue it’s contemporary horror at its most unsettling. No ghosts or monsters here, but the protagonist’s epiphany does reveals something…

  • Flash Friday: The Grief Counsellor

    She began waking with tears on her cheeks, mourning losses that belonged to other people…. The collected sorrow was changing, growing heavier than the sum of its parts.

  • Subscription-Based Reality

    I understand your concern! Unfortunately, subscription services cannot be extended beyond the renewal date. Might I suggest our Basic Social Package at £47.99 monthly?” Marcus felt a chill. He’d seen…

  • Pharmaceutical Personality Sculpting

    Pharmaceutical Personality Sculpting explores our modern obsession with self-optimisation and the seductive promise that we can simply medicate away the parts of ourselves we don’t like. We’re constantly bombarded with…

  • Algorithmic Relationships

    Just a quick plug before we dive in… keep an eye on freeflashfiction.com, who will be publishing my story “Echo Room” in September 2025 (or possibly before). You can read…

  • Still Active

    A contemporary horror story that explores our increasingly digital afterlives and what might happen when the boundary between online and offline begins to blur. Still Active examines a fear that’s…

  • The Echo Room – Coming Soon

    I’m excited to share some fantastic news: my story “The Echo Room” will be published on freeflashfiction.com shortly! This story emerged from a simple but unsettling question: what if the…

Navigation

About

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.