Quick reads for any moment — 100 to 1000 words
August 3, 2026 5 min read
Ashwood Funeral Home had served Millbrook for three generations before mortician Costa Reyes inherited the family business from his recently deceased father, and it took only his second week managing the embalming room alone before he began noticing that certain Read more…
5 min read
The abandoned mine outside Millbrook had been sealed for safety reasons decades before geology graduate student Priya Anand received special permission to conduct research inside its outer tunnels, and it was her second day of sample collection when her equipment Read more…
5 min read
The photograph had been sitting in a box of estate sale finds for nearly a month before genealogy researcher Sana Kessler finally got around to scanning it into her digital archive, and it was only during the scanning process that Read more…
5 min read
The ferry to Kestrel Island ran twice weekly, and marine biologist Ines Farrokh had arranged her research trip carefully around its limited schedule, expecting six days of solitary field work documenting the island’s unusual tide pool ecosystem before the return Read more…
5 min read
Physics graduate student Dario Kwan first noticed the discrepancy on a Tuesday, or what he believed was a Tuesday, waking to find his apartment exactly as he’d left it the previous morning, down to the precise angle of his coffee Read more…
5 min read
The Ashgrove Apartments had a considerably lower vacancy rate than any comparable building in the city, a fact that struck new resident Priya Iyer as reassuring right up until her third week, when she noticed her downstairs neighbor’s apartment number, Read more…
5 min read
The taxi driver who picked up graduate student Costa Reyes outside the university library at exactly midnight seemed ordinary enough, an older man with a weathered face who introduced himself simply as Farrow, until Costa noticed, several minutes into their Read more…
5 min read
The art studio above Wren Castellan’s rented gallery space had sat vacant for years before she finally expanded her framing business into the additional square footage, and it took only her first week working alone in the newly renovated space Read more…
5 min read
The taxidermied owl had watched over the Ashcombe family’s study for three generations before graduate student Ines Farrokh, house-sitting for her elderly great-uncle during his hospital stay, noticed its glass eyes seemed to track her movement across the room in Read more…
5 min read
The cornfield maze outside Millbrook had operated safely for fifteen consecutive Halloween seasons before park ranger Delia Vance received the frantic call reporting that a group of six teenagers had entered after closing and hadn’t emerged by the time their Read more…