Within

by John Xero

Within, the Darklings wait.

They nibble at the toes of your consciousness. They are a part of you. They live beneath the rotting, splintered floorboards of that cabin you like to call ‘me’.

They gather in the depths of your mind, where your deepest thoughts flow, places you’re afraid to go. They will take all the goodness they find and bury it as far as they can behind your fears, your flaws, and your selfishness, because happiness, hope and love blind them, burn them.

Be at peace and learn, become your own holy warrior. Only you can defeat your Darklings.




John Xero is the editor at 101 Fiction.

Please come back this Friday 1st June for the first contributor 101, Dismissed, by Peter Newman.

Ravenous

by John Xero

The radio wolves hunt in invisible packs. They are prowling, predatory creatures of air and electromagnetic waves.

That soft, crackling interference on your phone is their footsteps in fresh snow. That high-pitched whine you hear, sometimes, is their distant howl.

They circle closer, waiting to attack...

And when they do they will pass through you, paws and claws and teeth of trickery, nothing but the faintest flicker in the fields that encircle the Earth. But they will strip the brainwaves from you, rip your soul right out.

Don’t blame them, they are what they are. Symptoms of the system. Hungry.

Listen

by John Xero

We are the dancers of the Eternal Ballet. You have seen us; we are all around you. And you are one of us.

The Celestial Organ stretches across dimensions. Each key is the size of a continent. It has more stops, pulls and pedals than all the cities that have ever existed.

To call the player ‘God’ would be erroneous, he merely plays for pleasure. There is beauty and there is discordance and it delights him that we dance to his tune.

His is the music that shapes the world. We just feel and follow, rhythm beating in our hearts.

Testimony

by John Xero


Ruby droplets glistened like dew in the dead girl’s hair; her green eyes, glassy as marbles, stared at nothing. The room was spattered with other people’s blood, blood that hadn’t coagulated.

“Captain Harrison? Ma’am? We’ve evacuated the floor.”

They were alone. Harri sighed. This part was never easy.

She pried the girl’s jaws open and the sergeant passed her a sterilised blade. As she carefully cut away the tongue, viscous, dark blood oozed from the fresh wound.

Harri stuffed the thick muscle into her mouth and began chewing. The dead girl spoke to her, in stained memories and crawling whispers.

Sand

by John Xero

Keiji dances in the sand. He plays a game with the waves and laughs when he loses.

Keiji is thin, skinny, but not too skinny for his age. His sun-bleached hair is medium length and his skin is a beautiful, glowing bronze; not so unusual for a boy who spends all his time on the beach. His dark eyes shimmer like rock pools.

The soft sand sighs beneath his feet. It is white sand, hot in the late-day sun.

His mother calls to him but he does not go. The sand whispers his name, but the waves wash it away.

Editorial: Open for Submissions

101 Fiction is now open for submissions!

Hit the submissions link above for guidelines and the submissions form itself.

Editorial posts like this will be few and far between, reserved for important announcements and the like. 101 Fiction is all about the tiny, tiny stories.

As such, here are ten of my favourites from the past year or so, oldest to newest.

Pan - "His soft skin was pale as driftwood..."
Doors - "He dreams a vast emptiness..."
Acolyte - "I denounce my body..."
Torn - "Madame Fox cries tears of black tar..."
Inheritance - "Rose remembered how grandmother’s magic shimmered..."
Orbital - "A tiger stalked the empty corridors of Genesis station..."
Beetles - "Professor Hamilton pressed his back to the sandy wall..."
Poet - "Youth is fleeting beauty, rose petals on the wind..."
Honey - "Spanish boys taste like honey..."
Colonisation - "I thought Private Jones was dead..."