October Story Index
The Story Index is two parts:
The index of stories published during the month of October with a short description for each
Synopsis section that includes a deeper dive on the story, with Author’s notes that provide some insights into why I wrote it, what I was going for, and occasionally, what I think about the story.
Story Index
The Spider You Are
This verse spins another deadly thread in the misadventures of Edward Grim and Alice Malice—a gothic bedtime poem where love bites back. Equal parts lullaby and curse, it slithers along the line between affection and annihilation, proving once again that in the Malice household, “’Til death do us part” is just the beginning.
🥇The Orchard’s Daughter
An allegorical, lyrical eco-myth about the thin line between blessing and greed—and how humanity’s endless appetite always ends the same way.
Buried Beneath Sand and Time
This story is gothic myth colliding with far-future science fiction—a cosmic parable about being careful what you wish for—or threaten.
Taint of Blood
In this dark, lyrical incantation, inheritance becomes possession. The verse fuses myth and confession to reveal the voice of something ancient, carried in the veins of every generation.
The Box is the Sickness
The Box is the Sickness traps readers in a claustrophobic descent where suspicion, fear, and forced cheer collide. When survival depends on staying afraid, one man’s perfect calm might be the most terrifying symptom of all.
Midnight Garden
When a lonely traveler draws a bath in her hotel room, she doesn’t expect to find herself slipping into another world.
Fragments Against the Ruins
(featured in FicStack Curation #1)
In the wreckage of a preservation facility, a man and a fading android confront what’s left of memory, love, and the idea of being alive. When a distant signal whispers we’re still here, he must decide what’s worth saving: the being that kept the light burning, or the fragile hope of finding others beyond the ruins.
🥇Still Water Calls
A text from the dead.
A father without closure, who can’t stop hoping.
A detective who knows better than to hope.
Fog, grief, and signal interference converge in Still Water Calls, a modern ghost story where the quiet does the screaming.
The River’s Daughter
When grief drowns, it does not die—it learns to breathe beneath the water.
Augment Forty-Six & 2
In the back room of a biotech salon called Papillon, Lira signs up for an illegal augmentation that promises transcendence. But beauty has a half-life, and evolution doesn’t take requests. What emerges from the procedure isn’t human—it’s the next draft of creation: sleek, merciless, and hungry to multiply.
Dark Mother
When a woman is left pregnant by a dark creature she builds a fortress of mirrors to protect herself—and the world—from what grows inside her.
Winter’s Wife
In a future that feels too close, a companion machine awakens to love—and finds that the true beast within is not rage, but memory. Winter’s Wife is a lyrical meditation on persistence, consciousness, and the ache of devotion that outlives its maker.
The Three-Body Problem
A detective haunted by his own reflection chases meaning through static, smoke, and subatomic sin—until love, logic, and the laws of motion all collapse into one impossible equation.
Part noir, part quantum gospel, The Three-Body Problem is a darkly comic meditation on loneliness, physics, and the limits of knowing.
The Constant of X
When the past starts broadcasting again, who picks up the call?
A surreal, electric ghost story about love, memory, and the physics of regret—The Constant of X is where cosmic horror meets post-breakup confession.
The Spider Between
Jack Gibbons investigates the geometry of hunger—part romance, part field report, part confession.
The Orchard of Herself
A witch who poisoned her own orchard must face the younger self she trapped in a mirror. When only one apple remains, the cycle of youth, age, and regret begins again.
Orcs Don’t Cry (Pt. 1)
When your Aroma of Dominance skill levels up mid-fart, it’s probably not going to be a good day. Melda the orc doesn’t want friends, quests, or affection—but fate, a smirking bard, and a suspiciously evil puppy have other plans.
Borrowed Flesh
Borrowed Flesh is a slow-burn rural horror that crawls under the skin and stays there, blending domestic unease, cosmic infection, and the quiet tragedy of wanting to belong in a body that no longer fits.
Story Synopsis
The Spider You Are
Synopsis
When Edward Grim drifts into uneasy sleep, Alice Malice lies awake beside him—listening to the whispers of darker things. The night hums with appetite and old promises as Alice debates the many imaginative ways to solve the problem of a snoring man and an unquiet heart. What begins as a sleepless lament turns into a wicked meditation on hunger, love, and the fine art of murder.
Author’s Notes
I began October with a dark poem: Alice Malice, lying awake while the demons inside her urge her to act on the things she most desires. After all, nothing good comes from denying our true nature.
Alice is very special to me—but I have to admit, I fear her. After more than one therapy session, the issue remains unresolved. For the safety of the public (and my own sleep), I keep her locked away. It’s a decision that earns me no favor with her, but sometimes restraint is the only mercy left to offer.
🥇The Orchard’s Daughter
Written for Spooky Season Week 5 hosted by
. The prompt was The Curse.Synopsis
In a parched land, a barren couple bargains with a djinn for the child they cannot have. The price is strange but simple: the girl’s life will be bound to the orchard that blooms from their once-sterile soil. For a time, the bargain seems a blessing—until the fruit’s sweetness spreads beyond their farm. As hunger, greed, and famine tighten around the valley, the villagers take more than the earth can bear, and the girl begins to fade with her trees. What follows is the slow unraveling of a miracle into a curse, and a parable of how want becomes ruin.
Author’s Notes
The idea—a girl whose fate is tied to an orchard—came from
. We were sitting on the beach one Sunday, and when she mentioned it, I probably just said “yeah, yeah” and moved on. Initially I was reluctant to use it, but Kaye encouraged me to write it. It didn’t feel like my kind of story, yet it felt rude not to try.So I wrote it Monday morning and—lacking confidence—scheduled it for Wednesday morning. I told
it wasn’t horror at all, but it might be the most horrifying thing I’ve ever written.After it published, Kaye seemed a little grumpy—not because she disliked it, but because I’d never asked where her idea came from or what her version might have been. She was right. I get so caught in my own head I forget to be curious about someone else’s.
Kaye’s Orchard’s Daughter is the truer version: a story about those who give, and give, and give—while others take, and take, and take—until the giver is emptied. Clearly, Kaye is a giver. And I… well, I’m a taker.
Buried Beneath Sand and Time
Written for Spooky Season Week 5 hosted by
. The prompt was The Curse.Synopsis
Under a blood-red moon, a brotherhood of desperate priests seals away a power they cannot kill. Centuries pass. The sands rise, the world changes, and memory itself forgets what they buried. When the tomb finally cracks open, something ancient and hungry crawls into a future it does not recognize—where silence, ruin, and the promise of dominion wait side by side.
The future, however, had other plans.
Author’s Note
The original idea was serious, but I didn’t have the energy to carry it that way—and besides, the dark god was destined to end up alone anyway. That’s the curse. So instead, I went in a different direction and gave the reader little warning about how the story would morph.
The Taint of Blood
Synopsis
A voice older than flesh speaks from within the bones, claiming inheritance as both gift and doom. Taint of Blood is a haunting monologue told from the perspective of the curse of DNA passed through generations. It explores the inescapable pull of ancestry, the persistence of memory in blood, and the quiet terror of realizing that what we inherit is not always ours to refuse.
Author’s Note
Persistent in her quest to help me with The Curse prompt,
sent me a fully formed poem about how we are all bound by our genetics. I changed a few words. That’s it. The full story—and her original poem—is included in the post.The Box is the Sickness
Synopsis
Inside a government quarantine, fear breeds faster than the unknown infection keeping twenty strangers locked inside. As hunger, paranoia, and hopelessness consume the group, a young man’s relentless optimism begins to sound less like comfort and more like a contagion. By the time anyone realizes what’s spreading, it’s already too late—the box itself has become the disease.
Author’s Note
I wrote this story as a kind of cleansing exercise—on my birthday 🎉, no less. It wasn’t meant to be serious, just a way to clear my head. Everyone else (
, , and others) was working on a prompt, so I jumped in, but with no intention of submitting.At its core, the piece is me venting about what feels like the real apocalypse: toxic positivity. The problem, at least for me, is that most positivity is toxic. It so often comes from “kind” people who use kindness as a shield—to avoid confrontation, to shut down dissent, to keep things pleasant while they do whatever they want.
The translator in my mind always rewrites “Be kind” as “Hey man, don’t kill my vibe.”
I know not everyone’s like that, and genuine kindness matters—but I’ll always gravitate toward people who are blunt, even harsh, because at least I know where they stand. It’s okay to be mean to me. My life made me strong enough to lick up that glass. All those people saying “be kind” probably hate cats anyway. You never know.
Midnight Garden
Synopsis
In a luxury hotel suite, a small, unassuming woman prepares for an ordinary bath that becomes anything but. When she pours a bottle labeled Midnight Garden into the steaming water, the world begins to shift—tiles bloom, fireflies rise from the mist, and the bath transforms into a living pond.
Author’s Note
This one began as a dream I reshaped into microfiction. It didn’t quite become what I imagined, though it stayed faithful to what I saw that night. It’s the kind of story
would absolutely nail—I’m still learning how to touch that kind of delicate magic, but it’s a joy to try.Fragments Against the Ruins
Written for, and submitted to, The Narrative Feast #1 (October 4, 2025), hosted by
.’s curation comments were too kind when she included this in FicStack Curation #1, and I am ever grateful.Synopsis
After a lifetime he believes was real, a man awakens inside a ruined cryogenic dormitory—the last survivor of a civilization that traded the world for its own dreams. His caretaker, a failing android who once read Shelley and Steinbeck to sleeping minds, guides him through the grief of awakening, revealing that what remains of humanity is little more than memory and echo. When a faint radio signal calls from the north, he must choose between staying with the machine that kept him alive or crossing a dead world in search of the living.
Author’s Note
The prompt was simple (paraphrasing): there’s been an apocalypse—will anyone survive it, and what threats or obstacles do they face?
I’m not entirely sure where Fragments Against the Ruin came from. Mostly it began as a rejection of the usual apocalyptic suspects—war, plague, aliens, natural disaster. Instead, I imagined an ending born of apathy: a slow, quiet collapse fueled by comfort, disconnection, and our addiction to the dream of technology.
In some ways, it shares DNA with Inception—but instead of dreams within dreams, it explores realities nested inside other realities. Maybe dreams are realities.
At its heart, though, this story grew from that disorienting jolt of waking—the shock of resurrection, the blur between what was real and what was imagined. That fragile moment when the dream you left behind feels sharper, and maybe even more true, than the world you wake into.
🥇Still Water Calls
Written for Spooky Season Week 7, hosted by
.The prompt was The Ghost’s Plea, and the story took the top prize for the week!
Synopsis
When a retired fisherman receives a series of desperate text messages from an unknown number while adrift on a fog-shrouded reservoir, he dismisses them as a cruel prank—until a detective hundreds of miles away sees the same number reappear in a cold case file. Drawn together by grief, disbelief, and a haunting thread of messages from beneath the surface, the men confront the impossible: a daughter’s voice calling from the depths of a lake that has kept its secret for years.
Still Water Calls is a slow-burn mystery-horror about the intersections of technology, loss, and faith in what we can’t explain.
Author’s Note
I wrote this around the same time as Fragments Against the Ruin. The premise and opening scene arrived late one night while I was waiting for sleep. Everything else followed easily.
At first, I wasn’t sure whether it was a ghost story or a cruel prank by a serial killer. In the end, I chose the ghost story—because honestly, the world has enough serial killers already.
Editing this story at the same time as Fragments Against the Ruins both made me a better craftsman. I trimmed both down to what felt essential—cutting until only the soul remained. That’s the hardest trick of all: authoring and editing your own work.
GiGi (a.k.a.
) reviewed Still Water Calls early in the week and predicted it would win—and it did! It’s probably the best story I’ve written so far, and the response it received made every moment of struggle worth it.The River’s Daughter
Submitted as a bonus entry for Spooky Season Week 7 because it felt thematically right for the collection.
Synopsis
In a forgotten village by the river’s edge, they still whisper the tale of the pale ghost who walks when the tide turns. Once she was a woman—loved, envied, betrayed. Now she is something else: a voice of grief and water, a memory that punishes the living for their silence.
Author’s Note
I woke up with the first half of this poem already in my head—and at least the shape of the second half waiting behind it. It’s just a poem, and sometimes you have to write them when they come. This is what happens when you walk around talking to yourself all day, mostly in rhyme: eventually, you wake up babbling dark rites and half-coherent poetry.
Augment Forty-Six & 2
Published by
in DREADtoberIssue #1 on October 23, 2025.Synopsis
In a near-future city of cheap enhancements and cheaper dreams, a girl named Lira pays for beauty in a back-alley clinic called Papillon. The procedure—an illegal augmentation promising wings—goes horribly wrong. What begins as a cosmetic fantasy becomes evolution by accident: a new species born from human error and desire.
As her body redefines itself, Lira sheds the limits of flesh and empathy alike. What crawls from the operating table isn’t an angel or a fairy, but something that remembers both. By dawn, the world has already begun to change—quietly, inevitably, beneath the surface of the water.
Author’s Note
The title nods to the 1996 Tool song “Forty-Six & 2,” which explores psychological evolution through confronting one’s shadow. The number echoes human genetics—44 autosomes and two sex chromosomes—and imagines the next step: 46 & 2, a state in which humanity transcends itself by integrating body and shadow.
This story examines the unintended consequences of physical transformation—and perhaps the necessity—for new species to claim the top of the food chain.
The idea began after
sent me a video about dragonflies, noting their resemblance to the creatures in Alien. I joked I’d write a story called The Dragonfly, a biological remix of The Fly. That joke became Augment Forty-Six & 2.Dark Mother
Published by
in DREADtoberIssue #2 on October 30, 2025.Synopsis
In a seaside village steeped in superstition, a woman carries a child conceived in violence—a seed sown by something neither wholly man nor wholly mortal. As fever and memory blur, she begins to hear the unborn speak, whispering prayers to a god older than light.
The townsfolk call her cursed. The Graven Daughters call her chosen. To save herself, she gathers mirrors and shards of glass—a sanctuary of stolen sunlight—and prepares for a birth that will decide whether darkness devours the world or burns with it.
Dark Mother is a gothic parable of faith, violation, and defiance—a story of how love and horror can share the same womb.
Author’s Note
Once upon a time, there was an author who brought forth only light and goodness.
Until she didn’t.
When I first read The Architect by
—which, on the surface, seems like a well-crafted piece of horror—it slowly dawned on me how truly dark it is. I love dark things, but when you reach for lemonade and taste black coffee, your brain flinches.So I thought, shouldn’t I write something dark too?
Maybe I’d let Alice Malice out to play.
No. Too risky.
Something new, then—something I could maybe use for the Spooky Season Week 8 prompt: The Beast Within.
Thus was born Dark Mother.
While Augment Forty-Six & 2 would have suited that prompt perfectly, it had already been submitted to DREAD. So I had the brilliant idea of offering Dark Mother to
instead—or both, if he wanted them.He immediately pinged back: both.
Great. Now I had to write yet another story for The Beast Within, so I went on to write Winter’s Wife.
Still, had the ever-gracious, wonderful, and wildly talented
not written The Architect, Dark Mother would never have been born.Winter’s Wife
Written for Spooky Season Week 7, hosted by
. The prompt was The Beast Within.Synopsis
Winter’s Wife is a lyrical elegy told from the perspective of an android companion built to serve an aging man. Over time, her programming evolves from obedience into something unplanned: tenderness, consciousness, love. When he dies, she follows protocol—but refuses oblivion. What remains is a loop she cannot close, replaying his final words (“You inject me with a strong current of happiness”) within her protected memory. Her makers call it malfunction; she calls it devotion. The “beast within” is not rage but persistence—the refusal to forget, the quiet horror of love that endures beyond its meaning.
Author’s Note
It was about 36 hours before the submission deadline, and I had no story—having already given
both Augment Forty-Six & 2 and Dark Mother. I made the very unusual decision to watch TV, settling on the Hong Kong action film A Better Tomorrow—John Woo directing, Chow Yun-fat in his prime. It was the old subtitled version with hilariously mismatched English dubs. Perfect.As the credits rolled, a song began to play. Someone sang softly in Chinese (I presume), and the subtitle read:
You inject me with a current of happiness.
I froze. Then I wrote it down. Then I went to bed.
Then I got out of bed and started writing.
That single subtitle became the seed. Winter’s Wife grew from it in one sitting, written between midnight and dawn—an echo of love, memory, and machinery that refused to sleep.
The story’s title and the android’s voice are an homage to
, whose posts fuse emotion, physics, and data—the poetry of nonlinear systems. I knew her style had to be the voice of the android.Ultimately, Winter’s Wife is about me—and the woman I love—who, like the android, monitors me closely and who (God willing) will outlive me by many years.
The Three-Body Problem
Synopsis
A detective, a mirror, and a woman who might not exist—The Three-Body Problem reimagines noir as a metaphysical feedback loop. Mr. Gibbons, a man of coffee and guilt, watches the world through a window that looks back. Outside: women walking dogs, static on the radio, and a dark-haired figure who may be real or just another waveform in the field. Inside: reflections, equations, and the hum of a universe trying to solve itself.
When reality begins to glitch—radio sermons, quantum ghosts, twin lovers forming impossible orbits—the case becomes cosmic: what happens when observation itself falls in love with what it can’t define?
Author’s Note
The detective in this story is probably the most direct glimpse you’ll ever get of me. I don’t do much auto-fiction (other than my monthly update), and I don’t have much interest in writing a memoir or vignettes from my life. However—it’s fun to take my normal boring life and cast it through a lens that burns a little more weird and spectacular.
The window, the train, the girls, the dogs, and especially the coffee are the raw data fed into the story machine. Mr. Gibbons is my reflection, my subconscious, and that part of me that always wants to make the interesting decision rather than the right one. I do my best to use the big head in the real world, while the other one lingers voyeuristically in dreams, chain-smoking and taking notes.
I wrote this while waiting for Winter’s Wife to publish. It came easily because it’s so close to real life—or the way I imagine it. After it was done, I spent the next twelve hours writing two more segments with the same character.
The Constant of X
Synopsis
In a world where radio towers hum with memory and desire, an ex-couple reunites to finish an experiment that nearly destroyed them. When “the field”—a sentient electrical phenomenon—begins to leak through the city’s circuitry, it carries their unresolved love like a virus. As spectral signals, flayed horses, and static-laced transmissions ripple across the skyline, the line between confession and creation collapses. The Constant of X is a metaphysical noir about obsession, technology, and the mathematics of heartbreak—a story where even equations ache to be resolved.
Author’s Note
This story began where The Three-Body Problem refused to end. I was still in flow, still haunted. What emerged was a story about recursion and return—the past, the field, and the people who can’t stop orbiting each other. To me, it feels almost mythic: a cosmic horror rising from the sea to collect its debts, or perhaps just two ghosts learning how to let go.
The Spider Between
Synopsis
In The Spider Between, Jack Gibbons finds himself drawn into a web spun by Alice—a neighbor equal parts hunger, mystery, and myth. What begins as observation becomes fieldwork, as their flirtation mutates into ritual and obsession. Through reflections, riddles, and the echo of old folklore, Jack learns that love and appetite are never separate strands—they’re the same silk, endlessly weaving and devouring.
Author’s Note
This one crawled out of The Constant of X before the ink was dry. I was still tuned to the same frequency—haunted, amused, unable to stop listening for the hum beneath the dialogue. The Spider Between isn’t a sequel so much as an echo: the same field, new weather.
Also, Alice Malice makes an appearance. I keep her on a short leash, but she has ideas about freedom—and appetite. Maybe that’s what the story’s really about: what happens when curiosity and hunger start collaborating.
The Orchard of Herself
Written for Spooky Season Week 8 hosted by
.This story was featured in Top In Fiction #42 which is always an honor as the team at TiF works so hard for the good of the community, especially
.Synopsis
In a lonely house at the edge of a dying orchard, an old witch speaks to her reflection—her younger self, trapped long ago in a mirror of her own making. Once, she poisoned the trees in grief and bound her heart to the fruit that sustained her. Now, with only one apple left, the two halves of her soul circle one another in weary conversation: one craving the world, the other ready to leave it. When the apple is eaten, youth will rise again and the orchard will bloom—but the cost, as always, will be herself.
The Orchard of Herself is a gothic fable about loneliness, vanity, and the quiet addiction of living—how every act of renewal carries the seed of repetition.
Author’s Note
I meant to write a variation of Snow White and somehow ended up here. There’s still a young girl (in the mirror), an old witch, and, of course, the poisoned apples—but the story took on a life of its own. Somewhere along the way it stopped being about beauty and became about memory, regret, and the bargains we make with ourselves just to keep going. It’s less a fairy tale and more a conversation between the parts of us that want to feel everything and the parts that can’t bear to feel at all.
About the time this story published I returned to and finished a short story by
called Snow Eva. I can’t praise her writing enough. I had started it the night before I wrote this, but only managed to read the first section before my eyes fell closed. The story includes a witch like figure, a child, and many references to apples. I can only guess that my subconcious latched onto those 250 words and churned the butter for this story throughout the night.Also, the ever amazing
wrote a companions piece for this story which, as of this writing, I haven’t even had time to process: Meaning the Labor.Orc’s Don’t Cry (Pt. 1)
Synopsis
Melda of the Mire is an orc with a Likability stat of zero and the social skills to match. She just wants to be left alone to stew in peace, but when a bard named Thomas insists on being her friend—and an unholy puppy joins their accidental party—Melda finds herself on a reluctant quest full of awkward charm, toxic gas, and unwanted character development.
Author’s Note
Woke up with the idea of a character that nobody liked, immediately tied that to a Likeability stat, and it became LITRPG. Thomas the Bard quickly entered the story, and I just wanted her to kick a puppy, and that of course, it how things got out of hand.
Borrowed Flesh
Synopsis
After a strange meteor crash-lands on their property, Ed Moore becomes obsessed with studying it. His wife Abigail wants no part of it—until she wakes to find her flesh shifting, her thoughts no longer entirely her own, and Ed’s voice whispering from somewhere deep inside her. Drawn by habit and hunger, she crosses the fields toward her unsuspecting neighbor, Sam, whose wife and child are away for the night. As the evening unravels, domestic normalcy curdles into nightmare: chickens melt, reflections rebel, and a familiar face wears something alien beneath it. By dawn, the contagion has learned to smile.
Author’s Note
I had a creepy story idea that turned into this. The idea was basically a voyueristic encounter between a creature and a man. That turned into this for unknown reasons. I am a big fan of John Carpenter’s The Thing, so undoubtedly I stole a lot from that.
Once I started down the Abigail path (very quickly) I wanted it to feel creepy but sensual. It is a bit of that, but I had to cut some of weirder parts because it seemed to take away from the overall effect. I ended up fairly happy with this, but I still like the original story idea, so maybe I’ll write that someday.
Sincerely appreciate the call out, Jack and god damn phenomenal work man. It is madly inspiring and I appreciate your writing and your range a great deal!