Pretty much every conversation I have anymore (and it doesn’t matter who: whether it’s the 70-year-old MUFON member hawking fabric out of shed, the dude standing next to me in line for fresh-rolled donuts at the Iowa State Fair, or sitting down for coffee with a friend I haven’t seen in ages) devolves to the same dark subject matter:

     The end of the world as we know it. But unlike the song, we don't feel fine.

     Whether it’s data centers guzzling up resources and AI robbing the youth of jobs and a future (or its slop equivalents rotting away our cultural soul – the arts – which, by the way, was already on life support, in case you haven’t noticed), flock cameras and the security state tracking our every move and then trafficking that data to the highest bidder, or the realization not that the zombie apocalypse is real, but that it already happened; only instead of muttering for brains, brains, braaaiiins while shuffling incoherently down the sidewalk, they’re parked inside, welded to the one thing that matters to them. Not brains, but…

     Screens.

     Screens.

     Screeeeeeeeens.

     And I can go on. Endlessly. About how sad and depressing this world has become, and all I want to do is jump in a time machine and zip back to 1990. To us, the millennials, that era is our anchor as we navigate this tepid and shifty landscape – and you’ll have to forgive us our endless comparisons and laments. But I'll tell you, as great as it was growing up in that time, jealousy consumes me when I think about our parents – the boomers – and the gift they had in rearing children in that comparative utopia. Seriously, try raising little ones in this nightmare – is it any wonder everyone’s depressed and on something?

     Sometimes, I feel like the last man marooned on the island of sobriety.

     Or competency.

     God help us.

     Anyway, back to kids. This is where I’m supposed to drone on with endless societal platitudes about leaving behind a world that’s better for our children than it is for us. Yeah, I wish. That ship sank long ago – or rather, drove headlong off a waterfall – and now we swim amongst the wreckage, treading water while the tattered, splintered remnants float by, and all we can do is point with shaking fingers at the pieces and tell our progeny to close their eyes and imagine how great it once was.

     Pretty bleak, if it ends there.

     But it doesn't. Or doesn't have to. Not if you put your hope in something beyond the material. This life is fleeting, and fickle, and ultimately, a proving ground ruled by the demonic. So yeah, make it the best you can. Let everything you touch be better for it, but even as this world grows dark and heavy, keep your eyes fixed on what really matters.

     People.

     And where we all go after this life.

 

     This probably isn't news, but many of our readers are also writers. And what do writers want? To get read. And published. And paid. So as we mull this over in our collective hopper, we'd like your feedback, Dear Writer. See below…

by Dana Wall

 

 

I divided in the dark.

     This is how everything begins—a splitting, a doubling, a becoming-two where there was one. I did not know I was beginning anything. I did not know I was inside a woman who was swimming miles through water while I multiplied beneath her heart. I only knew the ancient imperative: divide, divide, become.

     She was healthy then, stroking through the Hudson River while I floated in a smaller sea inside her, a sea she had made for me out of her own blood and salt and wanting. One mile. Two miles. Three. Her arms pulling her forward through water while I pulled myself into existence through mathematics older than oceans. One cell became two. Two became four. Four became the beginning of eyes, the beginning of fingers, the beginning of a girl who would someday learn to swim the same waters her mother swam while making her.

     I did not know about the other dividing.

     Somewhere else in her body—not far from me, not far at all, close enough that we shared the same blood, the same oxygen, the same determined pulse—other cells were dividing too. But they had forgotten the instructions. They had lost the ancient knowledge of when to stop, and they were multiplying with a fury that matched my own, a becoming that was also an unbecoming, a life that was also a death.

     We were racing. I did not know we were racing.

     She gave birth to me in May, and the doctor looked at her blood and said the words that would unmake everything: it could be something related to pregnancy, or it could be leukemia. And it was both. It was me and it was the thing that would take her from me. We arrived together, her daughter and her diagnosis, two kinds of dividing that began in the same body and would end so differently.

     I’d like to tell you what it was like to be born into that.

     But I was a baby. I knew only hunger and sleep and the reaching for warmth that all new creatures know. I did not understand why she could not hold me, could not feed me, could not do the things that mothers do with the daughters they have spent nine months making. I only knew the absence of her hands. The machines between us. The glass and plastic and fear that kept her body—the body I had lived inside, the body that was still the whole world to me—on the other side of a distance I could not cross.

 

#

 

     She was afraid I would not know her.

     I know this now because she wrote it down, because she gave her fear to words the way she gave her cells to me, and the words survived her the way I survived her, the way everything she touched keeps surviving her because that is what she did—she made things that lasted. She wrote: I don't know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.

     I am here to tell her: I know.

     Not because I remember being held. I was not held enough to remember. Not because I remember her voice, though I heard it through glass, through masks, through the careful distance that kept her alive a little longer. I know because I am made of her. Every cell in my body carries her instructions, her blueprint, her ancient code that says: divide, become, keep going. She is not behind me. She is inside me. She is the architecture of my bones and the rhythm of my heart and the particular way my eyes see light, which is the way her eyes saw light, which is the way her mother's eyes saw light, back and back through generations of women who kept dividing, kept becoming, kept making daughters in the dark.

     The leukemia had a mutation. Rare, they said. Aggressive. The cells that were killing her were as determined as the cells that were making me. We were the same, the cancer and the daughter—both of us desperate to exist, both of us dividing without permission, both of us claiming her body for our own. But I wanted to become. The cancer wanted only to continue. There is a difference between becoming and continuing: becoming has a shape, a direction, an end point where the dividing stops and the living starts. Continuing is just hunger. Continuing is just more.

 

#

 

     She fought. I want you to understand how hard she fought.

     They injected chemicals in her blood to stop the wrong dividing—cytarabine, derived from a sea sponge, ancient medicine from an ancient creature that had learned, over six hundred million years, how to interrupt cells that would not stop. The ocean gave what it could. Her sister gave what she could—cells from her own body, a transplant that might have saved her, that did save her, that saved her and saved her until it couldn't save her anymore.

     I grew while she fought. This is the terrible mathematics of my existence: every month I became more myself, more separate, more the daughter she wanted to hold, and every month she became less able to hold me. I learned to crawl while she deteriorated in the hospital. I learned to stand while she fell. I learned to speak while she learned to die, and these were happening in the same family, the same house, the same terrible now, and I do not understand why the world is built this way, why becoming and unbecoming have to share the same rooms.

     She came home in October. Unable to lift me.

     I think about that. I will think about that for the rest of my life—my mother, home, wanting to lift me the way mothers lift their daughters, and her arms not strong enough, her body not strong enough, the thing that was killing her having taken even that. She could see me. She could touch my face. She could say my name in the way that I will remember even when I cannot remember anything else about her.

     But she could not pick me up.

     The cells that were wrong kept dividing. The cells that were right—the ones that made me, the ones that carried her instructions—kept dividing too. We were still racing, the cancer and the daughter, but I was winning now, I was growing faster than she was dying, and this is the only victory I can claim: I existed long enough for her to see me.

 

#

 

     She wrote about oceans.

     I did not understand this immediately, but I did eventually: my mother spent her life trying to tell people that everything is connected, that the sea sponge and the leukemia drug and the warming planet and the daughter she could not hold were all part of the same story. She wrote a book about invisible threads. She was going to write another, about oceans, about the water she swam while pregnant with me, about the creatures who make the compounds that became the medicine that tried to save her.

     The book is incomplete.

     But I am complete. And I am made of her. And someday, when I am old enough, I will understand what she was trying to say, and maybe I will be the one to finish it. Maybe that is what daughters are for—to complete the sentences their mothers start, to swim the waters their mothers swam, to carry the instructions forward into a future their mothers could not reach.

     I will learn to swim.

     This is the promise I am making now, understanding what the ocean took from my mother and what it gave. I will swim in the same waters she swam, and I will feel her there, in the salt, in the current, in the way the water holds a body up when the body agrees to be held.

 

#

 

     She was afraid I would not remember her.

     But remembering is not the only way to know someone. I do not remember being inside her, but I was inside her. I do not remember the sound of her heartbeat, but I heard it for nine months, the first music, the first rhythm, the drum that taught my own heart how to beat. I do not remember her holding me, because she could not hold me, but I remember the gesture of her wanting to hold me, and that imprint is in my body now, that ache for her that she thought only she would feel. I feel it too. I will feel it forever.

     This is what I want to tell her, the thing I could not say when she was alive because I did not have words yet, because I was still a bundle of cells learning to become a person: I know who you are.

     My mother.

     Every cell in my body carries the code you wrote.

     And when I am old enough, I will swim in your ocean and read your words and finish the book you could not finish.

     Not because I remember you.

     Because I am you.

     Because everything is connected.

     You are not behind me, not above me, not watching from somewhere I cannot reach.

     You are in me. The first cell that divided in the dark.

     And I will keep dividing.

     For both of us.

 

~~~

About the author:

     Dana Wall is the winner of Columbia Journal’s 2025 Online Fiction Contest for “Dissolution Studies,” Fourth Genre’s 2026 Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest for “The Bullfighter,” and second place in Story Unlikely’s 2026 International Short Story Contest. Her work appears or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Brevity, River Teeth, Hobart, Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, Strange Horizons, Pithead Chapel, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. She has received Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominations. Dana earned her MFA from Goddard College and lives in Manhattan Beach, California. 

 

by Steph Stockhill

 

 

The stars through the viewport of the UEC Vanguard weren't the shimmering beacons of hope I'd read about in history books. They were cold, static pinpricks in a void that had become my permanent cage.

     Back on Earth, the prisons had finally overflowed. The Zero-Capacity Act meant there were no more cells, no more exercise yards, and no more chances. The United Earth Coalition gave us a choice: a quiet termination in a sterile room, or a life sentence aboard a repurposed long-haul freighter drifting through the black. Most of us chose the ship. We traded a life behind bars for the illusion of a horizon, accepting the price of exile—permanent sterilization—to ensure no "criminal seed" would ever take root in the stars.

     I'd been aboard for three months. I was a flashpoint—a girl who had retaliated against a corporate enforcer with a precision that the courts called "excessive." Here, I was just Inmate 882-Alpha, learning that "freedom" on the Vanguard mostly smelled like recycled sweat and ozone.

     "You're staring again, Lisa," a voice rumbled behind me.

     I turned to see Elias. He was leaning against the bulkhead, his frame silhouetted by the shuddering neon filaments that hummed with a low, dying frequency. He moved with a grace that nineteen years in low gravity had perfected. Unlike me, he didn't look like he was waiting for a door to open. He looked like he was part of the ship.

     "It's hard not to," I said, pulling the sleeves of my grey jumpsuit down. "Everything is so ... silent."

     "That's the lack of a soul, Lisa," Elias said, walking over to join me at the viewport. "Earth didn't just want us gone; they wanted us out of sight. No guards, no fences. Just enough oxygen to keep the heart beating until we run out of time."

     Elias was my "guide," the man the Council of Lifers assigned to show me how to breathe without hope. He'd been here since the ship's second year. He was steady, patient, and had a way of looking at me that made the sterile walls of the Vanguard feel a little less like a coffin.

 

     "Stay close to the tether," Elias warned as we drifted into the umbilical of a derelict supply ship. The Vanguard didn't have a kitchen or a commissary, but it provided the basics; recycling our own waste into a flavourless, grey nutrient-slurry and lukewarm water—but to live on that alone was to slowly wither. To truly survive the rot of the deep black, we had to strip the dead. We weren't just looking for wires; we were looking for life. We scavenged the frozen husks of failed colonies and abandoned freighters, prying open pressurized lockers to find "luxuries" that Earth had long ago forgotten: a canister of real coffee, a dented tin of peaches, a packet of synthetic protein that hadn't yet turned to dust. We ate what we found in the ruins, learning to ignore the fact that the previous owners were likely still drifting in the next compartment over, frozen mid-breath.

     But we weren't just scavengers; we were graverobbers of industry. We fixed what we broke with the bones of ships that didn't make it. If a seal on our atmospheric scrubbers perished, we didn't have a warehouse of spare parts; we had to drift out into the graveyard and cut a matching gasket from the throat of a derelict tanker. The Vanguard was a Frankenstein's monster of a ship, a patchwork of stolen hulls and salvaged plating, held together by the desperation of people who refused to stop breathing.

     This was our life. The Vanguard drifted through the debris fields of the outer belt, scavenging the technological husks of failed corporate ventures. There was no high-tech medical bay on our ship, just a converted storage room with a few rusted gurneys and whatever supplies we could pry out of the dead.

     Inside the derelict, the air was stale and metallic. We were looking for simple things: canisters of atmospheric scrub, basic antibiotics, and copper wiring.

     "Why do you help me, Elias?" I asked, my voice echoing in my helmet as we moved through the zero-G dark. "You've seen hundreds of girls like me come through the intake."

     I watched him through his faceplate. He paused, his gloved hand resting on a jagged piece of bulkhead. "Because the UEC took our futures when they clipped us, Lisa. All we have left is how we treat each other. I'd rather spend my life being a human while banished than a prisoner waiting for the lights to go out."

     He reached out, pressing his gloved palm against mine. It was a simple gesture, but in the low-tech vacuum of our exile, it felt like fire.

 

     Our relationship grew in the quiet corners of the ship—the observation deck where we'd sit on the floor and share a single, salvaged tin of peaches. Elias taught me how to bypass the internal sensors to steal a few extra minutes of light in my bunk. He was the only warmth in a ship made of cold plastic.

     But the dream shattered on the twentieth anniversary of the ship's launch.

     We were in the "infirmary" when an inmate named Marcus collapsed. Marcus was a "First-Waver," had been aboard since day one. Thing is, he didn't just fall over dead. He erupted.

     It wasn't a hull-breaching explosion, but it was surgical. A localized, high-intensity burst of thermal energy that originated from his pelvic cavity—the exact site of the sterilization surgery we all underwent before boarding.

     "It's a timer," Elias whispered later that night, his voice trembling as we hid in the shadows of the cargo bay. "Marcus arrived twenty years ago to the day. For fifteen years, the mark beneath his skin glowed solid blue. Then it shifted to violet. Exactly twelve months ago, it started pulsing red."

     "We thought the colour changes were cellular degradation or power fluctuations in the implants," he continued. "But looking back at the intake logs, every single batch matches the progression. Blue for fifteen years. Violet for four. Pulsing red for the final year."

     Elias paused, trying to even his voice. "The ship has a capacity limit; this clears the decks to make room for the next batch." And then he pulled back his jumpsuit, revealing his lower abdomen. The glow behind his skin, which had burned violet for four long years, had just shifted into a rhythmic red pulse.

     "We aren't a colony, Lisa. We're a disposal unit."

     I felt the blood drain from my head. "Twenty years?" I gasped.

     Elias nodded. "And I have exactly one left…."

About the author:

      Steph S. Stockhill has been making up stories since childhood and still believes the best characters are flawed, complicated and beautifully human. Writing mainly short stories across a variety of genres, she is drawn to complex people, impossible situations and the messy space between right and wrong. Based in Doncaster, she writes with plenty of coffee, questionable amounts of imagination, and the occasional supervision of Stella, her senior tri-paw lurcher.

 

 

 

 

 

Listen on:

Hi Dan,

 

I Googled writing contests 2026 after someone in a critique group said I should publish my work. I figure put a short story out there and see if anyone else agrees because, seriously, some of the best stories I’ve read are not published, at least not in a traditional sense. Hence the Googling. I was going to be picky, read through all the options I found on Curiosity Never Killed The Writer (.com) before deciding which contests would be best, but then I found myself reading every line of your entry guidelines. But it was your About Us page that reeled me in because you seem to be real people with the sort of wit and life clarity I admire and on rare occasions pretend to possess. And I laughed aloud. There’s true value in that, so I subscribed. My conclusion: I want to be a Luchador of Literature, but only if I may I call myself The Twibiller of Prose, despite making that word up – Twibiller.

 

Thanks for this site! I’ve only been reading three hours, but I promise to devour it in goodly amounts as time allows.

 

With Best Regards,

Henrietta Willimena

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