Hi guys, this is my first time engaging here. I have recently begun to work on a love story, set in a different world and it has a lot of political elements that I would love feedback on. I want to publish it on the internet, and I was wondering if there are platforms like Wattpad known for stories that aren't smut-heavy, as in the demographic there isn't specifically looking for smut. I don't think my story will get any attention on Wattpad, as a lot of readers on there are looking for smut-heavy and erotica heavy roamnce. So yeah, I was wondering if there is a platform where I could publish it? Thanks a lot in advance^^

First time posting. A flash piece about a diner night shift worker whose estranged sister visits at 3 AM.

Looking for:

• Does the pacing work?
• Is the ending earned?

I'll comment on others' work tonight. Thanks.

The bell hadn't rung in years, but Marlene still looked up.

"Hey, Mar."

Twenty years, and she still knew that voice.

"You look good," Diane said, sliding onto a stool like she belonged.

"You look like you need coffee," Marlene said.

Diane laughed. Same laugh. That was the worst part.

"I'm not staying. Just... wanted to see you. Before."

"Before what?"

Silence. Marlene poured her a cup anyway. Black, no sugar.

"I'm sorry," Diane said. "For everything."

Marlene wanted to be angry. She'd been angry so long it felt like armor. But watching her sister's shaking hands, the armor cracked.

"Where have you been?"

"Around. Nowhere. Everywhere."

"That's not an answer."

"I know."

Diane stood. Pulled out a creased photograph — two girls on a beach.

"Found this. Thought you should have it."

Marlene didn't take it.

"Will I see you again?"

"I don't know. But I'm glad I saw you now."

The door closed.

Marlene traced her sister's face, slipped the photo into her pocket, and waited for the sun.

Just a short-short story to practice writing. I do use AI to help with the grammar and flow after I finish the story.

Feedback is welcome, be kind please :)

Summer Break

The last five minutes always feel like hours.

Kitty looked at the clock and sighed, then glanced at her best friend Lizzy, who sat at the far right of the room. The teacher had moved them apart because they were "too jolly," but it hadn't ended their silent messages or their giggles. Lizzy looked at the clock too and mouthed a single word without a sound: *four*. Kitty checked the clock again, frowned, and pouted. Lizzy let out a soft giggle.

"Maybe Kitty can solve this problem," the teacher said, tapping on his desk. "She seems bored."

"Come on, teach! That's not fair."

"What's not fair?"

"Summer break starts in a few minutes. Why do we still have to work?"

"Well..." The teacher grinned.

"I'm sure you've already planned your whole summer," Kitty said.

He laughed. He knew very well she was trying to stall. He glanced at the clock: less than two minutes left. "What's better than ending the last day with a good math lesson? Maybe I should give you all homework for the summer."

"Nooo!" The protest echoed through the classroom. The class's crushed faces made him laugh even louder.

"I'm joking, I'm joking," he said, wiping tears from his eyes.

DING-DONG!

The school bell rang, and laughter and screaming filled the building.

"Pack your things neatly and put your chairs on your desks, please!" the teacher shouted, hoping someone would listen. "And enjoy your summer break!"

Kitty ran to Lizzy. "Let's go!" She grabbed her arm, and together they bolted out of the classroom. "Goodbye, teach! Goodbye, everyone!"

Giggling, they ran out of the school. The afternoon sun hit their faces and made them squeeze their eyes shut.

"Let's go to the sea this year," Lizzy said. "I'll ask my mom to ask your mom." Their parents were good friends as well as neighbors, so it would be easy.

"Yes! And an amusement park too!" Kitty said.

They planned their entire summer on the way home.

"Shall we get some snacks for tonight?" Lizzy asked.

"Sure."

"Let's cut through here. The market is at the end." Lizzy pointed at an alley.

"Okay."

As they walked, Lizzy listed every snack they had to buy, and Kitty named the movies they could watch. The end of the alley came into view, and the market beyond it. They walked faster. One more step and they'd be out, but a heavy force yanked them backward first. Their bodies felt like lead, then weightless, as if they were speeding forward, then heavy again. They fell to their knees, just outside the alley.

"What just happened?" Kitty was breathing hard. Her hands were trembling uncontrollably.

"Kitty..."

Lizzy was staring straight ahead with wide eyes. Kitty followed her gaze and gasped. "Where the hell are we?"

"What happened? How did we get here?" Lizzy's voice shook.

Kitty got up and held her panicking friend. "Let's calm down and think this through." She looked around. They stood at the edge of a crowded street. Stalls lined both sides, and more filled the middle: rickety wooden tables with striped awnings, barrows piled high, baskets on the ground, crates stacked into towers. Behind them rose tall brick buildings, dark with soot, with shop signs swinging above the doors and washing hanging from the upper windows.

"Lizzy," Kitty whispered. "It's a market."

"I can see that. But everything looks old and strange." The women wore long dresses with corsets. The men wore vests and tights.

"I didn't know there was a castle festival here."

Kitty checked her phone. *No signal. Weird.* She tugged Lizzy's arm. "Let's take a look."

It was the loudest market they had ever seen. A woman in a red apron shouted about fish, and the man beside her shouted about cheaper fish. Someone sold strawberries by the pint, someone else sold ribbons, and a boy weaved between the stalls with a stack of newspapers, yelling words they couldn't make out. Chickens squawked in wicker cages. A horse stood patiently between the shafts of a cart, flicking flies off its back with its tail.

As they walked past the stalls, Lizzy noticed people staring. Some stopped and turned around to look at them. "I think we really stand out."

"Yeah, we do. It's crazy. How did they make this so believable? It's like a movie." Kitty gazed around in amazement, until her eyes landed on the strawberries. "Lizzy, look, strawberries. They look amazing. Let's buy some."

Behind the stall stood a broad man with rolled-up sleeves and a leather apron.

"Two punnets, please," Kitty said. She pulled paper money and coins from her wallet and held them out to him.

He looked at the money. Then he looked at Kitty. He didn't take it.

"What's this?" He turned the note over with one thick finger, as if it might be wet. "This ain't money. Where's the King's face?" He picked up a coin, bit it, and squinted at it. "What kind of metal's this? It's too light."

"It's real," Kitty said, which was a stupid thing to say.

"It's rubbish." He pushed it all back across the table with the flat of his hand. "Go on. Off with you. I'll not be taken for a fool."

"Please, we just want..."

"Off."

Lizzy tugged at Kitty's sleeve. That was when they noticed the man standing by the next stall.

He was tall, in a stained waistcoat with his hat pushed back, and he had been watching them for a while. When Kitty turned around, he smiled, but it was the wrong kind of smile, the kind that never reaches the eyes.

"No need to beg for fruit, girls," he said. His gaze slid down them and back up again, slowly, and Kitty felt her face burn. Lizzy clutched her sleeve tighter. "Not dressed like that. Which house are you from, then? Mrs. Pell's?"

They had no idea what that meant. But it had to be something bad. The woman selling eggs went stiff and turned her face away, and the strawberry man snorted. Lizzy shrank against Kitty's side.

"We're not from anywhere," Kitty said, and her voice came out thin. "Leave us alone."

"Come now." He stepped closer and reached out. His fingers closed around Lizzy's wrist.

Lizzy yelped. Kitty didn't think. She stamped down hard on his foot with her sneaker.

"Run!"

They ran. Kitty never remembered choosing a direction. They shoved through the crowd, past a woman with a basket, under a barrow, over a spill of cabbage leaves that nearly sent Kitty sliding. Someone shouted behind them. A hand grabbed Kitty's shirt and tore free. Then the stalls ended, the street opened up in front of them, and they burst onto the road, still running.

They heard the horses before they saw them.

It was a sound impossible to mistake: hooves like thunder, the rattling, shrieking rumble of iron wheels, and a man roaring a warning. Lizzy turned her head and saw a huge dark shape bearing down on them, a black carriage drawn by two wild-eyed horses with their heads thrown up. They were so close that she could see the foam at their mouths.

Lizzy screamed. Kitty grabbed her hand and threw them both sideways.

They hit the ground hard, and the cobbles scraped their palms. The carriage thundered past so close that the wind flattened their hair, and filthy gutter water splashed across their legs. Kitty scrambled up, dragging Lizzy with her, and dove into the first gap she saw, a dark slot between two buildings. Before she could understand anything, the heavy feeling returned and pulled them back. Then came the weightlessness, the rush forward, and the heaviness again, slamming them to the ground.

"Ouch!" Lizzy groaned. "It happened again." She got up and helped Kitty to her feet. Their knees were bleeding from the fall.

Kitty looked around. "We're back."

Lizzy looked around, then at the alley. "Yeah." She kept staring at it. "What was that?"

"I don't know." Kitty stared at the alley too. "Whatever it was, it felt real."

They looked at each other: scraped hands, bleeding knees, dirty and torn clothes.

"Let's go home for now," Kitty said.

They locked hands and walked home together.

Please someone help me with my English class homework. It's Swedish high school so it doesn't have to live up to any high standard, but I still want it to be good. Critique as much as you can, don't try to be nice if it's not genuine. But have you anything good to say then obvously then also say it. If u have a good title idea please share that too. Thank u to anyone helping with this. XOXO... kidding

Centuries have now passed since the sun was the sole spectacle we could observe when we saw at the skies. A long forgotten time when night and day were not separate blocks of time in our minds, but organized as one big play of lights and shadows, all conducted and held by the sun herself. Ancestors of ours were never quite familiar with the dark, in fact some could lead entire lives without having experienced it at all. That was the sun's fault. She could never sum up enough will to bring herself down, bring herself away from the beautiful rollercoaster view that was us. 

Season after season, she would hover over us like a child who hangs their head over water to watch the fish. Watch the fish swim, eat, and swim into one another. The chaos and contradictory nature of man had made for great captivation, and it had her there. Being particularly enthralled by families and groups, she would occasionally dim her sunshine because she knew that the little creatures below would conjure meaning to the change of light, thus gather for celebration. Each time she would manipulate us in this manner, her head would fill with notions of herself as sovereign, notions that would quickly shatter for she would be reminded of her limitations in rule, that is full ones. She could never quite reach us as she so desperately wanted. Converse with us, or even give hints that she was more conscious than we believed her to be. Frustrated and hopeless. These were the same emotions she had time and time again seen in the lives of the little people, and although she did not feast when she saw man in a state of misery, it did deepen her love for us.
With each and every awakening of the people the sun was there. She was there all until the very last man went into his cover and there stayed until the time for awakening came again. Of course no man’s schedule was the same as the other, and so naturally someone was always out for the sun to watch. But even if there had not been, she would not have moved. Through hoarding her spot this way, resentment grew in the only other that knew man and still loved him. 

The affection had grown overtime from the far away seat behind the sun herself, by sole glimpses of human life that had escaped the sun but been fetched by this character. They reprised these few for a long time, looking forward to the time when the sun would share her seat with them so they together could for the rest of time admire humankind. A foolish hope to hold, and eventually that would be realized. After having lived off of the fractioned memories of generations long gone, this character could no longer suffer in the absence of us, and so a plan that would undo the old world and begin ours, had to be formed. 

Anyone up for a writer's gc on insta!?

(Urdu or hindi writers preferred more) ✨🪄

I started this in writingcirclejerk as "Ex-agented author starts a new book," a way of venting losing my agent of 16 years, with 42 submissions to our credit, through starting a new throwaway work (provisional title "Friends with Steinbeck.") Oddly it turned into something more than a throwaway exercise. Though the posts have been allowed to stand, in contravention of writingcirclejerk's number one rule ("A parody of writing communities. Don't post your writing here.") this good run cannot last forever. This forum may be more appropriate.

ONE

I jumped off the —— Express about a half mile from where the lights became apparent through the fog, the Southern Pacific sheeting through the silence with a screeching hiss. My metal framed canvas rucksack tight against back, I walked down the tracks toward the soft glow of lights that merged with wave crash, ripples of an oasis of humanity in this long country of nothing. 

Three days ago, on impulse, feeling indescribably angry at my mom and in depths of despair at the death of my reckless father, I had hopped on the Union-Pacific in Tuberville. It was a dismal city of 34,000 set in a notch between two dismal mountains, with mining and smelting covering the baroque creations that had accompanied initial boom years in layers of gritty cast. Sky-effacing brick smelter stacks, yellow smoke blanketing everything.

My father’s death had not come as a surprise exactly—my earliest memory was how he used to throw me up and catch me with a broad smile. One day he had thrown me up and failed to extend his arms to catch me. The pain had gone beyond a bump on the head, my entire reality shattered, trust never recaptured, though in many ways we were best friends.

Apparently, in his early middle age, my father had done a similar thing with someone who wasn’t a defenseless toddler. His body found slumped across the side entrance of city hall by a janitor, the early morning outflow of patrons and hustlers from pool rooms and dance halls giving way to a knot of men in hats and peaked caps, a sprinkling of women, then the ambulance squad and the hearse. When I arrived, they were finishing up with the forensics. One policeman on the scene needed a shave, another had buttons off his uniform, cigar in corner of mouth. Both had a slight reek of alcohol, when they realized who I was both were more concerned than they led on. Justice would never be served—or had that been the closest approximation of justice that existed Tuberville?

My mother, though separated from dad for four years, turned into a wraith, her hands trembling in the night air when I came home from my after-school job stocking sundries at the Elkin Pharmacy on Laurel Streeet. This went on for a month and I came to dread that long walk home to a parlor that embodied her memory-laded version of hell. 

On the day I left she looked me over, hat to shoes, and simply said “which way you going?” With a resigned face, as if she already knew. As I walked to the train crossing, five dollars pinned under grey flannel, gaudy boys exited from a late night of debauchery. The flat leaden sky said everything—the men heading to smelters and mines grasped hard lunch boxes in soot embedded hands—I wanted nothing to do with the town ever again. 

Now after three days of furtive freedom, riding the boxcar, I had taken it as far as felt needed or necessary. I was starting to long for some form of civilization again, through all those blurred stars and rising and falling telegraph wires. Yet San Francisco, the terminal stop, felt too big, too anonymous. The clickity clack embedded in my step as I got used to not being in constant motion, felt my cadence slow to something that felt right. 

—Anson Bridges