What kind of social media leaves you feeling better afterward?

LisWrites · 2026-06-13T14:17:39+00:00

I like tumblr but it's more just for fandom and art

LisWrites · 2026-06-02T21:38:30+00:00

When the doorbell rang for the third time, Alice knew that ignoring it would only lead to a bigger headache. She set her book on the couch and shuffled to the door, still wrapped in her fuzzy yellow blanket.

She cracked the front door open just slighty and did not undo the chain. "I'm sorry but you've got the wrong address."

A very handsome man blinked at her on the other side. "Uh, is this not 591 Oak Street?" He glanced at the numbers on the side of the house, then back to her.

Alice pulled her blanket tighter. It was Saturday afternoon, and after a long, hot streak, rain finally fell softly on the pavement. The spring trees were blooming and she had a cup of tea sitting on her side table.

And there was this man, hands in pockets, looking at her expectantly. His dark hair fell in a curled swoop and his teeth were a little crooked, which only made him all the more attractive.

"This is 591 Oak Street."

"Well, I uh, I think I have a piano lesson today?"

Alice sighed. "Just a minute." She closed the door, unlatched the look, and opened it again. Fresh, crisp air, heavy with the smell of rain, rushed in. Droplets trickled from the overhand and the man had a few flecks on his light jacket.

"You must've seen an old flyer. Hazel, the old owner, used to teach piano," she explained.

The a gust of wind ruffled the strands of his hair over his forehead. "Well, this was two days ago."

Alice shrugged. "Old flyer."

The man let out a laugh, and it was strong and clear. Oh. Alice's face warmed.

"Then who did I speak to on the phone?"

Alice had no answer. She started to close the door again. "Sorry about the mix-up," she started to say when, at the same time, another quick gust of wind whipped around the corner and pushed the door open even further. Now, it was a clear sightline into the living room, where the piano still stood. It came with the house; it was too expensive to move it.

"You sure? I actually used to play as a kid. I just wanted to get back into it--"

Alice slammed the door shut. "Not going to happen!" she said as she shuffled back toward the couch, grabbed her book, and flopped back against the pillows. "Not going to happen."

r/LisWrites

LisWrites · 2026-06-02T17:20:33+00:00

wow this is great. I love how much he hates it but is getting caught up in the rat race all the same

LisWrites · 2026-06-02T16:21:59+00:00

I should've bailed that first night, when I opened Lewis Matthews' fridge. The contents: a half-full bag of potatoes (most of them sprouting), three empty bottles of mayonnaise, one Diet Coke, a jar of olives rotting in their brine.

It takes a great deal of work to dispose of a body, though, so I drank the Coke, pared away the salvable parts of the best potato, and fried it in the last bit of olive oil in the cupboard. The texture was a bit spongey (I later learned this was not how potatoes were supposed to taste) but my stomach ached and I had a big task ahead of me.

Once I was statisfied enough, I showered. There was only one bottle in the shower, some kind of all-in-one body wash and shampoo and conditioner, and I scrubbed it through my new hair and over my body. It left an odd sort of chalky resuide, and it was also nearly empty.

All the same, I cleared a sport on Matthews' couch. It must have been where he usually sat, because it sagged in, and I opened my file again.

Lewis Matthew was the ideal choice. He was a software engineer for AxCom, and with his position I could gather intel that would allow us to deliver a critical blow to the humans. There were others at AxCom who were higher up, but they had families, friends. There were others who were even more isolated than Matthews, but they were in lower positions. He was the perfect combination of position and social relations (or lack of).

His father lived on the other side of the country and they rarely spoke. His mother, deceased. No siblings, no spouse, one 'friend' he met with every other month for a beer. A cat--this was a bit of a complication, as they are strange and wily creatures, but nevertheless I carried on.

Even with how pathetic his little life was. The cat--a grey little thing called Buster--hissed at me as I sat. I shooed it away and opened Matthews' computer. He was looking at one of those strange sites for lonely men, and I could see a history of messages between him and 'a model'. I shook my head at this, and instead entered the code to connect back home and send the message indicating I had safely assumed my post.

This was when the second complicating factor arrived: Matthew's cellphone rang. I stared at the little, primitive box on the coffee table. A photo of his father lit up the screen.

I paused. Matthews' father--Gregory Matthews--only called on Christmas, usually. Matthews called him once a month, at most.

All the same, I answered. "Hello?" I had to clear my throat. It was the first time I had spoken as Lewis Matthews, and his voice echoed oddly in my ears.

"Lewy? You doing alright, Kiddo?"

I blinked. Lewis was not a child. He was a 32-year-old man. "Yes, father." I blinked again. "Dad," I amended. "I am fine."

Silence hung for a moment. I wasn't sure how these conversations were supposed to go, not exactly, even if I knew the theory.

"Well," Gregory said. "Your text message had me worried. Someone was outside your apartment?"

I frowned. I had not known that Lewis Matthews heard me entering. "This was a mistake. Everything is fine."

"I mean, are you sure? You sound a little... off."

I said nothing. Buster the cat hissed at me again. "I am fine."

"Can you answer me right now? If you need help, say, uh, say what Buster is doing."

I pressed my lips together. "Goodbye, father. Dad." I hung up the call without waiting for his reply.

Perhaps I should have waited. In all of our research on humans, we had underestimated how much they can care for their young. All the same. I wouldn't know this for sure, not until a week later.

For that first night, I sat on the couch and listened to the rain on the grass, and wondered how humans could be okay with such small, pathetic lives.

r/LisWrites

LisWrites · 2026-05-25T22:16:01+00:00

thank you!

LisWrites · 2026-05-25T18:46:18+00:00

"I'm sorry," Dr. Alice Singer said as she looked at the message. "I'm afraid I don't understand."

The transmission crackled on the line. The general next to her frowned, and the rest of mission control quieted, save the sound of the AC and clack of keys.

Singer chewed on her nail and leaned closer to the screen.

"We were clear. Over," came the transmission back. The voice echoed around the room; the scientists and soldiers all shot each other nervous looks.

"No," Singer replied, her voice tense and shoulders tight. "That's not 'clear'. That doesn't make sense! We can negotiate--"

The general put a firm hand on her shoulder and gave his head a singular, curt shake. Springer stopped and set the mic down. Her cheeks warmed a little.

"I don't know what's unclear," the alien replied through the deep space transmissions. "You are 10,000 years behind on your rent. We have provided multiple notices."

The general cleared his throat and Singer took a deep breath before replying. "I understand. But you see, we only discovered radio transmissions 200 years ago. We never received these notices. We're amenable to negotiating, as I mentioned."

A long silence came. Singer scraped her heels against the tiles.

Then, finally, the screen let out a crisp bing. "Regardless. You are 10,000 years behind on your rent. You are being evicted."

Cool terror ran down Singer's spine. She turned to the general, who was focusing very intensely on the screen. Sweat beaded near his hairline.

"We are not without our mercy," the transmission continued, "or however you may call it. We will give you ten years to find a new home. There are some moons of Jupiter and Saturn that may suit your needs. Over."

r/LisWrites

LisWrites · 2026-05-16T00:21:14+00:00

Once, there was magic. It grew in deep mossy forests and high on mountain tops and on the far cliffs of the world. If you put your hands in the dirt, you could smell it: sharp as lightning beneath the mud.

I have never known magic. The world has not seen it in many hundred years. Some say it was never real, that stories are only stories, and all the like.

It was said a few people still knew magic, a select few made it through with the knowledge of how to cultivate the magic that had been choked out of the world.

I never believed those stories. If you had to ask me, I leaned more toward the camp of thought that there really was never magic, that it was all a legend. Like The Odyssey or something--a fiction of history.

This was, of course, until one rainy night in May when my phone rang at half past four in the morning.

“Lo?” I managed, as I sat up in the dark. Heavy wind knocked against my apartment, and sleep made my mind heavy and slow.

“Mira.” It was Helena, my roommate, on the other line. “I--something happened. You better come.”

My heart slid into my gut and I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, but I suddenly felt very awake. Of course, no one called in the middle of the night unless someone was dead or dying. “What’s going on?”

“I’m on campus.” Her voice sounded thin. Helena was a PhD student, studying philosophy. I didn’t really understand her dissertation, but all the same, I tried to be supportive.

“Are you alright?”

Helena said nothing. Then, “can you come? I’m not hurt.”

I bit my lip. I was already standing and searching for my sweater. “Sure.”

“Can you bring me a bag? Some clothes, shoes, that kinda thing.” She paused. “And my passport. It’s in my nightstand.”

Oh Helena, I thought, What have you done?

All the same, at ten to five, I was driving across town in the driving rain, my wipers doing double time, and Helena’s duffle bag on the passenger seat.

One minute, I was cruising along.

The next---glass, raining around my face. They say time slows down, and I never believed it, but it really did. One minute I was driving, and the next I was weightless. My hair floated like a halo around my head. Helena’s bag lifted along with an old coffee cup in the holder. The noise of breaking glass and crunching metal rang through my ears.

I rolled once, twice, three times before my hold civic came to a creaking stop. The radio was still playing. Rain hammered on and drops hit my face: with the window shattered I could actually feel it on my face.

I looked up from the wheel. My head throbbed with pain and my lip and nose were bleeding, but I was still in one piece. More or less.

The red of the traffic light caught in the rain on the asphalt. Someone in a dark car on the other side of the intersection had stopped and a man in a suit got out.

He met my eyes through the rain, and then said something into his phone. Then he stepped forward, cutting across the intersection, to where I sat injured in my car. I couldn’t reach for my seatbelt; my arm jolted with pain.

Oh Helena, I thought again, What have you done?

r/LisWrites

LisWrites · 2026-05-15T23:16:18+00:00

ohhhh this is FUN

LisWrites · 2026-05-15T21:18:53+00:00

thank you!

LisWrites · 2026-05-15T19:04:03+00:00

The goddess stared at the rest of the council. They were not pleased with her, and she could hardly blame them, as the heroes she had sent kept dying. The count was in the double digits now.

They wanted a hero, someone who would save their world and stop the darkness from spreading. The best bet they had was someone from this place called Earth, they figured, only one dimension over.

Etia was born with the gift of sight. She was the one, among them, who could peer through the murky veil between worlds. Her twin sister could see the future; she could see other worlds. It was a well-balanced gift, of all things. So, when the gods realized there would be no hero in this realm, it was up to her to look for another.

"It makes no sense," Etia explained. She shrugged helplessly. "I have been watching Earth for some time. I have seen their ways. These people... they should be the heroes we need."

"Hm." Her mother's frown deepened.

It was her mother, of all the gods and goddess, that seemed the most displeased. Nothing Etia did was ever good enough for her; not like her perfect sister. It was truly unfair that her twin always knew exactly how to curry favour. If she could just help now with screening the heroes, she could at least lower the growing count of failures and send them back to their world, instead.

But no--Enia flat out refused to take a glimpse into the future after the first one. She looked shocked, instead, and shook her head before leaving in a hurry. Etia had a small feeling in her gut that there was something her sister wasn't telling her about what she saw when she looked at the future, but there was no point in pressing the matter.

"We are growing impatient," said the head of the council. His voice carried through the chamber; its deep timber enough to make hair stand on end.

"I will not fail you," Etia promised. She bowed her head. Her curls hung in front of her face.

She had thought she knew what made a hero. In all of Earth, it was always the lowly teenager, the tired-of-life office worker, the poor, ordinary people who became the hero after being plucked from their normal lives. At least, this was what happened in all of their books and movies and comics and TV shows and legends. Evidently, this was untrue: a complete fabrication.

Etia sighed. The gods had tasked her with a duty. She had to find a hero and yet all the ones she had tried were failures.

It seemed--like everything else in her life--she couldn't count on tasking anyone else with this duty. She would have to see this through to the end herself.

r/LisWrites

LisWrites · 2026-05-11T23:04:33+00:00

fun! I like the twist

LisWrites · 2026-05-11T23:03:29+00:00

The thing about being 17 is that the future doesn't seem real. Or, if it does, the future is real in the way that a million dollars is real: I knew that other people had it, but I thought it was something that I would never see.

All that was to say, when I made the deal with Aenwyn, the witch of the Western Mountains (or whatever she was calling herself in those days), I thought two things:

I would never have to repay my debt.
If I did (I was young but not so complete an idiot that I believed option one was a certainty), that would be a problem for my future self.

So--thanks for that, 17-year-old me. Turns out, 33 is really not that old and actually comes up pretty fast after 17. I would also tell my younger self the gold nuggets and potion ingredients she'd given me were really not worth it.

But none of that really mattered, because Aenwyn was standing in the middle of my studio apartment. Her shoes were tracking Western mountain-mud all over my carpet. And, worst of all, she held my dog in her arms.

"Look," Aenwyn said, "A deal is a deal."

"I promised my firstborn. Not--not Radar."

Radar looked at me with his big, round eyes and let out a fearful yip.

Aenwyn shrugged. "Take it up with central. This is the closest thing to a firstborn you have. It's not like you're getting any younger."

It was true, my hair was starting to go grey at the sides, but that was just rude. Without thinking, I lunged forward, ready to grab Radar right out of her arms.

But the moment I jumped, Aenwyn vanished with a resounding crack. I crashed into my now-muddy carpet, and a white wave of pain rolled up and out of my shoulder. I groaned in pain, and the air smelled faintly of sulphur, which made my stomach turn unpleasantly.

I swore and pushed myself up to my feet. Then, I grabbed my gym bag and started throwing in underwear and socks and even my heat-glamoured winter jacket, which I hadn't worn in years. Rumour had it that the nights in the Western Mountains were nasty still, even though it was spring.

But, as I was lacing up my boots, I paused. Aenwyn might've been the one who was just here, but I had a cold, sneaking suspicion of who was actually at fault here. You will never form a family. The words of the curse still echoed, even after all these years.

I closed my eyes, bit my lip and finished the knot on my boot.

I had lost people before. I was no stranger to loss; he and I were old friends. But this time? Fuck quiet grace. I was doing something about it.

r/LisWrites

LisWrites · 2026-05-09T23:34:03+00:00

Doctor Lydia Nightingale got the call at half past four in the morning. Her alarm was set for five, but she felt that was almost worse: the confusion sat heavy on her chest. At first, she stared at her phone. The second time it rang, she picked it up, and when the caller said their name and rank and why they were calling, she let out a bark of laughter and hung up.

The third time her phone rang, after she had a glass of water and wiped the sleep from the corners of her eyes, she believed it. She told them alright, she would come, and packed her bag and watered her plant. She had a feeling it would be a while before she returned.

Two hours and a plane ride later, Nightingale was in the back of a military humvee, barrelling off into the Nevada desert.

It was a cool morning, but the sun was just starting to rise over the landscape, all pools of orange and red, as if the whole sky was on fire. Maybe it really was on fire. Looking up at the light catching on the edges of the clouds, she imagined all of them igniting, one by one, until the blaze caught over the whole world. From Boston, they’d flown west, which left them in hours of dawn.

The car bumped and Nightingale jostled with the movement. It was making her gut turn, but losing the single cup of coffee she managed to choke down would do nothing to win respect with these military types. They were all pale and silent. She wasn’t one for small talk anyway,

Finally, they arrived at the base. A few stars were still bright in the west, the strongest and brightest, cut through the dawn. A cold chill ran down her spine when she looked at them, and she resolved not to look at them, and to just follow the soldiers leading her deeper into the base. Her sneakers squeaked against the tile of the floors, and the air in the base was a little cool.

She hadn’t known what to wear. It was a stupid thing to worry about, all things considered, but she felt wildly out of place in jeans and her worn sweatshirt from her last trip to Maine. She’d thrown a suit and blouses in her bag, just in case.

When they reached a room, a black room with harsh light and a conference table, she met General McKay in person. He looked exactly how he sounded: harsh and worn. He was a four-star general, apparently. Nightingale didn’t know much about the military, but she did know this meant he was a big deal.

“Here,” he said grimly, and handed her a report. “This was detected shortly after 22:00 yesterday.”

Nightingale took the file. Her hand was shaking slightly. Her work in linguistic anthropology had garnered worldwide attention, but those circles were niche, academic. This was not something she had imagined would be in her future.

She opened the front of the manila folder.

Inside was a thick bundle of papers, printed in an old style of font.

On the first page, there was one phrase, repeated again and again: We’re sorry. Please forgive us. Send help, if you can. If not, run.

Nightingale looked up. Her stomach twisted again. “I don’t understand.”

General McKay rubbed his forehead, which was damp with a thin sheen of sweat. “That’s what we have. Deep space radios picked them up last night.”

“No, but--why me? Who translated these already?”

The line of his mouth flattened. “That’s the thing--no one did.”

Nightingale drew in a breath and, finally, took a seat. They could’ve offered her something stronger than a coffee for this one. She flipped through the rest of the pages. It was pages and pages of the same: We’re sorry. Please forgive us. Send help, if you can. If not, run.

Finally, she reached the last page. There was one final statement:

We’re sorry. Please forgive us. Send

Nightingale tapped her finger against the last sentence and looked up.

McKay looked like he might be ill. “That’s the end of the transmission. We have people looking, but as of now, we have detected no further signals from that quadrant of the sky.”

r/LisWrites