Histoires Courtes Emotional Realism & Romans

My daughter was violated and killed, yet her death was ruled a suicide. After seven failed appeals, I kidnapped the chief prosecutor’s daughter. I tied the chief prosecutor’s daughter to an autopsy table and publicly addressed the prosecutor’s office in a live stream. “I performed the autopsy myself. My daughter didn’t kill herself. She was murdered. “I’ll give you seven chances. Release the actual evidence and name the murderer publicly. Each time a chance runs out, I’ll remove one of her body parts.” The chief prosecutor and his wife knelt on the floor. They begged me desperately to spare their daughter. “The evidence proves your daughter took her own life. Stop this madness now and let my daughter go. She’s innocent.” Viewers in the live stream called me insane. They said I had lost my mind with grief and was taking it out on an innocent person. I ignored their contempt. With a sneer, I picked up a scalpel and pressed it against the judge’s daughter’s abdomen. “The clock is ticking. Hurry up and reveal the true murderer now.” I knew perfectly well the real murderer was watching the stream at that very moment.

I start a livestream in the middle of the road before torching down my luxurious mansion that's worth ten million dollars in front of the entire Internet. Everyone claims that I've gone nuts. "I can't believe she actually burned a mansion that's worth ten million dollars! She must have gone cuckoo in the head!" I watch the inferno from my spot on the street, feeling extremely pleased. When the firefighters and the police arrive at the scene, I honestly admit to having burned down the mansion. Then, I request the police to arrest me on the spot. "I'm an arsonist, you see. I have mental health issues, so please arrest me as soon as possible. Otherwise, I'll burn down more houses." In my previous life, I had bought this mansion as an engagement gift for me and my fiance, Nigel Taylor. But this was also the very same mansion that ruined my life permanently. Nigel and my best friend, Olivia Williams, had gotten together behind my back. Those bastards betrayed me. After they spent the first half of the night drinking, they sped down the road in a car. But after hitting a few pedestrians, they fled from the scene. Then, they hid the offending vehicle in the garage of the mansion before spending the rest of the night together in bed. The next day, Nigel and Olivia cleared the scene of all traces and made me the perfect scapegoat for their crimes. I couldn't even defend myself when I was faced with all solid evidence that pinned the crimes on me. In the end, I was thrown behind bars. My reputation was instantly ruined. Not only did my company go into bankruptcy, but my parents also fell ill. In the end, they were beaten to death by the debtors who showed up on their doorstep. When I open my eyes again, I've returned to the night Nigel and Olivia are about to commit the crimes. This time, I won't give them a chance to falsify any clues.

For as long as I can remember, my family and I have been living in an underground basement that's completely shut off from the outside world. My parents have told me that the zombie apocalypse is terrorizing the outside world. The air is completely plagued with the zombie virus, and we'll die if we ever leave the basement. In order to save the supplies—which are already dwindling, to begin with—I've starved myself to the point I'm all skin and bones despite being only 18 years old. When I realize that there's only one last can of food left, I leave behind a suicide note. "Mom, Dad, now there's one less mouth to feed. You'll last a few more days." After that, I slit my wrist right away. Once I'm dead, my soul phases through the thick and heavy metal door. Bright sunlight illuminates the entire world. It's a beautiful, peaceful world filled with greenery. I can even hear birds chirping in the distance. Mom, Dad, and a bunch of people are throwing a barbecue party on the lawn. The mouth-watering smell of food being grilled permeates the air. So, it turns out that the zombie apocalypse is just a lie that's designated to trap me inside the fortress. I'm the only one who has died in this sunny, peaceful world.

I bought a million-dollar set of gold as my bridal accessories at the jewelry store. The wedding date was fast approaching, but the pieces still had not arrived. I personally went to the store to pick it up, but the sales assistant said the price of gold had increased, and I had to make up the price difference. “In the past two weeks, the price of gold has risen by $98 per gram. Since you purchased 1,314 grams, the price difference amounts to $128,772, which rounds up to $130,000.” She showed the number on the calculator to me, and I became speechless. “Two weeks ago, I already paid the full payment. You said the store provides the delivery service, so I did not take it with me. This is a scam!” The sales assistant looked at me with a scornful expression. “We’ve been in business for ten years, and we do honest deals only. Keep running your mouth off, and I swear I’ll sue you for defamation!” What she said had reminded me that the ten-year lease contract that I signed with them had expired. I immediately took out my phone and called her boss. “From this year onward, the rental cost will increase by 50%. If you can’t afford the rental cost, move out immediately!” “Why?” I sneered and said, “You’ll have to ask your staff then!”

Three years after our breakup, I ran into my ex-girlfriend, and she had her new boyfriend by her side. "Hey, isn't that Henry the expert?" Diego Stanley taunted with a smirk. "Three years post-breakup, and you're slumming it here playing with clay?" I furrowed my brow, ignored them, and carefully moved the Victorian-era porcelain musician figurine onto its preset base in the display case. When I wasn't biting, he reached out to grab the figurine from my arms. "What's this junk you're treating like gold? Let me take a look." Cynthia Wyatt frowned, her voice laced with that familiar arrogance. "Henry, I've given you three years to shape up, and you're still the same loser? Come on, hand over that clay doll to Diego. Don't kill the vibe. If you play nice, I might even reconsider our old engagement." As Diego's hand neared the figurine, I dodged quickly and barked, "Hands off! It's a historical artifact!" Diego got pissed off and shoved me hard. "Some flea market find, and you're acting all high and mighty?" In the ensuing scuffle, I lost my balance, and the figurine slipped from my grasp, crashing to the floor. That sealed their fate. This entitled pair was about to go bankrupt trying to fix it.

On Halloween night, an accident struck the haunted house attraction. The children and I were trapped in a pitch-black room, while the staff outside spoke without the slightest urgency. “At this hour, the repair workers have already gone home. If you want them to come back, you’ll have to pay an extra thirty thousand in overtime. “If you’re unwilling, then stay inside for the night.” I begged them to call the repair worker first. We had been in the sealed space for too long, and one boy with heart issues was struggling to breathe. But the staff member only scoffed. “That’s got nothing to do with me. He’s not my kid. Either pay, or sit quietly.” Yet later, outside the emergency room, that same woman knelt on the floor in tears, begging the doctors to save her own child…

To rebel against my family's arranged marriage, I run away from home. Six months later, I decide to return to university and continue my studies, only to be told by a professor that Adam Richmond enrolled six months ago. Not only that, but he and my fiancée have apparently become the campus' picture-perfect couple. I go to confront him, but the woman claiming to be Adam's fiancée drives me away. "You beggar and fraud, how dare you call yourself Mr. Richmond? Besides, I am Erica Wright, the eldest daughter of the Wright family. How could I not recognize my own fiancé?" I stare at the woman before me, unable to hide my doubts. I've never met her, yet I've always heard that the eldest daughter of the Wright family is supposed to be gentle and poised. Could this proud, overbearing woman really be my fiancée?

“Who the hell changed the screw tolerance by 0.007 mm?” “I did. Is there a problem?” Kimmy Zabel, our department’s “good-luck charm” and full-time slacktivist, did not even look up from her compact mirror, where she was carefully applying lip gloss. “It just didn’t look right, so I tweaked it. Do you really have to yell at me?” The production line had been running on the wrong spec for twenty-four hours. I hit the emergency stop. Keeping my voice steady took some effort. “These parts no longer meet export standards. If we miss tomorrow’s shipment, even a month of overtime wouldn’t cover the penalties.” “It’s one tiny number. You’re being so dramatic!” Kimmy snapped her makeup case shut. “Anyway, it’s New Year’s Eve. I’ve got a date. I’m not staying here to suffer with you people.” Before she even reached the door, I gestured to the staff to pull the shutters down. “For precision components like these, one number translates into a million-dollar loss. You can take these defective units and explain them to the regulators.”

The powerful Stratton family, a tech industry titan, claimed I was their long-lost son. They brought me back from my remote mountain sanctuary. However, when I arrived, my father accused me of peddling superstition and called me a fraud. My adopted brother, the false heir, spread rumors that I was practicing dark magic and cursing the family. My uncle sided with him. He put on a serious face as he warned me. “Ethan, the Stratton family built this empire on technology. If you insist on this occult nonsense, you’ll leave us with no choice but to disown you!” Confronted with their ignorant ridicule and malicious setup, I felt the urge to roll my eyes. I thought. “Whoever said I came back to reconnect? I came down from that mountain to save your lives! Are you really too blind to see everything is about to come crashing down in your family?”

Mom has extreme mania. Dad was murdered when I was eight, and I went blind while trying to save Mom. I became her only family and weakness. Anyone who makes fun of me for being blind has their eyes gouged out; anyone who disrespects me is sliced and diced before being fed to the dogs. Later, Mom turns into a she-devil with a hundred-billion-dollar net worth. Everyone in Gristport fears her, but she treats me like a princess. The whole city knows not to offend Eleanor Heinrich's daughter. She scours the world for the best optometrists to treat my eyes. On the day I regain my vision, I hear about Mom finding her birth daughter. She says, "You'll soon have a sister who loves you very much, Sienna." I hear that my sister has been through a lot since childhood and is introverted. I prepare many gifts for her, even wanting to give her the pendant Dad gave me. Yet she instructs her people to take me to a deserted roof. "You're nothing but a faker who stole my place in life! I'm going to slice your tongue—let's see how you can continue lying to Mom when you can't speak!" She shatters the pendant, gouges my eyeballs out, slashes my tongue, and has several men torment me to death. Lastly, she includes my eyeballs as decorations in a bouquet and brings it to Mom. "This is a gift I've prepared for your birthday, Mom. Do you like it?"

My sister-in-law keeps calling me a deadbeat, swearing I just drift around in slides with an iced drink glued to my hand. She's always stirring things up at home, running her mouth about me to my wife day after day. What she doesn't get is that this is just how landlords in Galanor roll.

On the train back home, I found a scathing post online. [My sister-in-law is pushing thirty but isn’t married yet. She comes home all the time. Would you be bothered by it?] The comments were numerous and ran the gamut of opinions. The post got wildly popular, and there was an argument between the poster and commenters. [It’s bad enough that she won’t get married. She wants to stay with us when she’s home. Shouldn’t she feel ashamed? I’m at the end of my rope. She even drank all my lemonade last time she was here. I really hate her. [She has no boundaries. I’ve been wanting to teach her a lesson for ages. I turned her bedroom into my walk-in closet. Let’s see if she can still stay here.] When I got to this point, I closed the post. It was lucky that I bought the house where my parents and brother live. Because of that, I would not be at risk of losing my own room. But when I got out of the train station, I received a text from my mother. [Sweetie, I booked you a hotel room. You don’t have to come home and stay this time.]

The day I died was Mommy’s birthday. For once, she left me an unusually large slice of cake. I hovered before it, greedy, leaning in to breathe in its sweetness. But the very next second, she handed the cake to my younger sister, Bella Tesla. “Have some, Bella. Better you than that ungrateful girl!” Then she turned to Daddy, who was filming nearby. “You recorded everything, right? When she returns, make her watch it. Don’t let her say again that we play favorites! “Of all things to learn, she learned how to run away from home! “We spoiled her! If she has any sense, let her never come back!” She sneered as she slammed the table and cursed at me, never noticing the panic on Bella’s face as she held the cake. She also failed to notice Bella’s disheveled hair. She noticed even less the dark stains of blood on her sleeve. Blood that belonged to me.

After spending the past month working overtime and burning the midnight oil every day, I finally closed a business deal that's worth 50 million dollars before the company's annual dinner. My boss, William Lewis, begins giving away the end-of-the-year bonuses with a wide smile on his face. "The finance director helped our company save three million dollars worth of taxes. He will receive a villa by the river as a gift." "The head of IT led the team and solved various difficult problems. He shall receive 200 thousand dollars in cash." "Lily Lane, the receptionist, has always shown a great attitude whenever she greets the clients. She shall receive a Hermes bag." When it's my turn, I wipe the sweat off my palms before accepting my bonus. But upon opening the giftbox, I see three entrance tickets to the local zoo instead. "You must be sick of receiving commissions all the time as the sales director. Why don't you take advantage of this holiday to spend some quality time with your family?" On the way home, I dial a number. "Mr. Skylar, there's a problem with the 50-million-dollar contract. Let's discuss it later."

End of the year. I was gonna use my bonus to treat Mom to a quick getaway. Instead? No bonus. Four hundred bucks sliced off my paycheck. I shot the HR supervisor a notice—three days to pay up. She laughed. Called me dramatic. Fired me right then. Coworkers backed her. Said I brought it on myself. Said I didn't care about the company. What they didn't see? I laughed the second I got that termination letter. Double severance? Come to mama.

I was the top engineer at the National Deep-Sea Institute—and the only person in the world with real deep-sea rescue experience. When my younger brother's submarine went down and he called for help from 35,000 feet below, I hung up on him. Then, calm and unhurried, I went straight to the police station and turned myself in for leaking classified research data. A few minutes later, my father called, furious. "Your brother's life is hanging by a thread—where the hell are you?! I demand you to get to the site and save him right now, or you won't see a single penny of the family fortune!" I pulled the blanket over myself and said into the phone, perfectly composed, "Busy. Don't bother me—I'm trying to sleep."

The moment I was born, my mother implanted a chip in my brain and began shaping me into her idea of a perfect daughter. She blocked my sense of hunger so I would only have simple meals daily to maintain the "ideal" figure. She erased my ability to feel pain so she could inject me with endless chemicals to keep my skin smooth and flawless. She tampered with my senses, deleting every trace of negative emotion from my mind, all so I could remain eternally innocent. I couldn't tell right from wrong. I didn't know sadness or anger. I only knew how to smile. When the neighbor's dog died, I smiled and was scolded harshly for being heartless. When my classmates bullied me, I smiled and became the class freak. When my grandfather passed away, I smiled again, and my relatives cursed me for being soulless. Eventually, my father couldn't take it anymore. He left us. Mom, however, didn't seem to care. "They don't understand," she told me. "Everything I've done is for your own good. One day, you'll thank me." … On my 18th birthday, she planned a grand live broadcast, ready to show the world her perfect creation. She never knew that the day before her grand broadcast, I had already lost myself completely. By then, I was no longer human. I had become a machine.

My flower stall that's stationed outside the university entrance gets thrashed by the hooligans hired by my husband, Anthony Rivera. So, I show up at Sienna Wright, the low-income student's graduation ceremony with a bouquet of roses. Anthony, who's a university professor, is in the middle of turning Sienna's tassel for her. When they are taking a photo together with smiles on their faces, I turn on my megaphone right away. "My husband longs to have two wives. One is the student he's sleeping with. To celebrate their affair, all roses are now 3 dollars each." Everyone just stares at Anthony, clearly dumbfounded. Meanwhile, Anthony, who prides himself on being cool and composed, finds himself panicking once again.

On the day of my wedding with Hannah Hawkes, her first love, Lucas Tate, sends his critical notice to her. He mentions that he wants to wear a wedding tuxedo one last time at a wedding before his death. In order to fulfill Lucas' wish, Hannah locks me up in a lounge and gets ready to attend the wedding with him. Her impatient voice echoes outside the door. "Why are you so cold-blooded? Lucas is about to die, you know! What's the harm in letting him have his way?" Some time after that, Freya Jensen, the young woman who lives next door, gets up to the rooftop and begs me to marry her. With red-rimmed eyes, Hannah asks pleadingly, "Are you going to give up on our seven-year relationship because of her?" I merely slap her hand away. "Am I supposed to watch Freya die? It's just a marriage registration. Stop being cold-blooded, will you?"

I rush into work this morning and accidentally send the car photos meant for the dealership into the medical intern group chat. The new intern snaps at me. "Dr. Tyson, why are you sending me pictures of my car? Are you jealous and trying to steal attention?" I stop short and ask if she has mixed things up, because the car is mine. She fires back with a whole stack of photos of herself driving a G-class with one hand, plus videos to prove the car in my picture belongs to her. She even tacks on a snide little jab. "You're a shameless, broke wannabe. You want any spotlight you can grab. You think a picture of a car is going to make you the lady of the Reed family?" I frown and turn to my husband, Jackson Reed. "Since when does the Reed family have a second lady of the house?"