Brandon Gallagher leaned back in the creaky barstool, rubbing a hand over his stubbled jaw as he stared at the dimly lit Tiki Bar. It was 2:07 a.m., and the quiet was deafening. A far cry from the chaos that usually filled the place—clinking glasses, drunken laughter, the occasional off-key karaoke rendition of “Margaritaville.” Now...More Please

Teri Palmer had never been one for knick-knacks. Her little two-bedroom house in Albany was spare, nearly ascetic. A few framed photos on the wall, a couple of mugs she’d had since college, and a secondhand armchair she’d picked up when she first moved in. She kept things simple. Orderly. No space for anything extra...More Please

Sandy shuffled through the cluttered aisles of the pawn shop, her fingers brushing over dusty knick-knacks and forgotten relics, her mind somewhere far away. Franky’s birthday was just a few days away, and she was desperate to find him something special. Ever since her husband, Tom, had passed last year, Franky hadn’t been the same....More Please

Brandon, Kyle, and Seth had always been close, the kind of friends whose bonds formed in the muddy creeks of Northern California. From the time they were kids, they had been fascinated by Bigfoot. Not the way other kids were, as a casual “What if?” fueled by cartoons and campfire stories, but with a real,...More Please

The woman awoke with a start, her face pressed against cold concrete. Everything was dark and silent, except for the faint metallic clank echoing from somewhere far away. A sweet taste lingered in her mouth, though she couldn’t place what it was. Her vision blurred, and her head swam in a thick fog. She blinked,...More Please

Michael Travers squinted at his reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror, his face framed by a pair of glasses that had seen better days. Money had been tight for a long time. Being a single dad hadn’t been easy on him, but he’d been doing his best for Andrea. This weekend was her sixth birthday,...More Please

In the year 2072, in the isolated deserts of New Mexico, Brimworks LTD unveiled a groundbreaking project: ChronoView. The concept was deceptively simple yet staggeringly ambitious—send a high-end camera back millions of years to capture images of Earth’s primeval past. With the technology to send objects backward in time but not bring them back, Brimworks...More Please

Bryce Johnson stared at the crinkled recipe in her hands, her pulse hammering as she tried to comprehend what she’d just read. It wasn’t a simple cranberry pie recipe from her grandmother Alice—it was an oath. Growing up, Bryce had always loved Thanksgiving. Every year, without fail, her grandmother made her famous cranberry pie, its...More Please