Mystery

Gunshots at Meadow Brook Acres. Top Story - January 2026. Content Warning.
"Is that the guy Ron, you are talking to?" "Yes, he is ordering, he must have fallen off the wagon. I haven't seen him for a long time. Cindy told me, he had moved back home and he had gotten clean."
By Gregory Payton25 days ago in Fiction
The Name He Would Not Say
“Do you want to start where you usually start or where it hurts today.” “It all hurts. I just pick the one that hurts loudest.”
By Sound and Spirit25 days ago in Fiction
✈️ “The Island That Wasn’t on the Map”. AI-Generated.
The storm struck without warning. Flight 907 had been cruising smoothly over the Pacific when the lights flickered, the engines groaned, and a violent jolt threw passengers into panic. Before anyone could make sense of the chaos, the plane plunged downward, swallowed by black clouds and lightning that cracked like shattered glass.
By Sherin ABUMUSTAFA25 days ago in Fiction
What are we doing here?. Winner in Mismatch Challenge. Content Warning.
"Will you just talk to me?" Mark begged, as his ceiling fan completed lazy, insistent revolutions. He watched as a fly— he couldn’t say when it had arrived— performed small frantic circles in the air before settling on the nightstand beside him. It groomed its front legs. Such fastidiousness in something so fundamentally unclean.
By Sandor Szabo25 days ago in Fiction
Lizards and Usurpers
„Can’t we get a cat or a dog? Why must it be a lizard, Jane?” “Everyone has cats and dogs Jim. They’re boring. About as interesting as a couple called Jane and Jim. I want something more special.”
By Paul Fingl25 days ago in Fiction
Blood on the Red Mesa
Sheriff Silas Boone rode slowly along the trail at the base of Red Mesa, the sun dipping behind the cliffs, setting the desert ablaze in red and orange. Dust brushed around his boots and spurs, and his horse sneezed.
By Natasha Collazo25 days ago in Fiction
Beat 'Em Then Join 'Em, Friday, September 21st, 2012
“Boy! Front and center,” Anton shouted like a drill sergeant. Toby sat in the warm living room watching The Backyardigans for what must have been the 100th time when he heard his father calling him. With no cable and only three VHS tapes, what other options did he really have? His play station was broken by his mom’s new neighbor friend when they were arguing.
By Anton Mathias Heft 25 days ago in Fiction
Nightmare On Pennywise St, (Present Day) September, 2021 (Fiction)
The next morning, Toby awoke to the obnoxious buzz of an alarm blaring for what seemed like an eternity. The air reeked of stale cat urine and dirty laundry. Sesame Street played on the television in the next room, with the volume so high it seemed as though Elmo was sitting right next to Toby, yelling.
By Anton Mathias Heft 25 days ago in Fiction
The Confrontation, Saturday, September 24th, 2011
“Toby’s dad is ‘it’,” called one of the neighborhood boys at the park. Anton was enjoying his weekly Saturday game of tag with Toby and the neighborhood kids at the local park. The park’s large, grassy area was rarely mowed and riddled with weeds. Random garbage and the occasional pile of dog feces dotted the landscape. In the center of the park was a circular area of old, red mulch with a rust, brown jungle gym in its center. On the side adjacent from each other were two equally deteriorated, brown swing sets. The children used one of the swing sets, while the other set only had one swing left. That individual swing was used by the local drug dealer as a one stop shop for a variety of illegal drugs. He monopolized that spot for a majority of each day.
By Anton Mathias Heft 25 days ago in Fiction
G.I. Joe's Last Stand, Saturday, December 25th, 2010
This was Toby’s best Christmas ever!! He woke up to a mountain of presents, even ones he hadn’t dared ask Santa for. A brand new Playstation 2 sat amid the chaos along with two amazing new games: an adventurous SpongeBob game and Spyro the Dragon. There was also a football, a blue and orange frisbee, a fresh pair of shoes, a stack of new clothes, and not one but two big stockings overflowing with sweetness and joy.
By Anton Mathias Heft 25 days ago in Fiction
THE GHOST IN THE RING: A PLANETARY GRAVEYARD DISCOVERED?
The Ring Nebula is the "Mona Lisa" of the night sky. Since the French astronomer Charles Messier first spotted it in 1779, it has been the poster child of cosmic death—a colorful shell of gas thrown off by a dying star, a preview of what our own Sun will do in a few billion years. We thought we knew its face. We have photographed it, analyzed it, and mapped it with the most powerful telescopes in history, including the James Webb Space Telescope. But we were wrong. We were looking at the skin, but we missed the skeleton. A European team led by astronomers at University College London (UCL) and Cardiff University has just shattered our understanding of this iconic object. Hidden deep inside the nebula, locked within the glowing gas, they have discovered a "mysterious bar-shaped cloud" that shouldn't be there. The Iron Anomaly This isn't just a wisp of smoke. The structure is a dense, distinct strip made of ionized iron atoms. It fits perfectly inside the inner layer of the nebula's elliptical shape, like a dark artifact trapped in amber. The scale of this thing is terrifyingly vast. The iron bar stretches out for a length roughly 500 times the distance of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun. It is a structure of titanic proportions, yet it remained invisible to us until now. Even more disturbing is the density of the material; the team calculates that the mass of iron floating in this bar is comparable to the entire mass of the planet Mars. The Tool That Found It How did we miss an object the mass of a planet floating in one of the most studied spots in the sky? The answer lies in a new instrument called WEAVE (WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer), installed on the William Herschel Telescope. Using a mode called the "Large Integral Field Unit" (LIFU), which utilizes a bundle of hundreds of optical fibers, the team was able to slice the light of the nebula into its constituent wavelengths across its entire face for the first time. Lead author Dr. Roger Wesson described the moment of discovery: when they processed the data, this "previously unknown 'bar' of ionized iron atoms" simply "popped out," sitting right in the middle of the familiar ring. It was there all along, waiting for us to learn how to see it. But now that we see it, we have to ask the frightening question: Where did it come from?
By Wellova 25 days ago in Fiction
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Untold Story Before Game of Thrones
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: A Simpler, Deeper Story from the World of Westeros When people think of epic fantasy television, the first name that comes to mind is Game of Thrones—a brutal world of power, betrayal, dragons, and blood-soaked politics. Later, House of the Dragon expanded that universe with even more fire and royal conflict.
By Junaid Shahid 25 days ago in Fiction