F²W² 2026 Submissions & Voting

Smelt

“Touch me here, not there,” she giggled as her eyes glowed and thighs ignited with awakening.

As Rory Silver took even greater liberties, Cherise Golden stood in front of him wiping his brow, tickling his beard, and massaging his face from jaw to jugular with light strokes.

“You...you... sure?” Rory choked with sultry breaths fluttering Cherise’s curls as his hands slithered across her face and torso.

Unexpectedly, time tarnished the couple. Rory’s breath turned rank; Cherise’s curls went flat, and she spent more time stroking the strop and fantasizing about a nick to Rory’s skin. She fancied tickling the vein as Rory sat perched in profile in the dim light. It would be so easy—perhaps whimsical even—to move from massage to chokehold after listening to “Óinseach, Floozie, Tchotchke, or Cailín…bring me a pint!” Rory was never satisfied with Cherise’s efforts. Over time, honey-whispered adorations simmered into tiny daggers to Cherise’s heart.

Nevertheless, the silent parley of ten years began… again.

She leaned into his body. He settled in against the stairs. Cherise’s hands tickled Rory’s neck. Cherise cupped, cuddled, and teased the vein out of hiding. A wisp of a curl licked his forehead. One bead of sweat dripped from her curl—singeing Rory’s eyelash. He blinked. She stared. Her scorched fingers delivered the final caress. Rory’s body fused with the rail; Cherise left through the side door.

The floor creaked.

Their love had blazed—until it fizzled. Now, Rory—extinguished—knew it, too.

Shae

“No. No. No. That’s still not it!”

Frustrated, DJ pushed away from his desk and started spinning in his chair.

The image kept coming out all wrong and he couldn’t figure out what he was doing to keep getting the same results. Each time he made a slight adjustment to the prompt in hopes of refining the image yet the results were still the same: a young man looking up at a woman dispassionately grabbing what seems to be a collar around his neck. The image didn’t fit the story he wanted to write.

He stopped spinning and pulled his keyboard closer. “I guess if it won’t give me an image I’m thinking of, I’ll just have to adjust my story to fit the image.” He flexed his fingers and started typing…

SHAE was too strong to overpower, no matter how much leverage he attempted to gain from pushing against the table he found himself on. He first noticed something was wrong with SHAE when he went to attach the charging collar. The verbal reset command didn’t work. Instead, the command seemed to make it worse. SHAE grabbed his hands and pushed the collar against his neck and just kept pushing until he was backed against the railing. His only hope now was to get close enough to press the manual shut-down switch before the electric charging collar activated against his own flesh. Which, according to the audible countdown feature, was in less than a minute.

*SHAE = Simulated Human Automated Expert

Let Them Eat Cake

It’s rare to recognize this kind of precipice while you’re standing on it, a cliff where two timelines hang, each dripping with fundamental change. More commonly, only with the benefit of hindsight can we distinguish between “before” and “after”. Hindsight would not be needed for Claire. She could already see the shift her life was about to take at this moment, with this choice.

It was an accident she would tell them. It was, at least she thought so. Then again, she couldn’t be sure. Was it an errant sock that delivered his tumble or a well-placed textile assassin’s bullet? Did the answer matter as his body lay crumpled, twisted like the double-helixes that gave him life?

How easy it would be to snap those delicate chemical bonds; just as easy, she could seek assistance from those who could glue Humpty together again. The two paths were so clear, yet the decision was opaque. Was this moment a gift of providence to rid her of relentless physical and psychological torment, which almost broke her to the core, or was this a test of her humanity, an immoral slice of cake tantalizingly served up that she would deny herself? Accident or not, her choices remained the same. Would the import of this instant paralyze her? Did right and wrong hold any meaning here? She was done pontificating to herself about ethical arguments. Waiting was a luxury she couldn’t afford.

Snap. She always loved cake.

A Love Set in Stone

She held him in her arms as tightly as she could
Because by day’s first light, he would be gone for good
She thought of the wonderful times and the connection they shared,
And he wanted to see in her eyes that she really cared
They both knew he shouldn’t take note of her look
They both also knew he had already been hooked
This day, she could see, would not end without pain
But he would drawn to it, as if he were insane
The force he was driven by, it was unknown,
But he could hear it calling, like a loud, clear baritone
There was nothing he could do, he was too far gone
He was just part of something bigger, he was just a pawn
Slowly but steadily, he turned his head without thought
She knew all too well the web in which he had been caught
Fully facing her, his eyes were still closed.
His fate was now sealed, his end had already been composed
Despite the compelling trance, he fought his own eyes
His last effort would not prevent this, his demise.
Just a sliver of white was all that was needed
His transformation to stone had now been seeded
Most see her, Medusa, as just personified evil,
As if she could control her power so lethal
But consigned to loneliness, she has no control of her life
Friend or foe, all will succumb to her knife

That Which Lies Below

Her knees smash into the steps. Wood bites bone. She doesn’t slow.

He’s slumped against the banister, chest heaving, fingers hooked in the spindles like he’s holding on to the last solid thing in the world. Below, a door hangs crooked on one hinge. Plaster dust drifts through the stairwell. The fight isn’t over—it’s circling.

“Look at me.”

Her hand clamps his jaw, steady, urgent. His eyes snap open. Dark. Locked on her.

Good.

The lantern on the wall flickers, throwing jagged light across his throat. She feels the tremor under her fingertips—the aftermath of whatever hit him. Rage spikes through her, clean and sharp. Beneath it, the older thing wakes. The thing in her blood that answers threat with annihilation.

Footsteps thud somewhere in the house.

No time.

She presses her forehead to his. “Breathe.”

Heat surges from her palms, not gentle, not careful. It slams into him like a shock. His back arches. A gasp rips out of him. The tremor breaks.

“That’s it,” she mutters.

Another crash below. Closer.

He grabs her waist, strength returning in a rush, hauling himself upright. Not fragile. Not broken. His eyes clear, hard as flint.

“You with me?” she asks.

A tight nod.

Good enough.

She rises, stepping down one stair so she’s between him and the dark below. Power coils under her skin, hot and volatile. The air prickles. The lantern glass fractures with a sharp ping.

Something pounds up the stairs.

She bares her teeth.

“Come on,” she whispers.

The Weight of the Oak

The stairs were a spine of oak that had held the weight of four generations, but tonight, they felt fragile. Elias sat on the third step, his knees drawn to his chest, a fortress of denim and silence. He didn’t look up when the floorboards groaned. He didn't have to. The scent of lavender and cedar followed his mother like a shadow. She knelt before him, her cream-colored sweater a soft blur in the dim amber glow of the hallway lantern. Her hands, calloused from years of tending to the garden and the house’s endless demands, reached out to tilt his chin upward.

"The world is loud, Elias," she whispered, her voice a steady anchor in the storm of his thoughts. "But this house knows how to hold its breath. You can, too.

He looked into her eyes—deep wells of concern that mirrored his own exhaustion. For weeks, the weight of the town’s expectations had pressed against him, a phantom pressure he couldn't name. In her gaze, he saw a permission he hadn't realized he was seeking: the right to be still.

She didn’t ask for explanations. She didn't demand words he hadn't found yet. She simply held his face, her thumb tracing the line of his jaw, grounding him to the wood and the earth beneath it. In the silence of the stairwell, the heavy air finally began to lift.

Annabelle Lee, Redux

It was many years ago indeed
And it took place in a mansion by the sea
I lived there with you,
Your precious Annabel Lee;
This maiden lived with lots of thoughts
Only one of which was to be loved by thee.

You viewed me as a child
And felt our love was the envy of Heaven
But what I coveted more than thee
Was my freedom to see who I wanted to see
And to live unbothered by you
In that beautiful mansion by the sea.

You bragged of our love to all who would listen
But when I could not be tamed
In a matter befitting your stature,
You had no choice but to entrap me
And thus turned our home into a tomb by the sea.

And this was the reason, you see
That all those years ago
I devised a plan and called my kinsman to me.

When he knocked you to the floor by the stair
I had to see for myself if you were still there—
When I felt your weak pulse,
I hesitated a moment;
With Heaven and Hell looking upon me,
Did I have what it took to finish the job?
Then your pulse faded, Glory Be!

Now I lie in slumber with another,
Gazing out at the moonbeams and listening to the waves
From the open windows of my mansion,
Imaging you in your hidden sepulcher by the sea.

An Unfeeling Artist

It strives to construct an image from everything it’s seen but its efforts fall short. It falls into the valley… the uncanny valley.

Its name is AI.

A copier, a consumer, a parrot of what it is given. It tries to make art out of its training, but it will always be lacking. Because it is unfeeling and cannot imbue its art with the passion of an artist.

Just look!

The woman in the portrait has everything theoretically required of a person but misses something essential to her spirit. Her smoothed skin, a facsimile of reality, depicting simulated perfection and erasing what makes someone human: flaws. Grabbing onto the distorted figure in front of her, the woman cannot seem to look them in the face. With this movement and her expression, you can almost feel a sense of sadness, like the AI is the woman, gently cradling and mourning its distorted, unhuman creation.

However, this emotion isn’t from the artist, it is the invention of the human mind making connections and finding meaning. The mind has the incredible power for interpreting seemingly senseless social situations. We inject our own creativity into the image, creating our own stories from our lived experience. That is what makes art beautiful. We cannot forget this.

AI may appear to create meaning from its aggregate of data, but it cannot without the emotional bandwidth to form connections. Instead, it can only hallucinate and plagiarize style.

The unfeeling artist is not an artist at all.

Late Night Thoughts

On stormy summer nights, a woman in her house notices the power goes out, and you hear the sound of the generator kick in, followed by a shuffling sound coming from downstairs along with a moaning man aching in pain. She quickly runs down to find a young man. Collapsed at her stairwell. She's unsure of what to do, so she begins to examine the man to aid him in his pain. As she looks at his eyes and mouth to look for bleeding or bruises, the woman thinks to herself how the life of this man is for right now, even just for a moment, in her hands. She could help him try to recover, let him suffer until the pain becomes all-consuming, or a more adventurous choice to end his suffering for him. Which to choose? But how silly of her, she thinks as she continues to examine the man's face for the source of pain.

I Confess

The stairway appeared out of the blue or rather out of the beige, either way Kovski was elated by them. A break from the endless Victorian style hallway with its peeling walls and deafening silence that he had walked for decades, an inescapable prison.

Desperate for the escape from monotony he raced forward. His feet carried him down, faster than he could think, he made the mistake of looking over the banister hoping to see the gates to freedom at the bottom.

Instead, the world shifted violently and broke, like glass shattering. The stairs melted into nothingness and he found himself tumbling down into the undefined abyss.

Kovski awoke in a broken, bedraggled room. His body was mangled, legs twisted to the right, but he didn’t notice because for the first time he wasn’t alone.

Cradling his head against the remnants of the stairway was an extremely pale woman in a simple dress. She had a blank, analytical expression.

To Kovski she was an angel, sent by God to take his confession. There was a familiarity in her emotionless eyes that made the words come easily.

“I confess.” He whimpered. “I took her life out of a selfish, feral desire. Have mercy upon me.”

As he spoke the realization of her familiarity struck him. This was no angel, this was a vengeful spirit come to ensure that his punishment could not end and that no matter how long he walked that peeling hallway, redemption would forever be out of reach.