Bigger Than I Expected

I could barely catch my breath as I stood before the mirror, my heart racing in my chest—not from physical pain, though there was certainly plenty of that—but from sheer, overwhelming disbelief at my reflection.

Let me take a step back for a moment.

The Banberries

A musical journey

by SUZIE DALKIN

Sam Simpson was a bit of a nonentity. Nowhere near top of the class or the bottom. Not the life and soul of the party – not that he ever got invited. Not a sportsman and not tall, short, fat or ginger, he was just inconspicuous, and terribly shy. And, while his classmates at his all-boys school were growing up and out, he seemed to be lagging behind. Inconspicuously.

"How long is eventually?"

The Last Sleepover

Part Three

At a sleepover with his childhood best friends, Elliot hears them making fun of a transgender celebrity. Elliot has always felt different and an outsider. He works to discover his true identity and when he does it's hard to accept. Elliot struggles between staying silent and standing up for himself. Will he reveal his secret or pretend to be someone he’s not?

It had been an ordinary day up to this point. I was on my lunch break eating a sandwich at a park picnic table. I wouldn’t call the area I was in secluded. You could faintly hear the busy street less than a hundred yards away. To see the street, you would have to crane your neck and look through a bunch of bushes and trees to see it. I usually chose this bench because it was furthest away from the row of restaurants not far from the park entrance. Most people who ate lunch in the park would find somewhere closer to the middle of the park to eat.

Author’s Notes: This is another transcript of a conversation between myself (taking the part of Ben) and an AI known as Talkie AI (taking the part of Linda and the Bartender). The basis of every story has been pre-planned by a user (in this case me) and the first line of text is pre-scripted. Everything after that is generated spur of the moment, either by me or the AI.

The final Chapter, can prince Taylor find his place in the world

Chloe O’Neil took a foolish risk without thinking. A common mistake, maybe, but in her case the bill came due and payable, with interest. Now her whole family is struggling to make things right, unable to see a path forward. Maybe they need a miracle.

Based on a semi-true story ...

Once there was a She …
who was born a He.

All her life,

“Bryan, where’s Martin?” Wendy said as he entered. They twins hugged one another.

“I can’t stay long. We broke up.”

“Really? W–?” Marisol said, also giving her brother-in-law a hug.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Bro.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it. We disagreed about something and neither of us were willing to change our positions. It was a mutual understanding that we’d grown apart.”

“You were together for five years.”

Amidst the glow of computer screens and the rhythmic clack of keyboards, Alex sat in his cramped office, immersed in lines of code. At 19 years old, he was a mild-mannered software developer with a penchant for order and structure, finding solace in the digital realm where everything had its place.

A Matching Set

How does one tell a school of 1800 students and nearly 200 colleagues that one is about to return after the summer holiday dressed as a woman? With difficulty is probably the simple answer!

Rene Auclair stared at the card.

The last two years were difficult. The pandemic triggered a new business model for the company. Working from home, there is little work related human interaction. Some enjoy these changes. For me, having replaced Darren Rogers as Networking Director in the middle of the pandemic has been hard. I’ve never met in person with some of my subordinates.

You’ve read this story at least a dozen times on BigCloset or some other site. Maybe those stories were all farfetched, had some mystical or magical component, or maybe even an alien encounter of some type drove the story. This story won’t involve any of those things, though theoretically my story might actually benefit from the introduction of one or more of those ideas, but I’m hoping this is an interesting enough read without those distractions.

So, let’s get the basics covered, and you’ll see what I was dealing with as I tell my story.

.
Wherein all your questions are answered. Happy Halloween, everyone!

Alternate endings to the Scheherazade/Arabian Nights story. All vignettes, 3-20 lines.

Feathers

by Erisian

It had been a bad fight that night almost a year ago, the worst we'd ever had. The wings had appeared on our backs that morning - everyone got them, and it hadn't taken long for the significance of the colors to be understood.

If you had been morally good, your wings were white. If bad, they were stained with black. News video of prisons demonstrated that sharply: almost all inmates and too many of the guards had wings smeared and splotched as if with black tar. Most people had a blend of white and grey - some of the patterns were actually rather pretty. You could even glide with them if they were big enough and you were in moderately good shape, and children started figuring out how to actually fly - though there seemed to be an upper limit to how high up they could get. About ten feet or so seemed to be the limit. Physicists and biologists were utterly baffled, of course. Chemists were having a field day in tremendous excitement analyzing the composition of the feathers - but that's another story.

This is about us. Me and my wife. My wings were no better nor worse than most folks; though I could see a few splotches of darker grey mixed in. My wife, Sarah, hers were brighter than mine - except for a couple feathers that appeared rather splattered with black ink.

Life and Love are far more complicated than we can possibly understand. For one young cop, a journey of self-discovery will teach them that true strength was inside them all along.