Last House. Spit. Dreamscape

May 2025

The Last House on Main Street

Author: Wistful Willow

Victor Lewis has been in a daze since his neighborhood was destroyed in an air strike. Over the years, he has been whiling away his time day by day and watching his food stores slowly deplete. How many years has it been now? What happened to his mother? What still keeps him in the last house on Main Street? These are all answers he will have to discover for himself before his impending starvation and shattering psyche decide for him.

This story doesn’t hold back on emotion.

Depression hits hard, and you feel it in Victor Lewis, a man still living in a house half-destroyed by an airstrike. Why was there an airstrike? Who did it? Who were we at war with? That doesn’t matter.

When I read it, I took the airstrike as a symbol of a traumatic event that nearly destroyed Victor’s life, with the aftermath representing his major depression. After the airstrike, you’d think he’d leave, find somewhere safe. But he doesn’t. He stays in this broken place, surrounded by clutter, with no food left.

Victor sticks to a routine, like watering his mother’s plants, because he’s clinging to what’s familiar. It feels safe, even if it looks anything but. Watching someone fall apart like this is rough. It hurts to read. This story doesn’t flinch. It’s beautiful work. Read it.

Spit

Author: Angela Quinton

A grimy hungover first-person crawl through gender, lycanthropy, body horror, risking detransition, skeptical allyship, guilt, species euphoria, cheap meat, and bodily fluids.

Violent change might break you, but slowly, methodically, you can heal and maybe become more yourself than you were before.

I didn’t know what to say after reading SPIT.

I had to let it sit in my mind for a while. I needed time to absorb it, to replay the imagery, to step into the main character’s skin and feel the deep, dark emotions being conveyed.

It’s raw. Visceral. Violent.

This story uses body horror and lycanthropy as a metaphor for gender transition, identity, and dysphoria. The main character, June, is a transgender woman. Her dysphoria is described as intense: her “human body still hangs on [her] bones like a wet straightjacket.” She feels trapped in a body that feels alien, and doing everything possible, like hormones, clothing, and presentation, just to make it align with one’s identity.

But none of that is enough. She seeks the werewolf transformation as the final, necessary metamorphosis. It’s the only one that can truly make her body match her self-image. She doesn't just want to transition into another gender. She wants to become something beyond human. Something that feels right to her.

This isn’t your typical “human to monster” transformation with a moralistic spin. What it is, is a journey toward authenticity. And that journey is terrifying, painful, and socially isolating. But the transformation is necessary.

There’s trauma, loss, bodily violation, social exile, and emotional pain throughout. Maybe the most important thing we can do is simply be there without judgment, just a constant presence so they’re not completely alone, for someone going through their own kind of transformation, pain, or reckoning.

Dreamscape

Author: Lauren W

A pessimistic dream operator is bored with controlling the visions of their sleeping subjects. There are only so many times they can watch people suddenly acquire flight capabilities, or be trapped in an endless freefall, before it becomes dull.

When a client requests to deliver an important message through a subject's dreams, the dream operator is intrigued, hoping to see a powerful, legendary being. Instead, they meet a fragile, old woman--a soul from a deceased mortal.

Still, the dream operator has a job to do. And as the old woman enlightens the sleeping subject, the dream operator's eyes are opened as well.

Imagine being stuck in a control room, operating people’s dreams like you’re a switchboard operator from the early 20th century.

You’re kind of bored. Just going through the motions. But then something happens. Something that reminds you how powerful dreams really are. How life, love, and memory can stretch across time. How even in death, we’re still connected to the people we leave behind, if we ever truly leave them at all.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of Ray Bradbury. Not in plot, but in tone. It reminded me of his more introspective, surreal pieces like The Veldt or The Rocket. That hazy, otherworldly atmosphere where technology, memory, and fantasy blur together and brush up against something deeply human? Dreamscape captures that.

The writing is smooth and poetic, but not in a way that feels forced. It just flows, like you’re slipping into someone else’s dream without even realizing it.

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Readers’ Reading Corner

Because good stories connect us.

Sparks of Renewed Embers by 1Tuna1 (suggested by Joel): “The author has a very descriptive writing style that immediately pulls you into the story. The theme is heavily centered around Rebirth and Redemption.” [Read on Royal Road]

Gifts of Wandering Ice by Olga McArrow (suggested by an avid reader): “It’s a hard sci-fi graphic novel (over 1,000 pages long!) with a vast cast of diverse, well-developed characters. It stands out by being a post-apocalyptic story that focuses on a brighter future. In this world, the apocalypse made humanity better, not worse: only those who learned to work together and value human life above all else survived the ice age.

‘GWI explores deep questions like immortality, mind control, the rise and fall of civilizations, the conscious vs. subconscious mind, the dangers and benefits of AI, and more. A true delight for serious readers.” [Read on Gifts Comic]

Master of Exams by slashindex (suggested by Count Boogula): “A man is thrust into a world where nothing is as it seems. Why he was summoned there and what he has to do are a mystery, and to make matters worse he's essentially a ticking time bomb. It's a story that has tension, confusion, and this sense of eeriness that things just aren't quite right. The story sells itself well in the opening chapters, and it's so short I can't think of any reason not to try it. Well worth a look.” [Read on Royal Road]

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Fun Fact: One of the Oldest Libraries in the World is Still Open

In the city of Fez, Morocco, there’s a library that’s been around since 859 CE. It’s called the Al-Qarawiyyin Library, and it’s still operating today. It was founded by Fatima al-Fihri, who used her inheritance to start both a university and this library. That university is also recognized as the oldest continuously operating university in the world.

For centuries, the library has held rare books and manuscripts. You can find early texts on medicine, astronomy, and religion there, including a 9th-century Quran written on camel skin. For a long time, it wasn’t open to the general public. Only scholars could access it. But after a recent restoration led by Canadian-Moroccan architect Aziza Chaouni, parts of the library have been opened up for more people to visit.

This place isn’t just a piece of history. It’s a sign of how knowledge and learning have been protected and passed down through time. It’s a living space, not just an old relic. It shows that even in a world that changes constantly, some places of learning still stand strong.