It was nine in the evening on December 31 and I was standing on a bridge looking down, far down, on the river where large chunks of ice floated. I was not going to jump. Not then. Actually, I was there to give me strength to go on. I was there to remind myself that there was an alternative to crime or prostitution even if things didn’t get better. Death before dishonor.

That Summer was a blisteringly hot one, with no real rain until nearly March. As a consequence, a lot of our time was spent at the beach, but I noted one slight change in the dynamics, in that both of our offspring were spending their own chunks of that time away from us, or at least beside us but not actually with us. Each was building their own social circle, and I was pleased beyond words, especially for LC.

In the dream, I was there with Mona, and I went straight to the point.

“What I’d like, if you can do it, is a portal between my home in Alaska and my dream-home in the world Nancy lives in. My home is two doors down from hers. Um, no, I shouldn’t call it a portal because of the Portal People. Let’s say a doorway.”

The Dead Pixel Society

© 2026 Zoë Taylor

“What the hell was that?” Kris asked, her head jerking up suddenly. Lewis didn’t answer right away. He felt along the paneling for something, and found it - a crack, almost invisible. He managed to dig his greasy theater-hardened nails into the crack and pried it back. Another low, echoing groan as the hinges protested, but gave way to a massive steel door, covered in acoustic foam on the other side.

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of a villainess, facing the end of a doomed route he himself wrote, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amelia quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance, and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she never even thought about. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system, or the demon that forced her into this situation to begin with...

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed... but surely she can come up with a way to write herself out of that, right?

...Right?