Stories Archive - Uncharted

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Mary by Another Name

Ra'Niqua Lee

Muddy footprints trailed Lottie on her way back to the porch. All that morning, rain fell, and wind played rough in the trees. Only now did glimmers of sunlight spill through crosshatches of oak branches. The air was sweet with damp grass as Lottie settled onto her front steps. Thin elbows propped behind, she watched […]

The Last Summer

Crystal Castro

Gen had fourteen freckles on her nose. Nora knew this because she counted them. In fact, Nora could’ve charted a map from Gen’s hairline to her neck and identified the exact location of every landmark on the way. She knew the crooked angles of Gen’s nose, the exact curve of her lips, and the shape […]

Be The Optimal You

Irene Jiang

It feels like fate when Lucy sees the billboard flash neon against night as she stumbles out of the reunion trashed on vodka and self-loathing. Lucy has seen the name floating around the news: Optime, pronounced “opti-me”, is the pet project of some tech mogul with a biohacking obsession. She’d dismissed it as some woo-woo […]

Conscripted Flesh

C.H. Irons

The cigarette smoke feels like fire, searing holes into Cal’s brand new lungs. Lungs that are still fresh from the culture vats, that have barely tasted their first breath, and he just flooded them with nicotine. It feels good. Like he’s making the loaner his own. “Use of addictive substances is illegal in government-issued organics,” […]

Mercy Kill

Kristina Atkins

My daddy saw great horrors during the Brothers’ War. Soldiers with their heads blown off. Men crawling on their bellies, on account of their missing legs. Horses dragging dead riders across battlefields. Rows of bodies with no linen to cover them. But the war’s greatest horror, no one saw for years. I’m watching it now […]

Safe Harbor

Amy L. Bernstein

In a future where water has colonized land, a team of crack scientists race to prevent a catastrophic breach in a major sea wall beyond the B-Harbor of Baltimore—but the effort will come at a cost. Vera rotates her silent-running, fuel-cell powered skiff until she’s facing B-Harbor Sector 1. She comes to a full stop. […]

#83: Kimberly Frank Is a Skank

Sharon Inkpen

“#83: Kimberly Frank Is a Skank” by Sharon Inkpen is the winner of the Through the Looking Glass Challenge hosted by Voyage YA by Uncharted. Page 1 It’s 1989. You are thirteen-year-old Colleen Paxton. Puberty is hell. High school is hell. Your life is hell. The lunch bell just rang. You’re supposed to be in […]

We All Become the Bedrock

Akis Linardos

She was born in the Cave, emerged from the cocoon of shattered stalactites soaked in vestigial groundwater like all daughters before her. Her first name was Kori, her second, Mama, and now finally everyone calls her Yaya, the eldest. Even after so long, a sinful child whose hunger for adventure once lured her old family […]

So Many Seasons

Heather Kamins

Ava is born at 12:00 a.m. sharp on the first day of spring, with purple crocus buds pushing through the patchy snow outside. It is a home birth, and she spends her first day on earth squalling and sleeping, nursing and acclimating to her new existence. She has a mother and a father who gaze […]

Tears Like Summer Rain

Rose Rasor

“Tears Like Summer Rain” by Rose Rasor is the first place winner of the Young Adults Write YA Contest hosted by Voyage YA by Uncharted and guest judged by Theodora Goss. XXX “Tears Like Summer Rain” by Rose Rasor is a beautiful story—thematically, stylistically, and in terms of its structure. It reminds me of a […]

A Seamstress Joins a Bodice to a Skirt

Amelia M. Burton

The best part of sewing a garment is pressing the finished seams. The glide of the iron over parallel stitches, two lines a quarter inch apart. The coy slip of the edge rolling under itself. The joining obscured. My hand follows the iron, satin clammy with heat, then reverses back over the seam, skin licking […]

All Mad Here

Emi Davis

“All Mad Here” by Emi Davis is the second place winner of the Young Adults Write YA Contest hosted by Voyage YA by Uncharted and guest judged by Theodora Goss. XXX It’s very difficult to write a story that grows out of and incorporates another story—that is, to write intertextually. But Emi Davis, the author […]

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