Short story: The House of Generations The grandmother’s house carried that smell of freshly baked bread that seemed to linger in the walls, like an ingrained memory. In the living room, the afternoon sun sliced through the curtains and made bands across a wooden table that had hosted more gatherings than any of the people present. Five people — and a cat with the air of an inspector — settled around that table for tea. Each held a different cup: a porcelain one with floral…
Short story: Wheel That Turns María closed her bedroom door with more force than she intended. On the table, the open notebook showed the wheel: a circle divided into ten sections, each with a word that, until recently, had seemed just a school exercise. That afternoon, however, the words pricked her attention like needles. She had shaded three sectors insistently: Studies, Physical Health, and Friendships. The shadows were dense, almost like cracks on the page. "No sé por…
Short story: The Shadow of the Watch The flyer had been pinned to a corkboard near the subway platform, its corners crumpled and the black marker ink smeared by rain. Julián saw it for the first time on a gray morning, rushed, with the weight of the previous night still in his body. He didn’t think it was more than one of those urban provocations people post for amusement or boredom. But something in the cadence of the lines—this tacit promise of control, of authority…
Short story: The Inner Lighthouse Mariana arrived in the coastal village one autumn afternoon with the feeling that something inside her had worn thin. She carried a simple backpack, a notebook with slightly dog-eared pages, and the intention of disappearing for a while to find herself again. The village was small: cobbled streets, houses with blue shutters, and the smell of salt and seaweed. She walked unhurriedly to the lighthouse, drawn by the promise of silence and…
Short story: SILENT SENSES The night spread over the small town like a warm, gray blanket; the streetlights traced pale circles along the lake’s edge while a cold breeze lifted little ripples on the water. Ana sat on a wooden bench, wrapped in her coat, a thermos cupped between her hands. From there she could see the plaza lit up in the distance: the annual festival had begun, but the laughter and music reached her only as echoes, too faint to draw her in. She preferred that…
Short story: The Paw Club It was a mild Saturday afternoon and the building’s community room smelled of freshly brewed coffee and the indistinct mix of catnip and air freshener. Doña Marta, a retired teacher and organizer of unexpected events, had arranged chairs in a circle, hung a poster with 12 feline rules, and set out a table with printed leaflets. She had invited every neighbor with cats to a talk — which in practice would become much more — about common mistakes…
Short story: The Mirage Marina never sought trouble. She grew up in a home where words were used to build bridges and, when they failed, to close doors gently. Over the years she learned to read tension in a gesture, to gauge the warmth of a room before entering, and to calculate the width of silence needed for others to find their own rhythm. She didn’t call it a “technique”; to her they were small courtesies that returned dignity to those who were losing it. One autumn…
Short story: Suma The city had learned to breathe among cables. Its vents smelled of old rain and motor oil; its streets were veins of neon that pulsed in time with ads and predictive routes. Glass towers pierced the sky where clouds once drifted; above the central plaza, an omnipresent screen projected, without pause, a phrase that had become liturgy and sentence: "In five years, digital intelligence will surpass the sum of all human intelligence." The magnate's name behind…
Short story: Programmed Emptiness The rain had started the night before and the city woke wrapped in a sticky gray that seemed to cling to clothes and moods. Marcos woke with the usual feeling that the day had already happened: the hours had memory and that memory was impermeable to novelty. He sat on the edge of the bed, feeling the weight of the blanket over his legs. On the nightstand, the alarm clock ticked eight with a mechanical tic he had learned to respect like a…
Short story: The Invisible Line The rain didn't fall: it returned. Each drop seemed to repeat the exact same chord, a rhythmic insistence that turned the city into a repeated score. Marcos took shelter under the coffee shop awning, hands buried in his coat pockets. Outside, the world kept its routine as if nothing had failed; inside him, a sense of fissure ran down his spine. He had arrived without remembering the way. He remembered the lamp in his apartment, the yellow…
Short story: Signs The hum of the servers filled the square like a silent orchestra. It wasn't a noise you heard with your ears: it was a presence that vibrated in the city's skin, in the railings, in café tables. Neo-Valle's colossal screens projected information without pause: news, ads, works of art, short series, reviews, playlists, and faces generated with such detail that it felt like any announced person could appear on the next corner. Everything was fluid, perfect,…
Short story: Echoes in the Silence The rain struck Lucía’s bedroom window with an irregular cadence that seemed to want to recall older rhythms: her mother sweeping the kitchen, the glass always set in the same place after dinner, conversations that began and ended without hurry. Outside, the city breathed cold and bright; inside, the blue light from the screen cast shadows she no longer recognized. Lucía (28) lingered for a while looking at the photo on the shelf: herself…
Short story: Silent Ash The rain had started as a timid murmur and, over the afternoon, became a steady drum against the windows of the small apartment where Maia lived alone. The drops traced paths across the glass, distorting the streetlight into a diffuse watercolor. Inside, the place smelled of cold tea and books; a desk lamp cast a cone of yellow light over a cluttered table with papers, a planner, and a ceramic mug with tea leaves. That focused brightness, however, did…
Short story: The Noise Before the Silence The city stretched out like a circuit board: neon lights blinking in sync with the hour, delivery drones cutting through the air with mathematical precision, screens adjusting brightness and content based on the passerby’s expression. Everything seemed designed to eliminate chance: optimized routes, recommended encounters, smiles suggested by algorithms. There was no public order forcing people to behave this way; it was a habit that…
Short story: The Suture of Oblivion Marina Valeri rang the bell of the building where she lived with the feeling that each step was a betrayal of her own body. The night before she had hardly slept; the fainting spells had become more frequent and the pains, sharp and constant, no longer responded to the painkillers or antibiotics they had prescribed. She walked slowly down the hallway to the elevator, her hand on her abdomen as if holding something fragile that could…
Short story: Neon Shadows The night in Kabukicho opened like a luminous wound: signs bleeding color, steam tangling around streetlights, and the city breathing with a rhythm that did not ask for names. At a corner where the rain left mirrors, the young people the world—hurried and forgetful through social media—had named the Toyoko Kids gathered every night. Their faces were fleeting frames, their gestures small rituals that algorithms turned into spectacle; tourists and…
Short story: The Buffet Pigeon On a block whose name no one could quite remember—they simply called it “the block of smells”—restaurants of every kind lined the street: a neon-lit pizzeria, a small bistro with checkered tablecloths, an empanada stand open late, and a soup food truck sending fragrant steam into the air. There, among sidewalk tables and conversations that smelled of coffee, lived Palomina, a pigeon who had made a decision as practical as it was decisive:…
Short story: Broken Mirrors The news arrived without warning: a pop-up forcing the screen’s glow to compete with the darkness of the room. Lara set the phone on her quilt and, still with the blue light ringing in her retinas, read the headline like someone hearing a sentence: ALERTA SALUD. Below, in smaller but equally harsh type, the UN warned of a severe deterioration in young people’s mental health worldwide. A report from the United Nations Development Programme noted…
Short story: The Tide of Silence The beach woke slowly, like someone stretching an asleep body. The tide had pulled back enough to leave a fan of gray, damp sand dotted with broken shells and black seaweed. The street vendors still smelled of coconut and hot oil; the murmur of the sea and distant bar music mingled in the warm air. That morning, no one noticed that the beach was waiting for something. Nai arrived with her hair loose and an easy laugh that seemed to script…
Short story: Jazz Conditioned In the heart of the Cronos Institute, behind a door labeled with a saxophone sticker and the word CAUTION, sat the Sound Laboratory. There, among tangled cables and shelves full of transparent cages, Dr. Sofía Márquez reviewed the protocol with the seriousness of someone tuning a concert. When she exchanged glances with her team, scientific certainty mingled with a curiosity that sometimes bordered on mischief. “Ready to turn science into a pop…
Short story: Cake, Cream, and Boundaries The afternoon passed with a gentle calm; the hall was decorated with paper garlands and warm lights that cast soft shadows on the walls. The main table, in the center of the room, held the cake: three immaculate tiers, white frosting, and piped cream flowers sculpted with precision. It looked like a work of art that refused to be touched. Friends and family chatted, laughed, and took photographs; the music—a mix of hits and songs that…
Short story: The Last Room In the San Remo neighborhood, the new streetlights couldn’t drown out a warm rectangle of light spilling onto the sidewalk: the old game room PixelBar. The city had changed—buildings with glass facades, cafés with hanging planters, and home networks promising instant access to everything. Yet, in the heart of the neighborhood, PixelBar stayed lit, its yellow windows and faded signs insisting on keeping a corner of another era alive. Mateo pushed…
Short story: Ash Routine The house of Marcos and Clara had been built from years of routine: work routines, quick dinners, televisions left on like background clocks, messages read halfway, and promises always postponed to “someday.” In the main living room, on a low table cluttered with magazines and remotes, the television projected an endless dance of images—ads, series, news, other people's laughter. It was a hypnotic light that took up space without asking anything in…
Top 5 musical - April, 2026 April, the fourth month of this year, where our usual musical segment is presented to us again with the list of the most listened to, which among many of them are classified within the same genre or are related in some way, except for one that is totally different. And that's something we'll look at next. And first of all, it should be remembered that this list is part of my profile on LastFM, a social network that has my statistics on music…
Short story: Neon of Tomorrow The rain fell over Seoul with the cadence of a futuristic metronome; each drop bounced on the asphalt and exploded into tiny neon lights that slid down the façades like electric frost. On the city’s fifth ring, an orbital café clung to the corner of a transparent building; its floating terrace offered views of the drone bay and the aerial highways. Mina left her laptop on the table — its screen open to a star map full of notes and a blinking…
Short story: THE SLOW BEAT The city spread out like a slab of neon and glass, a translucent body lit by data running beneath the skin of the buildings. Advertisements breathed; their rhythms shifted with the collective mood. Trams floated without rails, and plazas projected curated memories to attract emotional tourists. In that landscape of glare and sensory modification lived Mara, a memory technician at ChronoWeave, the corporation that had industrialized nostalgia. Her…
Short story: The Unexpected Piñata The house where the party was going to be held looked calm from the outside: dim lights in the yard, the front door ajar and a small sign that read “Welcome” hanging from the knob. Marco thought at first glance that he had found the perfect opportunity. He had checked streets, corners, and times; that night, by his imperfect calculation, the house should have been empty. With a misaligned moral compass and a ragged sack full of questionable…
Short story: The Perfect Sister (According to the Internet) Chapter 1 — The Post Aiko swiped her thumb across the screen while her heart fluttered between pride and embarrassment. The post she had made minutes after getting off work had gone viral with absurd speed: screenshots, comments, direct messages ranging from serious proposals to ridiculous offers. Some accounts proposed “serious dates,” others sent memes. At the top, still visible, was the headline she had typed on…
Short story: Ledge Night had fallen like a velvet curtain over Midtown. The offices, like horizontal constellations, gleamed in rectangular blocks while the city murmured below: a heartbeat of cars, distant sirens, conversations dissolving in the damp of the asphalt. On the 42nd floor of the Hawthorne Tower, a silhouette moved with the precision of an acrobat: a black cat, thin, walking along the exterior edge of a window as if the cornice were a tightrope. Mateo Ríos held…
Short story: The House That Stayed in the Air She woke with light stabbed into her eyelids like a knife. At first she thought she was still dreaming: contours were blurred, sounds filtered through a distance that hurt. A clock on the wall marked minutes that did not belong to her; voices around spoke with the tempered calm of those who have waited for the unpredictable. Three weeks, they told her. Three weeks that for her had been seven years. "Where am I?" she murmured, her…
@mc5punk
