Story Embers

Our Final Chapter Dear Story Embers Community, After much thought and prayer, we’ve decided that Story Embers will be closing its doors. This has been a difficult c […]

By Laurel Wood
 
I wake to the taste of saltwater on my tongue and throbbing behind my eyes. Heat sears my back as I bob in turquoise waves. Below and around me float crates imprinted with Japanese symbols, […]

By Victoria Shanks
 
The desert is no place for a guilty conscience. The silence eats at sinners until they’re small enough and broken enough to be swallowed whole.
 
That’s why Erin Flores chose the Mojav […]

By Mackenzie Nicole 
 
Wine in hand, I stepped into the scalding shower without checking the temperature. The sensation offered a brief reprieve from the ache in my heart. I stumbled on a leftover sliver of a s […]

By Allie Robyn
 
We stopped at the teashop on Madison Street.
Abstract renditions of flowers hung from the walls.
A case displayed little pastries, perfect and neat.
The worker behind the counter gave us a […]

By Emily Waldorf
 
Recently I had a dream;
Creeping and stealthy, it quietly came.
The pictures I saw were dull and blurred,
But the air about me with voices stirred.
 
Confused at first, but gradually c […]

By Kathryn Sadakierski
 
I walk the length of another road,
but endless paths branch from it
in every direction.
The journey was arduous
but rewarding
in strengthening me
so I can climb another […]

By Claire Tucker
 
Every moment in every story makes a promise: the conversation, decision, or setting that the author is focusing on holds significance, whether immediately or in a future chapter. As a reader, […]

By Alithea Wrights
 
The phenomenon first happened when I was seven years old.
 
Mud caked my pants and the tip of my nose as I stirred an earthy concoction with a stick. “Leaves!” I commanded, my hand outst […]

By Zachary Holbrook
When I was nine years old, I became the dictator of a sprawling, shape-shifting land called Fiction, and my political party consisted of myself, a few other students in our homeschool co-op […]

By Sarah Wiens
 
Dedicated to the Sidwell family, in memory of Wynn, my childhood playmate.
 
You asked me if I believe. I’m not sure
After all my sister and I have endured.
What made You stay so far awa […]

By Rachel Evans

“The hero sobbed piteously over the corpse of her mentor, swearing to avenge him. After an hour of weeping, she wiped her eyes and returned to saving the world, setting her sadness aside un […]

By Emily Waldorf
 
The sunlit world is all aglow
While shafts of golden brightness find
The dust of diamonds on the snow.
But darker seem the lines of shade—
Long lines of shadow on my mind.
 
The pea […]

By Joe Bisicchia

 
Love begins and never ends.
Love is, with justice never distant,
raveled and unraveled, here, everywhere.
No departed utterance,
it endures beyond sounds
of rhyme, time, upon lips, […]

By Al Zapor
 
I never meant to bring you along to this cliff,
But still, here we sit, watching the tide roll in.
The sun sets in the vast emptiness, and I wonder if
You know this isn’t a detour, rather, th […]

By Jonathan Babcock
 
Your character shivers alone on the shore, her clothes soaked from her boat overturning in the rapids and her backpack drifting somewhere along the river bottom. She spends several minutes […]

By Rachel Leitch
 
Mythology influences countless books and movies. At the elementary school where I work, it appears in Rick Riordan’s popular Percy Jackson series, which Christian readers have split op […]

By Sarah Spradlin
 
Stories from all over the world hold that wayfarers,
especially sailors,
often got tattoos of swallows.
It was, after all, the swooping swallows
against the blue sky
they would see well […]