Bluesky · Hashtag

#shortstory

1,398
posts · 30d
409
users
47
posts / day
3.4
posts / user
-8% vs last week

#shortstory is an active hashtag on Bluesky. In the last 30 days, 409 people shared 1,398 posts with it — around 47 a day. Activity is down 8% versus the previous week, peaking on Aug 4 with 66 posts.

#shortstory posts per day (last 30 days)

Posts with #shortstory

Shimi ·⃝⃤
@shimi.bsky.social
11 months ago
New zine: “Look Into My Eyes One Last Time” A final love letter to the self I shed A prayer for the creature. Becoming A reckoning, a surrender. Homecoming This is my deepest wish laid bare—needle, fur, breath, & mercy. Being held with a care I never found. #AnimalHRT #Therianthropy #ShortStory
A hand-drawn black-and-white cover image in a sketchy ink style. At the top, large stenciled type reads: “LOOK INTO MY EYES ONE LAST TIME.” Below the title is a syringe and a small medicine vial labeled “LUPINEX – Therionyl – 5mL,” with a stylized eye logo on the label. The vial and syringe are crosshatched with vintage texture lines. Below the drawing, in handwritten script, is the phrase: “Homecoming, not vanishing” and the signature Shimi & Critter.
[Art on Page] A detailed graphite drawing of a wolf’s eyes. One, the left is more formed than the right — indicating a near but not complete transition. The fur around them is dense and wispy, rendered in fine pencil lines that suggest softness and depth. The eyes are highly realistic and expressive, staring directly outward with intense, soulful focus. They seem alert but ancient—wide with instinct, watching as if waiting for something to begin. The drawing fades at the edges into blank white space, giving the eyes a floating, disembodied presence.

Look into my eyes one last time

Look into my eyes. Hold them close until you can see the last scrap of me — the part that counts thoughts in lists, that weighs choices against rules, that folds shame into tidy, human-shaped pockets. Watch it loosen. Watch the corners of doubt unhook themselves like small animals from a net and dart away. There is no melodrama here, no violent yanking; it slips. The human mind peels like old bark, and underneath, the thing that always was settles warm and terrible and simple.
	They give me the last injection in a room that smells faintly of cedar and lemon. No needles, no cold clinical lecture — only the careful hands of doctors, veterinarians and nurses who know which bones to cradle and which stories to leave untold. I breathe. I lost the ability to count days back. I let the bracing liquid be a gate, not an instruction manual. I do not want to name it; names are the thin net that caught me for years.
	The burn is a rumour. It goes through me sideways — a quiet rearrangement, like a convent bell that signals not death but a calling. My limbs answer first. They stop thinking of movement and begin to remember it: how to fold, to coil, to push.
Tendons unlearn the polite phrasing of two-legged steps and curve toward the old, fourfold geometry of running. My hands tighten and flatten; the knuckles find a new logic. Fur prickles along my forearms as if a thousand small moths take flight together and settle again. Each hair is a note in a chord I’ve felt… no… known in my bones since childhood.
	Look again. See how the pupils widen, how the whites retreat like a shy moon. My last maps of metaphor — the maps that turned hunger into lists and longing into projects — dissolve. Where there had been a ledger of self, there is now only the immediate ledger of scent and sound and the earth’s exact tilt beneath my weight. I do not mourn the maps. I never used them as well as the human world predicted and as I pretended.
	Sound changes. Those little, trivial noises of the room condense into a chorus: the slow tick of breath in the person beside me, the whisper of fabric, the distant wet confluence of gutters. And underneath that: a low, patient life-frequency — root and soil and river. It is not music so much as an acknowledgment. I find I can hear the insect conversation inside the walls, the sap walking up the birch, the small, stupid heartbeat of a mouse two blocks away. There is an intimacy to it that is almost rude.
	Breath becomes work and worship at once. My ribcage narrows, then widens in ways I know but cannot name. Milk memories — a thing to shame into silence when human — rise like a tide: the cadence of suckling, the doctrinal simplicity of being called to feed and to protect. A swelling around my belly that is not fat but purpose.
 I think of my children who never were, of the packs I have loved in mute pieces. The notion of motherhood is larger than gender; it is a compass with teeth. My children! You are my children and you are my all!
My jaw shifts. I feel the slow, inevitable rearrangement — a socket loosens, a hinge finds its voice. A tooth erupts where an organised thought had lived. The smell of iron, rain-damp soil, and sleeping bodies that have waited for me — flooding my mouth like saliva.
Tears come and I do not know if they are human or creature; they taste of salt and release. There is a tenderness in my own trembling that I have never allowed before.
	Outside the window, someone whose scent I knew laughs and it sounds to me like a distant bell. The handlers murmur: careful, gentle, let her and her pack decide. My mouth forms the shape and bark of guttural assent I could not voice when I was wholly human. Somewhere a crate opens as if the world is taking a breath with me.
	They will test me further, yes. They will see whether my newness walks toward the wild or clings to the small, safe hands of fosterers who will teach me boundaries, how to pass in a world of paved things. I do not fear them. I am no longer wrapped in that ledger — of consent, of cost, of consequence. I am wrapped in appetite and mercy. The choice, if there is one, feels less like an argument and more like a direction: toward den or home, toward the kill lovingly taken or the bowl lovingly given.
	Look once more. There is no human drama in my eyes now — only depth, like a riverbed where stones remember every footstep. The last scrap of thought, the tiny librarian of my life who loved lists, things and order, exhales and steps back through the doorway we are leaving open. I feel it go, and where it is gone there is fullness, a pulse that answers the creature’s call without translation.
	This is not a loss. It is not my obliteration. It is the solving of a long, clenched equation. I am not lessened. I am finally the shape I have been learning.
	Look into my eyes, one last time.
	I am awakening.

— Shimi & Critter
@shimi.bsky.social
37 241 565
Micro SF/F by O. Westin
@microsff.com
8 months ago
The emperor was sitting in his bed when the assassin came in through the window. "Welcome, old friend." "Wait," the assassin wheezed. The emperor waited for him to catch his breath. "I'm too old for this," the assassin said at last. 1/3 #ShortStory
1 141 470
Chris @ Heroes Peak
@heroespeak.bsky.social
over 1 year ago
Something that's been rattling around my head for awhile. Hope you enjoy it. Comfort is… 🧵 #photography 📸 #photosky #nature #shortstory #writing The dry leaves crunched below the traveler’s feet. The clear autumn skies were a pleasant change from the damp spring and summer heat. 1/11
Streaks of sunlight on a curved woodland trail with tall trees of various yellow hues
a small cemetery perched on a mossy embankment. Fallen leaves sat undisturbed, like a warm blanket. Ripples of sunlight illuminated the headstones. Some new, others a mere fragment. A lowly rusted wire fence was all that separated the living and the dead.
7 flat stones buried in the shadowed forest hill covered in dead leaves
2 19 359
Crystal Jayme (Scotty) Comic Artist
@scottycomics.bsky.social
9 days ago
My New Viz one-shot "Do You Like Fruit" is out now!!!! 🦇🍎 Read it here: www.viz.com/vizmanga/cha... Or on the App for free! And let Viz know what you thought by leaving a comment or even filling out the questionnaire (if it pops up after you've read it! ☺️) #viz @viz.com #oneshot #shortstory
app.bsky.embed.gallery#view
4 55 105

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