All the Ways We Break the World, by Bogdan Dragos
All the Ways We Break the World, by Bogdan Dragos

“Time is both a thief and a gardener. It takes the thing you thought you couldn’t live without and leaves seeds where you forget to look.”

All the Ways We Break the World, by Bogdan Dragos

When the world grows too loud, open this book.

All the Ways We Break the World is a collection of speculative short stories for quiet nights, for the hours when you want the noise to fall away and imagination to take its place.

Inside these pages, the ordinary bends.

ABRACADABRA

A boy discovers a book of magic whose tricks are gentle, private, and costly. Each spell asks for a memory in return, and as his home grows quieter, he must decide what is worth forgetting.

FROZEN IN TIME

A man who can stop time meets the only woman who can move in it. Together they steal seconds like kisses and try to build forever in the cracks between heartbeats. But every miracle comes with a dead-line.

TRANSCENDENT

When newlyweds Mia and Ben unlock a sealed pantry, they find a USB from their future kids, part love note, part warning. Before the night’s over, they’ll have to choose between a life that’s predicted for them and one they get to live themselves.

LOCKER 12

After his wife’s death, a grieving man finds a locked box that shouldn’t exist, and something inside it that makes him question who she really was.

MAYDAY

When Flight 228 touches down in New York, there’s one more pas-senger than the manifest lists, and no sign of how he came aboard. As Captain Ward searches for answers, she uncovers a disturbance in the air where time folds back on itself, and the dead remember how to arrive.

A SUDDEN CHANGE OF HEART

Megan’s making a list of reasons to leave her boyfriend when he bursts in with a winning lottery ticket. Love, money, and moral flex-ibility go to war in real time, and Megan’s suddenly not sure what “forever” costs per share.

TWINKLE TWINKLE

A child makes a wish on a star, which turns out to be a malfunction-ing satellite. Somewhere in orbit, a weary technician receives her request and decides, against policy, to grant it.

GHOST STORY

John’s a blocked writer who wakes up to find someone, or something, finishing his book for him. The ghost is funny, sharp, and better at dialogue. But she also wants something he can’t give: a rewrite of her own unfinished life.

A DOOR IS NOT A DOOR WHEN IT’S AJAR

A little girl grows up in a locked cellar with one rule: never open the door. But rules are only strong until you start asking why.

THE FIFTH KIND

Aliens finally make contact. Humanity’s ambassador? A man who still can’t program his microwave. Negotiations were doomed from the first handshake.

AN EYE FOR AN EYE

In the humid hush of Charleston, two men plan a quick score and a clean getaway. But when the night turns bloody, it’s clear the job was never about money, it was about settling a debt no one saw coming.

THE LAST SUPPER (AGAIN)

When journalist Cal accepts an invitation to a secret dinner hosted by the mysterious Madame Vesperine, he expects pretension, not sorcery. By dessert, reality is unraveling course by course, and the bill, due at sunrise, demands more than money.

THE LAST REFLECTION

She wakes to a silent city, no people, no sound, no movement. The only thing left alive is her echo.

ZUGZWAND

Two chess prodigies with supernatural abilities face off: mind-reading versus foresight. Every move costs more than a game.

AN OFFER YOU CAN REFUSE

Evicted, broke, and one bad decision from homelessness, Leon starts calling in favors. They pay out, in blood, debt, and explosions of bad timing. Every contact helps him climb; every hand up drags him deeper down.

BEAM ME UP

The world’s first teleportation works perfectly, except the apple they send arrives half-eaten. The scientists blame a glitch. The cameras roll. The mystery gets hungrier.

DARK DREAMS

William’s dreams indulge every forbidden impulse he hides from daylight, until the fantasies start leaving fingerprints.

FUTURE’S PAST

Nora wakes in a city a century ahead, clean, kind, and full of people who remember her like a saint. The problem? She’s not dead.

THE MIRROR INITIATIVE

When billionaire Elliot Crane pays a stranger to flirt with a woman for sport, he thinks it’s just another game for bored rich men. By the end of lunch, the woman has turned the table, and the bet becomes the most expensive lesson Elliot’s ever bought.

AUDITED

Marvin’s Heaven’s most overworked accountant, quietly balancing karma ledgers since the Renaissance. Then a discrepancy appears, one soul missing, one too many condemned.

WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME

A tired man steps into a bar for a quiet drink, only to find everyone there knows his name, his sins, and his middle-school haircut.

THE SIM ARCHIVE

In a future where emotion has been outlawed and humanity lives in a perfectly balanced simulation, a maintenance worker named Lira finds something that shouldn’t exist: laughter.

IN BETWEEN

Every night, she wakes from a nightmare with a souvenir from it beside her: a matchbook, a feather, a note that wasn’t there before.

FLAT OUT

The world wakes up to undeniable proof: Earth is flat. The internet implodes, world leaders improvise, and science packs up early for retirement.

UNCHARTED DREAMS

She’s trapped in endless dreams, each one feeling real, each one less like fiction. Somewhere between sleep and waking, she has to choose what to believe.

THE BUTTERFLY

Two strangers meet online and fall in love, hard, over twenty-four hours of messages. A romance born, lived, and ended before break-fast.

THE OTHER SIDE OF GLASS

While scrolling through her phone, Mara finds a photo of herself asleep. She lives alone. Or she did.

MIDDLE MANAGEMENT

Drago meets a man who claims to be God. He doesn’t believe him until the miracles get personal, petty, and a little too specific.