[{"id":"217","link":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/217-2\/","name":"217-2","thumbnail":{"url":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Ocean.png","alt":""},"title":"The Year the Ocean Returned My Brother | A short story","author":{"name":"talysin","link":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/author\/talysin\/"},"date":"Mar 5, 2026","dateGMT":"2026-03-05 05:38:27","modifiedDate":"2026-03-05 05:40:24","modifiedDateGMT":"2026-03-05 05:40:24","commentCount":"0","commentStatus":"open","categories":{"coma":"<a href=\"https:\/\/clallen.com\/category\/uncategorized\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Uncategorized<\/a>","space":"<a href=\"https:\/\/clallen.com\/category\/uncategorized\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Uncategorized<\/a>"},"taxonomies":{"post_tag":""},"readTime":{"min":18,"sec":33},"status":"publish","excerpt":"Twenty years ago, Daniel\u2019s brother vanished beneath the waves during a family vacation, a moment that fractured their lives and left a silence that never healed. Then, on a storm-lashed night along the same shore, the ocean returns him. Still thirteen. Still alive. While the rest of the family has aged, he remains exactly as he was the day he drowned, asking simple questions no one knows how to answer. As the long night unfolds, the family must confront the impossible gift they have been given, and the quiet truth behind it: the sea has not returned their lost son to live again, but to offer them something they were never able to give him before. A final goodbye."},{"id":"187","link":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/the-morticians-friends-a-short-story\/","name":"the-morticians-friends-a-short-story","thumbnail":{"url":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-4-2026-08_08_25-PM.png","alt":""},"title":"The Mortician's Friends | A short story","author":{"name":"Chris Allen","link":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/author\/chris\/"},"date":"Mar 5, 2026","dateGMT":"2026-03-05 01:13:34","modifiedDate":"2026-03-05 04:01:01","modifiedDateGMT":"2026-03-05 04:01:01","commentCount":"0","commentStatus":"open","categories":{"coma":"<a href=\"https:\/\/clallen.com\/category\/short-story\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Short Story<\/a>","space":"<a href=\"https:\/\/clallen.com\/category\/short-story\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Short Story<\/a>"},"taxonomies":{"post_tag":""},"readTime":{"min":35,"sec":15},"status":"publish","excerpt":"A lonely mortician who stopped living after his wife and daughter died discovers the dead don't want to haunt him. They want to keep him company. But something else in the building does want something from him: it feeds on his grief, needs him sealed, and has been quietly starving him for six years. When he finally lets himself feel it all, he finds out death was never the thing he needed to fear. Forgetting to live was."},{"id":"134","link":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/haunted-savannah-coloring-book\/","name":"haunted-savannah-coloring-book","thumbnail":{"url":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Untitled-design-2026-03-04T064209.969.png","alt":""},"title":"Haunted Savannah Coloring Book","author":{"name":"Chris Allen","link":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/author\/chris\/"},"date":"Mar 4, 2026","dateGMT":"2026-03-04 11:45:39","modifiedDate":"2026-03-05 04:01:32","modifiedDateGMT":"2026-03-05 04:01:32","commentCount":"0","commentStatus":"open","categories":{"coma":"<a href=\"https:\/\/clallen.com\/category\/books\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Books<\/a>","space":"<a href=\"https:\/\/clallen.com\/category\/books\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Books<\/a>"},"taxonomies":{"post_tag":""},"readTime":{"min":1,"sec":23},"status":"publish","excerpt":""},{"id":"124","link":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/the-door-at-the-end-of-every-dream-a-short-story\/","name":"the-door-at-the-end-of-every-dream-a-short-story","thumbnail":{"url":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Door-at-the-End.png","alt":""},"title":"The Door at the End of Every Dream | A short story","author":{"name":"Chris Allen","link":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/author\/chris\/"},"date":"Mar 4, 2026","dateGMT":"2026-03-04 11:31:59","modifiedDate":"2026-03-05 05:01:22","modifiedDateGMT":"2026-03-05 05:01:22","commentCount":"0","commentStatus":"open","categories":{"coma":"<a href=\"https:\/\/clallen.com\/category\/short-story\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Short Story<\/a>","space":"<a href=\"https:\/\/clallen.com\/category\/short-story\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Short Story<\/a>"},"taxonomies":{"post_tag":""},"readTime":{"min":33,"sec":54},"status":"publish","excerpt":"Across the world, people are reporting the same dream. A long hallway. Bare walls. A door at the end. Every night, they wake up closer to it.\nDr. Elias Mercer is a clinical psychologist who has spent his career proving that dreams are nothing more than neurological noise. Then his patients start arriving pale and sleepless, describing the same corridor in the same words. Then the forums fill. Then the news breaks. Then, one night, Mercer closes his eyes and finds himself standing at the far end of a hallway he has heard described a hundred times. At the end of it, a door. And behind the door, breathing. Not one breath. Not two. Millions. Something vast and ancient, waiting with the patience of something for which waiting is not an act but simply a state of being. Something that has watched humanity move toward it for centuries. Because eventually, someone was always going to open it."},{"id":"58","link":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/vacancy-a-short-story\/","name":"vacancy-a-short-story","thumbnail":{"url":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Vacancy.png","alt":""},"title":"Vacancy | A short story","author":{"name":"Chris Allen","link":"https:\/\/clallen.com\/author\/chris\/"},"date":"Mar 4, 2026","dateGMT":"2026-03-04 10:33:19","modifiedDate":"2026-03-05 03:59:33","modifiedDateGMT":"2026-03-05 03:59:33","commentCount":"0","commentStatus":"open","categories":{"coma":"<a href=\"https:\/\/clallen.com\/category\/short-story\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Short Story<\/a>","space":"<a href=\"https:\/\/clallen.com\/category\/short-story\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Short Story<\/a>"},"taxonomies":{"post_tag":""},"readTime":{"min":35,"sec":27},"status":"publish","excerpt":"Daniel Marsh is forty-three years old, recently divorced, and driving nowhere in particular down a dark midwestern highway at midnight. When a flickering neon sign offers him a room for the night, he pulls in. The motel is cheap and forgettable. The room is exactly what you'd expect. The mattress is just a mattress.\nUntil it isn't.\nDaniel had been driving for four hours. He did not know exactly where he was. He knew he was in Indiana, or perhaps had already crossed into Illinois, though he\u2019d missed the last two signs. He did not particularly care. He kept his hands at ten and two, the way his father had taught him, and he watched the road and he did not think, or at least he tried not to, which was not quite the same thing but was close enough to sustain him mile after mile.\n\nThe truck, his truck now, officially his since the paperwork had cleared in September, hummed along at sixty-four miles per hour. He could tell by the particular pitch of the engine when he was at sixty-four. He had driven this truck for nine years and he knew its sounds the way you know the sounds of a house you\u2019ve lived in long enough. The faint whistle from the passenger window when he hit seventy. The way the steering wheel trembled slightly on right-hand curves. These things were familiar. These things were his.\n\nThe radio had given out somewhere around the Indiana border. Not broken, exactly. It simply could not find anything worth broadcasting. He had scanned the dial twice in each direction and found only the patient hiss of static, punctuated now and then by the ghost of a country song or the fragment of a voice, some late-night preacher or talk show that faded before it resolved into anything recognizable. He\u2019d left it on. The static was better than silence. Silence had too much room in it.\n\nHe was forty-three years old. He was driving alone on a highway in the middle of a Tuesday night in October with no destination he would have been willing to honestly name. He told himself he was heading to his brother\u2019s place in Kansas City, but Gary hadn\u2019t invited him and didn\u2019t know he was coming and Daniel had not called ahead, which he recognized, somewhere in the flat gray region behind his sternum, as evidence that Kansas City was not actually where he was going. He was simply going. The forward motion was the point. Stop moving and the thoughts caught up.\n\nClaire had packed her boxes on a Wednesday. He remembered this because he had been home, having taken a personal day without fully understanding why, and he had sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee he didn\u2019t want, listening to the sounds from the bedroom. The careful systematic rustling of a person organizing their departure. She had not slammed or thrown things. She was not a slammer or a thrower. That had always been part of the problem, or perhaps part of the solution, depending on who was keeping score. If she had screamed at him, if she had smashed something, it might have felt more like a rupture and less like a slow leak. Instead it was just the rustling, and the sound of tape being pulled from a dispenser, and the soft thud of cardboard flaps being folded into place.\n\nHe hadn\u2019t gone in to help. He hadn\u2019t offered. He wasn\u2019t sure whether this made him cruel or simply accurate in his assessment of what she wanted.\n\nAfter she left he had stood in the bedroom doorway for a long time. The closet on her side was open, its interior bare except for a few wire hangers still on the rod, turning slowly in a draft he could not locate. The room had smelled like her perfume and beneath that like the particular clean scent of freshly emptied space, the way a room smells when something has been removed from it that had been there long enough to leave a kind of presence behind.\n\nHe had slept on the couch for three weeks without quite deciding to.\n\nThe headlights pushed forward into the dark. The fields gave way to a stretch of scrubland and then resumed, the stalks thinner here, the earth looking used and a little defeated. A possum sat motionless at the road\u2019s shoulder, its eyes catching the light and throwing it back green-white, and then it was gone behind him. He had not seen another pair of headlights in forty minutes.\n\nHe was tired. The kind of tired that sits behind the eyes and makes the edges of things seem soft and slightly unreal. He had stopped for gas outside of Indianapolis and eaten a gas station sandwich that tasted of cellophane and refrigerant, and he had drunk two cups of bad coffee that had helped for an hour and were now helping not at all. The heater was on but it was not quite keeping up with the cold coming through the seams of the truck\u2019s old doors, and his fingers were stiff on the wheel, and the road kept going.\n\nHe thought about calling Gary.\n\nHe thought about turning around.\n\nHe did neither.\n\nThe static on the radio shifted briefly, some compression in the atmosphere opening a channel, and he heard three words from something before it closed again. He couldn\u2019t make them out. They sounded almost like his name.\n\nHe was overtired. He knew what overtired did to the mind.\n\nThen, perhaps two miles ahead, a light appeared.\n\nNot headlights. Something stationary. A smear of color in the dark, low to the ground, pinkish-red and stuttering in a way that lights connected to electricity sometimes do when the connection is not quite right. He watched it resolve as he approached. A sign. Neon tubing bent into letters, some sections dimmer than others, a couple flickering with the irregular rhythm of something about to give out.\n\nVACANCY."}]