This creepy little science fiction story is now up for your reading and/or listening pleasure here.

Most of the time, when people ask me where I get my ideas from I can’t give them a good answer. Story seeds just sort of appear, usually when it’s most inconvenient. But in this case, “Trenches” was born from a Codex story competition in which you received a setting from another contestant and had to base your story around that scene.

Mine came from the talented James Beamon, who gave me this setting:

Your scene is a trench, the foremost of an interlaced network of trenches. Wooden beams line the sides of the rough hewn trench to keep the earthen walls from collapse. Unmarked crates are in this trench, their contents as yet unknown. On top of the crates are personal effects: a straight razor, a ragged picture, a tin cup, a mirror, batteries. Behind this trench are the other trenches in the network, also rough and crudely dug. In front of this trench, topside, is a lush field of emerald green grass. A small brook babbles its crystal water some few scant yards ahead in that grass field and in the distance a copse of trees stands unmolested and inviting. It is far from no man’s land; it is every man’s land.

Now I know nothing about trench warfare or the military and I didn’t have time to do research because, you know, hard deadlines. So I told my characters to start making things up – until I figured something out. Except, turns out that once a narrator starts lying, they don’t want to stop.

The song that I played on loop while I wrote and edited this story was Speed The Collapse by Metric.

Anyway, hope you enjoy!