Another Small Burn

Best not to think about it.

Everyone can burn now. Trade a memory and it goes up in coloured smoke and comes back as power: flight, a fist of red light, a full stomach. Spend too much and you join the burned, swaying in the streets of Chicago, London and Shanghai, not dead but worse.

Carlos wakes behind Marty's Corner Store in the empty town he grew up in, the last of the blue smoke still curling around his head, and runs the checklist he runs every morning. Who are you. Where are you. Have you hit rock bottom. He is hungry, he has an old pickup and a few good memories left, and one of them he keeps going back to.

A quiet horror short by Kristopher Mallory, first published on Stealth Fiction in 2026.