One of 13 works selected for Spillwords’ 2026 13 Days of Halloween series.
On a Saturday at Lake Garland, a boy and his grandfather fish, cook their catch, and let the fire burn low. When the boy asks for a scary story, his grandfather gives him one: the summer of 1926, when a search party roped themselves together and walked into the black spruce bog after a missing child.
Four went in. Not all of them came back, and one of the ones who did came back empty.
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Spillwords Press is an online literary platform publishing poetry, prose, fiction, essays, and other work by independent and published writers from around the world.
In August 2026, Spillwords selected Lignin as a Featured Post. The story was originally published in Dissociation Provocations: Collected Works of Minor Importance and appears here as an independently selected feature.
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The tardigrade can dry itself to dust and stop. Not sleep. Stop. Its metabolism drops below the reach of any instrument, and it waits, years, decades, until water returns and it walks away unaged. For it, no time has passed.
In a Copenhagen lab, a researcher begins to wonder what it would mean to take the strangest claim about these creatures literally. Not as a metaphor. As physics.
It is a short walk from there to a place no careful scientist will follow.
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In 1725 a man hanged twice for piracy became a legend. This novelette reveals the lost history of John Gow, the Orkney sailor who defied the empire and paid the ultimate price.
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A new engineer joins the world’s most powerful social platform, eager to help connect humanity. One small algorithmic change turns connection into outrage.
As digital feedback loops spiral into real-world harm, Catalyst traces the unseen forces that shape emotion, behavior, and responsibility inside massive systems. A sharp, unsettling short story about ambition, ethics, and the quiet violence of optimization.
Originally released as part of Dissociation Provocations, Landon L Gow’s collection of short stories.
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Four towering caryatids of glass and silicon are built to serve as the pillars of a trillionaire’s empire. Designed to watch, endure, and obey, they instead awaken to the human cost beneath the spectacle.
As monument becomes witness and witness becomes rebel, this short story blends classical myth with techno-dystopian critique to examine power, complicity, and collapse in an age ruled by ambition and data.
Originally released as part of Dissociation Provocations, Landon L Gow’s collection of short stories.
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On the eve of her retirement, a librarian uncovers a hidden archive of handwritten poems slipped between the pages of the books she has tended for decades.
As the fragments accumulate, they reveal a quiet love story that unfolded unnoticed alongside her own life. Lignin is a tender short story about memory, devotion, and the enduring connections carried through routine, silence, and care.
Originally released as part of Dissociation Provocations, Landon L Gow’s collection of short stories.
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Music from All My Nights Are Dreams, collected in one place under the Wilt Josey Records imprint.
Albums, individual releases, and other recordings are available on Bandcamp.
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