Fiction Fantastic 2025 Winning Story: “Superscript” by Ishika Chakraborty

The story below is a winner from our Fiction Fantastic Young Writers Contest, open to all youth in Lane County. For more information on this contest, including how to enter, visit here. Support this program with a donation.

You can purchase this story in the 2025 Winners Anthology, Echoes of the Future.

“Superscript” by Ishika Chakraborty, South Eugene High School

Honorable Mention, High School Level, 2025

Superscript

by Ishika Chakraborty

South Eugene High School

When Freesia bites down, acid bursts under her tongue. Sharp, sweet, smoked by the bitter air of the Vessel. She’s going to die like this. Her skin has shriveled, her eyes wet and haunted in a way not even a mirror could stand to look at.

She spits, and crackled pink shells fall at her feet, spiked and mottled with flecks of dark copper. The cuts along the roof of her mouth burn better than a star. Before the sugar hits her bloodstream, she only has to listen hard enough to hear them—doleful footsteps following in her wake, delicate, damp, searching. She never sees them, never witnesses rotting souls that aren’t her own.

Fifty-two years ago, long before the Vessel had swallowed everything along the horizon, a raven fellow had gifted her a stack of crudely sketched botanical drawings. Freesia only has to sleep a few laborious hours to imagine his face. He had been nice-looking, smooth and supple. She misses having someone to speak to.

Most of the drawings are worthless—who can find purple roots and aphrodisiac spores in a place like this? Only one has served its purpose, the rusted coral fruits she likes to call crackstones. Soteria tulsinthe, the faded ink reads, its accompanying description so marred by dust that she had to discover the fruits’ painfully heady taste for herself, a pooling of tart pus along her tongue and behind her molars.

Whatever nutrients her crackstones hold, they’ve kept her going. It’s disgust that fills her lungs when gouging them from the Vessel’s walls, and equal parts dread when imagining how the Vessel might retaliate. She is never punished for her survival, but it does not matter. The solitude will kill her first.

Twenty-three rail cycles have passed. In the beginning, her head had been clear. Counting came as second nature. As time trickles by (does an hour hold meaning? A day? A week?) her vision blurs, her stomach roils, and it becomes a Sisyphean feat to remember. Twenty-three is close enough. It has to be.

“Trust me,” she speaks aloud into the wet air. Her lips are chapped. Hearing her own voice is frightful. Any sense of preservation has been dulled to a flat, stagnant hum behind her ears, and she can only pray that the Vessel will not respond.

Sometimes, it tries to speak to her. Its voice is something out of the deep recesses of the earth, hoarse and quietly hideous. The incessant vibrations through her skull twist her into fetal positions, jaw clenched to an uncomfortable ache until the Vessel has exhausted itself. After, she begins to wander once more.

That is all she can do. Wander until she’s dizzied, until she’s crawling on her hands and knees, splitting slick membranes with her bare hands to reveal more tunnels, more wandering.

(It isn’t aimless, she tells herself furiously. Somewhere, something, someone, I only have to wait.)

During the fifth rail cycle, when the pulsing walls held open orifices into the Ether, she’d catch glimpses of others like her. Soft faces, clean nails, weeping smiles. If her memory serves her, that is. It must have been the last time she experienced such a thing, for soon after the Vessel stitched its open wounds and made her a pitiable husk of a human.

Once upon a time, Freesia liked to sing faintly to herself when the tunnels shrunk in on themselves, bottlenecking her into tight crevices that stank of charred meat and sour rot. Breathless tunes and mindless rhymes, the kind children repeat to themselves until your head starts to spin. The Vessel made her stop.

Too much, it had groaned, and it did not sound anything like a person. Its words were not words, its voice more of a concept than a tangible thing. Freesia is still unsure how she understands, when each breath feels like her last and each pulse of the floor serves as a reminder of her fate.

Now, with fresh heat quivering along each nerve ending, she moves forward in the way dying animals drag themselves to water. Her skin feels hot. She wants to peel it off. Seventy-four years ago, her father took her to an orangery in the countryside, and she had spent the day prying open ripe citrus. What lies beneath her own layers?

(Desperation is man’s savior. Without it, her decaying corpse would have long ago been devoured as the Vessel’s last supper.)

Her hair has grown long and unruly, matted with thick crackstone syrup and the excretions of her sweltering prison. Something smells faintly of bitter ginger and rainwater, and hope stirs faintly in Freesia’s chest. The rail station? Yes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

She is thrown roughly to the cold ground, as though the Vessel has vomited her up. The air buzzes faintly, and an unknown light source floods the space in sickly yellow.

She grins gleefully back at the tunnel that has deposited her so graciously, and finds herself delirious with gratitude. Perhaps the Vessel loves her after all.

The twenty-fourth rail cycle approaches, she is sure of it. Freesia watches the rusted tracks with unflinching focus, preparing for the telltale rumble of the train. The train won’t stop, this much she is sure of, but routine encourages survival.

One thousand and six years ago—eight hours?—Freesia took the train to her first internship at a local lab. Just two days later, she came kicking and screaming into the world from her mother’s womb. Time is interchangeable and meaningless.

She feels the shudders of the wheels before she hears them. The shrill whistle is music to her ears. The back of her head throbs and a string of saliva trickles down her chin. She sees it then—a great hunk of stained metal overgrown with black vines. She peers closer. They’re already looking back at her.

Twelve rail cycles ago, Freesia came to the chilling realization that the faces in the windows were not figments of her unhealthy imagination.

They are so beautiful, those pasty white creatures with sharp teeth and pits for eyes. They receive her blinding smiles silently, passively. Freesia has resigned herself to the fact that they are likely blind. She cares not where they go or where they come from, only that they arrive at the station for each cycle.

(The time between each cycle is indeterminable. Freesia counts days in heartbeats and seconds in the number of times she cries into the Vessel’s nonexistent lap.)

She watches the train slowly approach. This had been her first mistake, at the first cycle, when everything had been sterile and sharp and clearer than the fractals of light in a diamond. The train will not stop, even if it gives such an impression. Torment can only be torment if you allow it.

Throat dry, Freesia wishes maddeningly for another crackstone to place under her tongue. The sugar would tide her over, let her memorize a few of the creatures’ faces. If Freesia had more sense, she would carry a few with her at all times, and now realizes, regrettably, that the last time she saw a cluster of crackstones had been several hundred paces ago.

The train continues to slow.

She remembers when the Ether used to be called something else. Remembers when those mangled faces and gaping mouths had been people like her, when time had been linear and functional, when the Vessel had been little more than an old wives’ tale.

Her eyes graze over the glistening windows of each train car, trail over those creatures similar in features yet different in stature. One is alone, its waxen face pressed up against the glass. She looks at it.

It looks at her.

It looks at her.

The train has yet to pass. Shakily, she collapses against the wall behind the platform, still brightly lit like a stage. The Vessel’s damp warmth greets her.

The train is going to stop.

Twenty-three cycles. The train has never stopped.

The creature is still looking at her, blank and unwavering. Heat rises to Freesia’s cheeks, flushes them fever-red. Her hands tremble badly and the ground shakes before her eyes. Something soaks through the back of her shirt, hot and wet like blood. The Vessel is thanking her.

No more sorrow, she thinks giddily. The train is stopping! She thinks the doors are opening, but it’s hard to tell, hard to see, hard to smell and taste and breathe. She braces a hand behind her, against the Vessel, pushes herself to her feet. Crackstone shells drop from her pockets.

Nineteen minutes ago, the Vessel swallowed her whole and made her its child. Seven years ago, the raven fellow told her that an entity was approaching, a great cadaverous being that would eat the planet whole. Four days ago, Freesia realized she was well and truly alone. Thirteen weeks ago, Freesia watched the first rail cycle pass with raw eyes and a stomach wound tight as a spring.

The creatures are standing at the open door. It’s waiting for her, the train. For her. For the first and last time, Freesia hopes to hear something from the Vessel. An encouragement, an admonishment. She presses a hand to its uneven skin, watches her foot step forward as though it belongs to someone else. The walls are made from flesh. She’s going crazy.

The creatures are within reach. Their mouths are agape, filled with rows of blades. She is sure, then, that they are going to eat her.

Twenty-three rail cycles ago, Freesia met the beginning of the end.