SoulFire77

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I have 121 stories published in 8 collections on the site.
My stories have been read 32614 times and 122 of my stories have been cherry picked.
11 of my 69 comments have been voted Great Feedback with a total of 18 votes

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J. Oliver Padgett

J. Oliver Padgett writes horror and dystopian fiction from the North Carolina Piedmont. His work explores economic coercion, institutional complicity, and what people become when survival demands compromise. Novels include "Lily", "The Interview", and "Escape From Room 101". His prose favors psychological dread over graphic violence, working-class authenticity over literary posturing, and endings that deny comfort. By day, he works in warehouse logistics—a background that informs his fiction's attention to the quiet machinery that grinds people down. 

My stories

Cherry

Snap Decision

I find her reading glasses on the counter where she always left them, beside the bowl she used for keys she never found again. I find the knife she...
Cherry

"I'm Not Finished."

Three days after we put her in the ground, I heard her voice in the kitchen - not a memory, not the echo grief makes of the dead, but her voice, her...
Gold cherry

While I Wasn't Listening

In the hush after a ping, the breath between notifications, the half-second before refresh— nothing at all. I remember quiet. I remember reaching for...
2 likes
Cherry

The Less Miserables Enter a Contest (3)

(Cont.) He finished fourth. The bleached-hair kid from Winston-Salem took first—no surprise there, his runs had been surgical, every trick landed...
Cherry

The Less Miserables Enter a Contest (2)

(Cont.) For the next two weeks, Hector changed everything. He stopped running lines. Instead, he broke his contest sequence down into components and...

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