Structures of the Void
Four Flash Fiction Stories of Architectural Becoming
These four flash fiction stories were written for “Welcome to the Hinterland” collection:
The Dead Mall Sarcoma
The atrium of the sprawling abandoned shopping centre didn’t smell like dust. It smelled like a deadman’s breath.
Jaxon walked the concourse and the tiles crunched under his boots, not with glass, as you’d expect in a desolate space like this, but with calcified molars shed by the building.
He was here for the dérive, but the insane geography was drifting into him.
The many mall cyborgs in the bridal windows hadn’t fallen over. They had evolved. Their bio-plastic limbs had loosened up into a translucent, milky dermis of the place.
Through the display glass, Jaxon watched them pulsating, their synthetic crotches heaving with an erotic hunger for purposeless expenditure.
He touched the handrail of the escalator leading up. The rubber was the entropic skin. It was warm and melting, bonding upon touch.
“Buy,” the air vents announced in a monotone robotic voice. “Consume. Enjoy. Join.”
Jaxon didn’t flinch.
He unzipped his jacket and pressed his chest against the storefront glass, offering his heat to the commercial precinct.
The glass softened into a mucous membrane, letting him in.
In the end, he was right.
The mall wanted to try him on. His own becoming was no more.
The Substation Communion
The hum of the transformer station was but a chant for the new electric era.
The station sat in the middle of the woods, a concrete block ignored by the map, the passersby, everybody. It vibrated at a frequency that boiled your bone marrow to a blood stew.
Elara cut the chain-link fence surrounding it. She wasn’t a vandal. She was a pilgrim of the grid.
Inside, the air tasted of someone’s burnt hair.
She sought the zone where the alternating current met the nervous system.
The massive ceramic insulators weren’t just holding wires; they were dripping a thick, black ichor—the Black Meat—of the energy sector.
She placed her hands on the buzzing housing unit.
The shock didn’t kill her. It was slurping her in and out.
Her veins lit up blue, visible through her skin like a map of a city.
The electricity reorganised her biology, cooking the impurities out of her flesh, turning her organs into wet, conductive batteries.
She opened her mouth to scream, but only static came out, a white noise prayer to the God of voltage she now served.
She was finally grounded.
The Brutalist Hive
Tower Block 4 was condemned, but the council couldn’t demolish it.
Every time the wrecking ball hit the concrete, the building bled.
Renfield sat on the balcony of the 14th floor, overlooking the rest of the estate. The railing was covered by a furmold that had learned to mimic mammalian hair.
He was injecting the concrete dust into his tear ducts. He wanted to see what the building saw: the geological hatred of the megacity.
“Architecture is our bodies’ destiny,” he stated in conviction.
A wet fissure opened in the cement. It was pink and lined with steel ribs. The apartment was ready to take his essence.
The wall behind him groaned, waiting for come.
Renfield stepped into the wall, and the concrete wrapped around him like a liquid eyelid.
He was now transforming into slime-semen, ejaculating into the structural integrity of the building’s womb.
He himself was now an oozing seed.
From his body, the building would grow, and that was eternity.
The Lido of Lost Time
The outdoor pool had been empty for twenty years. It was a blue tear along the length of the coastline.
But at night, the drain gurgled with fluids that were nothing like seawater. Not at all.
Kael descended the ladder into the deep end of the pool. The tiles were rich with bio-slime, a primordial soup of life brewed from the memories of countless summer holidays.
He lay in the centre of the drained blue basin. Above, the moon was a cataract eye, glossy, milky.
But below, the drain cover rattled.
Something was coming up from the sewers, predatory, yet not a monster. A shape made of tangled swimsuits, drowned hair, and discarded, bloodied bandages, animated by a viral, sexual will.
It was the waste of the holiday season, returning. Returning hard.
Kael spread his arms in anticipation.
The mass surged out of the drain, smelling of chlorine and rot. It engulfed him.
He didn’t drown, and he couldn’t scream. In fact, he had no intention to scream.
Kael’s memory siphoned, becoming another holiday memory. His clothes shed into the cluster—forever whirling in the concrete ocean of the past.
Third Eye Horror
© Maciej Sitko, 2026
All rights reserved.
OHHHH Substation Communion was SO HOT.
All of these live together as a collection so well. Fantastic.
This made me think of J. G. Ballard. Can't quite explain it. Maybe the building sequence, or the concoction of random things, or the "atrocity" of the text. Ok, I'm gonna show myself out now.