Publication news! My romantic fantasy short story “The Skeptical Lover” is now available in the October 2026 issue of Luminous Realms Magazine.
Here’s a sneak peek:
The Skeptical Lover
by Karl El-Koura
The week after his twenty-eighth birthday, Tim Clath began to lose his grip on reality. He manifested his increasing mental collapse in six steps.
The first presented itself as something exactly opposite–a realization so monumental he thought of it as an epiphany. Like most epiphanies, it struck him in the shower.
The second step in his self-destruction was the plan he cooked up while hunched over his bowl of cereal that morning.
The third was enacting his plan later that day. He called his girlfriend, Beth Alella, from the teacher’s lounge during fourth period and asked her to come over for dinner that night. “I’ll cook,” he said.
Beth worked in an open-concept office building. Two of her cubicle neighbors were looking at her. She wasn’t supposed to be taking personal calls, and Tim never called her at work unless it was important.
“OK,” she said. “Around seven?”
“That’s perfect,” Tim said, and Beth detected something in his voice. A nervous energy. Was this it? she wondered. Was Tim proposing–tonight?
She put her phone face-down on her desk, trying to hide her smile by sucking back her lips.
For his fourth step, Tim waited in the teacher’s lounge until Olivier Marguerite showed up, looking bleary-eyed from his self-imposed, quixotic mission to instill a love of literature in kids who looked at books the way his generation had looked at a multiplication table.
“Aren’t you supposed to be supervising study hall?” Olivier said, bee lining it to the coffee pot.
“I need to talk to you,” Tim said, grabbing a mug from the cabinet and filling it for his friend. “About Beth.”
The bleariness seemed to leave Olivier’s eyes immediately. “Everything OK?”
“Great. But I need to break up with her.”
Olivier ignored the offered coffee. “Come again?”
“I need to break up with her. To know if I should marry her.”
Keep reading at Luminous Realms Magazine.
