Joe Pearson, Author

Sci-fi, horror, speculative. Literary with a twist.

My stories smell like bonfire smoke on a distant planet. Someone will be haunted, by a ghost or a memory. The world will be ending, but people will be kissing. There'll be a father trying, but not always succeeding. Time will flow backwards. A whiskey glass will break.

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2026

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2025

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Flash Fiction

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Joe Pearson is a British fiction writer living in Paris, France. He writes mostly speculative fiction about climate change, cultural displacement, masculinity and fatherhood.Joe is currently seeking representation for his first novel.He is also a First Reader for the speculative flash fiction magazine Orion's Belt.

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Night Kingdom

by Joe Pearson

Originally published in Indelible: Issue #9, "Awakening"

In the corner of your room there is an armchair: once neon blue, now threadbare, greying and speckled with formula stains. Some chairs you settle into; this one near engulfs you. Between its loving arms I rocked you back and forth as the world fell away around us. Now you are older you climb up there yourself, burrowing your own body into its cushions, fidgeting and cartwheeling in search of the perfect spot. That chair is where you and I bonded; performed our private, nightly rituals, sealed with tears, sweat and pain. And in the depths of blue night – when we discovered countries – it became the Night King’s throne.
You first showed me the Night Kingdom when you were four days old. Your mother was asleep, recovering from labour, and I lay awake on the too-thin mattress we installed on your bedroom floor. I kept you safe, daughter, listening to your breathing, knowing your world was still vibrant, shocking and new. I watched as lights appeared above your Moses basket; hallucinations, I thought, sleep already feeling like a remnant of the before times. But the lights persisted, and within them I saw dancing shapes, like faeries or evil spirits. I thought perhaps they’d come to take you away, that they’d realised your parents were unfit to raise you, that our mistakes would be numerous and inevitable and would twist your little mind away from happiness; but looking again I saw too much joy in their prancing for it to herald a kidnapping. The pixies’ jig transfixed me, and I saw, then, that it transfixed you too; you were awake, in silence, staring up at whatever blurry shapes your infant eyes could make out. Too young to smile, you watched unknowingly. When every sight is a wonder, the supernatural and natural have no distinction; I envied your ability to process awe.
I picked you up and the lights danced two, three looping steps around us, then blinked out. Your screaming filled the silence, hunger replacing wonder. When, two hours later, you closed your eyes again, I collapsed into sleep without knowing if the spirits returned.
Days passed. Your mother and I alternated our guard duties, ensuring every night was restful for at least one of the three of us. You awoke, fed, squeezed my finger in your tiny palm. I saw no lights save the glint in your eye when you caught me looking your way. I fancied this connection was an early acknowledgement of love; what is love when one is that young but the provision of milk? Then one night you were clearly in pain: trapped wind, or teeth arriving – who knew the cause? But you screamed like your short life was ending, and I held you and patted your back fruitlessly, wanting desperately to find a cure for despair and knowing it to be impossible; and that’s when the Night King appeared in the armchair. He was brittle and sinewy, spider-legged and angular, a wispy mass of light and bone that flitted in and out of existence even as I watched, and he unfurled a wiry finger and extended it to his lipless mouth, and the shushing sound that emerged from his glowing teeth silenced the whole neighbourhood. I could no longer hear the gurgle of pipes in the walls of our apartment building, nor the low hum of traffic outside the window, nor the shouts of drunk patrons emanating from the corner bar. We sat in a void – you, me and the Night King; he smiled a cursed smile, and I feared he’d granted me a devilish wish, but then I saw you breathing and realised you were once more asleep, and I took my place on the Night King’s now vacated throne and sat sentinel over my sleeping daughter, wishing to forget the sight of his flaking skin. I’d thought to give you to him: a dark intrusion, one I would never voice to other humans, least of all your mother, but which the Night King heard like peeling thunder. He thrived on those thoughts; devoured them. There would soon be meat on his bones.
You grew. Each day there was more light in your eyes. We would lie together on the starry rug we unrolled on your bedroom floor, and there I’d imagine we were floating in space, as time slowed to a syrupy crawl. We existed in moments that seemed never to string together. We watched comets travelling to distant stars, let them pass like memories. You slept more and more; your naps took on a schedule. Until one night, four months in, when you seemed to forget how to close your eyes if they weren’t screwed up in anguish, and my regularly scheduled night watch turned me instead into an empty vessel for you to fill with screams. I paced and paced and patted your back and could not tell for the life of me what caused your distress – until all too suddenly it became clear, as the wardrobe door stood open and a bony, glowing hand was beckoning me inside.

In my delirious state of exhaustion, I could not resist the Night King’s charms; I stepped through the wardrobe and into his cold stone hall. Demons of light danced slow, elliptical waltzes amid granite pillars, which connected a flagstone floor to a vaulted ceiling. A room of such size should carry echoes, but my footsteps were muffled by a potent hush that descended over that cavernous space, as pair by pair the dancers stopped, turning empty eyes towards us. You’d stopped crying, and again your own eyes were open. Did you, too, see wonders? Or was this no more miraculous to you than any other sight in your first few months on Earth? At the head of the room was a sapphire throne, upon which the Night King sat, always beckoning. Before him, your Moses basket, somehow stolen from the bedroom we’d left behind. I took silent steps towards it, as thousands of pointed, hollow-eyed gazes followed us across the hall. I held you close and kissed your head – your wispy hair tickling my lips – and when I arrived at your crib I lay you down before the Night King, and you were calm, your eyes drooping. The Night King stopped beckoning and clicked his fingers – a single, echoing thwack – and then grasping hands pulled me away, spun me round the dance floor in a silent jig, tossing me from partner to partner as fast as the wildest ceilidh. In the brief moment I held each demonic partner, I studied their faces, and in them I saw shades of myself, shades of your mother; I saw you, at different stages of life – the girl and the woman you were to become. I danced with you on your wedding day; did a quick two-step around the kitchen with five-year-old you on my toes. In one, I saw a woman long past middle age, and I felt my exhaustion intensify, old age calcifying my joints as I swayed, and she held me as we shuffled round a neon hospital room, and, somehow, I knew this would be our last tango, that this marvellous woman would soon watch me die, and that strange lights would carry me away to dance in new halls, without her.
“You gift me all of this,” said the Night King, his voice like screams over baby-monitor static.

I made one last spin and landed at his feet, next to your gently rocking cradle. Your eyes were fully closed by this point, the Night King’s silent lullaby having sent you off to sleep. The spirits around me stopped their dance, and I inhaled slowly, all five of my senses dulled beyond feeling – and in that second of clarity, I knew I would defy him.
“I gift you nothing,” I said, picking you up and turning away.
Then the Night King roared, his anger rushing through the room like mistral winds, banishing us from his kingdom. Soon I was back in your bedroom, standing on your starry rug, and you were resting against my shoulder screaming bloody murder, because you never wake a sleeping baby – that’s something you simply never do. Except that’s just what I did, because I needed to know I still had you. Because if you were screaming, I knew you were alive. And we stayed there for hours, existing and hurting, gifting each other our pain.
The Night King let me be after that; once his offer was refused, he moved on to torment other fathers. I see them sometimes, leaning on pushchair handles, his radiant fingers creeping over their hunched shoulders. But you and I sleep better these days. Though there was a moment, a few nights back, when your baby monitor once more exploded with the Night King’s roars, and I raced to your room with fresh, convulsive panic to see you standing in silence in your new crib, eyes fixed on your father in the doorway; and you smiled, and held out your hand, and a single, glowing firefly rose from your outstretched palm.
I realised then you knew something I didn’t: that the Night King doesn’t rule his own kingdom. We were never his guests but rather he was ours. He came to our home and I neglected to give him bread and salt; I sit, daily, in his throne, coveting and cradling the source of his affections! We dance with demons not so they may act through us, but so we may spurn their temptations. Because the day starts not with the dawn but when we greet the light with open eyes, and if those eyes never close, tomorrow is simply more today, and if they close forever, then that day lasts for eternity. And whether or not our eyes are open, sleep only comes to those who accept it is soon to be inevitable. When all is screamed out and the visions clear, we have no choice but to rest.
After you released your firefly, I picked you up and once more stepped through the wardrobe into the Night King’s hall. He sat on his throne, bored and distracted, picking his luminescent fingernails. The rest of the hall was empty, his dancing retinue disbanded. Behind his throne I could now make out a window of dark stained glass through which grey light was flowing, not straight in rays but in wisps like smoke: my unchosen futures dissolving. With an ethereal sigh, the Night King rose and made his way towards me. The look he gave me as he walked past was long-suffering and resigned. I watched him leave, and his hall faded; we were back in your bedroom, alone. I sat in the armchair and tickled your chin softly. As I watched your face, I noticed my own limbs glowing, my skin peeling, my skeleton elongating. I held you aloft as my body changed into light and fear and sharpness. You laughed, surveying my lipless jaws, your own eyes glowing like fireflies.

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