Author: Heavy Feather

“After the Animals,” a short comic for Bad Survivalist by Nick Francis Potter

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Nick Francis Potter is the author of New Animals (Subito Press). His work has recently been published in 3:AM Magazine, Quarterly West, Big Other, Typo Magazine, The Offing, and Entropy. He teaches writing and theory in the digital storytelling program at the University of Missouri.
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “The Woodcutter” by Mike Itaya

In the medieval woods of 1307, a gentle woodcutter and a spinsterly-type lived in a pristine cottage and shared a lonely life together, so lonely that in a moment of fraught miscalculation, the couple agreed to board Trina, a terrible person from Pascagoula, Mississippi. Trina had a chainsaw tattooed above her bottom, and used “blow…
“The Ghosts at the Carwash Are Always Looking for Company”: Flash Fiction by Cathy Ulrich

There is a universe where all the carwashes are haunted. Where there are creaks and groans and disembodied hands dripping with carwash water. Where our mothers sat us down since we were young, said never go to the carwash, said or you could end up a haunt there too, said when the first carwash was…
Lunch Quest, Chris Kuzma’s epic fantasy graphic novel, reviewed by Trey Brown

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Lunch Quest by Chris Kuzma is a frolicking epic in graphic novel form, one that doesn’t take itself too seriously to have a ton of witty fun. The adventure begins with a blue bunny rabbit in a tailored suit. Already we have a protagonist that challenges the…
Matthew Thorburn & J.G. McClure: A Collaborative Interview between Poets

Matthew Thorburn’s new book of poems, The Grace of Distance, was published by LSU Press in August 2019. He’s also the author of six previous collections, including the book-length poem Dear Almost (LSU Press, 2016), honored with the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry; A Green River in Spring (Autumn House Press, 2015), winner of the Coal Hill Review chapbook…
“Unclear Motives”: Short Fiction for Haunted Passages by Chase Dearinger

The very last thing: the roof rose up seamlessly from the house, sat perfectly still a hundred feet above the lights and chaos in the street. The ground quaked and calmed, and a murder of countless crows poured out from the house, their oily, rainbow flap like a deck of cards splashed across a room.…
“Ghosts”: Five Poems by Conor Scruton for Haunted Passages

Pareidolia In summer we make stories for the ungrowing seasons,the sweatspeckled back of the blue sky made real in its telling,each winter to come. Some of what we know—we can only make out in contrast. I cannot give you muchbut another season’s worth of words, this basket I hold to my stomach,these petals I take…
“Unhaunted,” a short story for Haunted Passages by Madeleine Sardina

The ghosts had always been loud. Like rats or squirrels, they scampered in and out of our homes, tampering with the wiring and knocking on bedposts. We had our ways of softening their effects so we could keep our homes and schools and workplaces functional, but it was an art to keep them at bay…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Karen” by Eleanor Levine

She speaks thirty seconds, a mere thirty seconds, after I ignore her for five years, and then I’m back. I’m always back. * I am like the trappers in Werner Herzog’s movie Happy People—the trackers of the Siberian Taiga—happy in their solitary hunting, but I’m not solitary. * Karen was my girlfriend for six months,…