Category: Fiction

Fiction for the Friggatriskaidekaphobic: “Immortal” by Stefan Kiesbye

On evenings she couldn’t sleep, she walked up the carpeted stairs and knocked on my door. Under the down comforter, my bony hips squeezed between her thighs, we listened to her husband’s snoring. Emily was richly layered and comfortable and her neck smelled of dark spices. When she was in a hurry, she knelt in…
Short Fiction: “To Have Done with the Division of Moving Bodies” by John Madera

The day the killer killed the bitch, the town-they-called-a-city’s grayscale sky went cartoon blue. White sun crashing through, it made the spring that felt like fall feel like spring again, if only before it felt like fall again. A fall, though, where an American Robin’s breast could be confused for bronze, its song a string…
“Picking,” a collaborative short story by Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross from Vol. 9

I’m picking lemons from the lemon tree beside the back porch of a man I met a week ago at a fundraiser for the local cat shelter. Cocktails and Cats. I was mostly there for the cocktails, Josh was mostly there for his ex-wife, Maggie. She’s one of the shelter’s directors. “She’s my best friend,”…
Two Fictions by Teague von Bohlen from Vol. 9

Bombs in Dogs My ex Shelly and her new husband are moving out of town, a little over an hour’s drive from here. It’s a planned community on what’s now a golf course, but the whole thing used to be the municipal airfield back before the regional airport went in. They say they’ve treated the…
From Vol. 9: “80,” a short story by Stephen Dixon

He wakes up, gets his cellphone off the night table and opens it to look at the time. 3:02. He’s been asleep for less than an hour. An hour ago he checked the time after lying in bed awake for almost three hours. 2:05. So he’s gotten an hour’s sleep tonight. He’ll probably lie in…
From Vol. 9: “Invasion of the Dad,” fiction by Nicholas Grider

The dad arrived, as dads are known to do, in a large red SUV that was partly covered in mud and made a confident exit from the vehicle, stepping down from the driver’s seat onto the blacktop in dark brown shoes dwelling somewhere between “sensible” and “noticeably expensive,” and the dad was dressed as if…
From Vol. 9: “A Miniature Tale of Motherhood,” a short story by Oliver Zarandi

My children are cruel and look like goblins. Every day they take something away from me and I don’t ask for anything in return. I asked them this morning, “What do you want for lunch?” “Your breasts,” they said. So they had them. They suckled my teats, one apiece, and sucked them dry. No more…
Bards & Brews Reader, a 2016-17 anthology of series performers

BNB logo designed by Emily Weddle Table of Contents FICTION “Shangri La Dee Da” Dan Mancilla “Bigfoot’s Overcoat” Matthew Fogarty NONFICTION “Staff Meeting” “Rescue” “Scorpio, Born in the Year of the Cock” “Go, Jim Dandy” Ginny MacDonald Broadside Excerpt from “Field Notes” Josh MacIvor-Andersen POETRY “How to Skin a Rabbit” “Assembly Instructions for…
The way the sky was now, a 2013 fiction chapbook by Ryder Collins

Image: Eben A. Kling Winner of the 2013 Heavy Feather Chapbook AwardJudge Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World and Other Stories: “‘And so it came to be. & so it came to be that Big Mama squatted and borned us. & we came out squalling and waving sticks.’ This is the way we’re…