Category: Fiction

Excerpt of Fred Misurella’s Novel A Pontiac in the Woods (Blue Triangle Press)

Jamie Sasso finds herself alone, with no family or home. Cast adrift by a distant cousin in another state, she finds she cannot tolerate her county’s foster care program. But where can she live, how can she feed herself, and in what way can she plan her future? Will she even have a future? A…
Haunted Passages: “Black Magic,” a short story by Karen Petersen

A runaway hippo, typhoid fever, and a charge of theft had not figured in my plans for a tranquil seed collecting expedition in East Africa. I had flown to Nairobi to do some work for a botanical garden and write up a story about it for a national publication. While there, I was going to…
Short Story: “Bombing from Above” by Alex Kudera

In Xi’an, China, I had the runs. It had gone on for two days, and I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t stop going. In the middle of the night, I’d dash to our apartment’s American-style toilet bowl where it would pour out like a Biblical flood. On a stifling bus—one sardine among many—the urge would…
Short Story: “the lies the silence tells” by Carolina Meurkens

These days your arms are covered in tiny red scratches. You can’t seem to get any work done without Jonah anchoring her claws into you. It hurts but you let her. Until it starts to feel good, that point right before she punctures your skin. You’re beginning to enjoy this pain of being needed. Which…
“Plastic Light,” flash fiction from The Future by Jerrod Schwarz

The dam was a weird body at night. Big half of a hip. Bladderskin wrapped over a coccyx. Cut a stomach in half and tell the juices, stay mostly on this side. I tied a nylon cord around the boat’s bench seat and looped the other end around a leaking plastic bag of cow hearts.…
The Future: “Really Good Puppets,” a short story by Jill M. Talbot

Things can be people, when you get down to it, and this can be dangerous. It is most dangerous when a puppet becomes a person and fights back all it has been used for, or when a person becomes a thing and is so thing-like that it forgets that it ever was a person. These…
Fiction from The Future: “Old Faithful” by Nathan Dragon

He’d say if maybe he got a new one, he’d be able to get some work done. The desk chair was a pain in his ass. Couldn’t sit right and couldn’t work right. Always something, Rosie would say, whenever he complained. He just couldn’t get comfortable in the damn chair, no matter how he’d adjusted…
The Future: “Women with Runes,” a short story by Michelle Dove

Independence It is here—the celebration of our country’s birth—and the heat is a trillion or two trillion degrees. To stay cool, we wear our chamber suits and sit far enough from each other so the sweat doesn’t spread, only localizes within our individual suits and runs between our thighs where nobody sees. The musicians take…
Fiction from The Future: “Dog Days” by Michael Chin

From back before all the dogs were gone, I remember Waffles. The first time Waffles stole a waffle from Dad’s plate (the reason we renamed him from Rover). Waffles barking from the far side of the front door when I keyed into the house. The way Waffles smelled when he was wet—moist and mildew-y in…