Category: Fiction

New Side A Short Story: “Nobody Cares” by Jacob Austin

Finding himself with a rare Tuesday off, Laramie decides to catch a movie. He had been told the local theater offered five-dollar matinees on Tuesdays, and while there is not anything playing he particularly wants to see, he had been at Target the other night and smelled the popcorn from the snack stand and has…
Haunted Passages: “Audrey Hepburn,” an Autofictional Dreamoir by Meghan Lamb

(A dreamoir inspired by Wendy C. Ortiz) I wake with a sharp pain behind my eyes, the kind that makes it difficult to open them. I rise in a fog of headache and blurred vision, taking careful, tender steps around the apartment. The apartment is a strange amalgam of familiar spaces, other spaces I’ve lived…
Side A Short Story: “My Oncologist” by Trevor J. Houser

My Oncologist After being told I had a year to live, I decided one evening to visit my oncologist’s private residence in Pacific Heights. It is a very nice neighborhood. Homes like state capitol buildings clad in armor of Italian cypress. When I arrived at my oncologist’s address, a stream of people in costume was…
“Grief Algebra”: New Side A Flash Fiction by Mileva Anastasiadou

Grief Algebra We sit in silence around a table of four. We’re only three, because someone is missing. His chair is empty and will remain silent until someone visits and sits there, unaware of the value this chair held. We’ll look at them like they’re undefined operation, like they’re savage or sacrilegious and they won’t…
Original Fiction for Flavor Town USA: “Metropolis” by Michelle Bitting

Joan at the Château Élysée, 1929, Hollywood, CA By the time they are ready for me to rehearse on the rooftop, I’ve already eaten two plates of sand dabs smothered in lemon butter sauce and a mountain of croquembouche eclairs. I can’t help it—I’m getting nervous waiting for my turn under the stage lights, and…
New Bad Survivalist Short Fiction: “Small Arousals” by Lily Gareth Cunningham

Every morning I crawled out our kitchen window and photographed my ass next to our street’s latest road sign. This was my full-time job. “NEW: NO parking on Franklin, 10am to 4pm, Wednesday. Street sweeping.” I posted the caption beneath a photo of a sign that read the same, featuring the curve of my right…
“Four Paintings by ______ (1928-1999)”: A Haunted, Microfictive Gallery by Addison Zeller

The Loud Aviatrix (1957) In the foreground, a crowd of well-wishers plug their ears and wince. A number of young girls seem particularly excited, judging from the jaunty angles of their novelty aviatrix caps, to witness the aviatrix’s arrival. The aviatrix, in her pink jacket, white jodhpurs, and lighter pink scarf, her pale skin and…
Novel Excerpt: “Struck” from Afterlife by Angela Woodward

In this luminous novel, Angela Woodward chronicles the meaning of death, the illusions of truth, and the strange, shimmering persistence of the self beyond the ordinary boundaries of life. Through fictional encyclopedia entries, surreal vignettes, and personal narratives, Afterlife blurs fact and imagination, the material and the ghostly, with poetic precision and biting wit. Woodward’s speaker journeys…
“Finals”: A Short Story for Bad Survivalist by Tobenna Nwosu

Time once blew against our march to adulthood, now it stands so still we have to carry it. Chuba huffs ahead, face redder than fanned coal, shoulders slack, past strands that streak dew on our shirts, past the silence ruffled by desertion. A strip of cloud shadows us like we’re sheep grazing astray, munching farther…