Category: Fiction

Four Fictions from Debra Di Blasi’s Today Is the Day That Will Matter: Oral Histories from the New America #AlternativeFictions

Her Father, Reclining The daughter must wait on him hand and foot. Her hand flutters at the foot of his bed where he is reclining naked, exposed, his pebbly ass facing her each time she enters the room with a gold tray of milk and Nutella and salt-free butter sandwiches fried in butter. He loves…
“Foundation,” a fiction story by Christine Hennessey

There was a man living in her walls. Fiona hadn’t seen or spoken to him, though late at night when he emerged from behind the plaster she could hear the sounds he made, the grease sizzling in the frying pan, the methodic thud of knife against cutting board. The scents that slipped under her bedroom…
Fiction: “1,000 Ghosts” by Diana Clark

He insists on lying down. Dr. Greenwood tells him, “That’s only in the movies, the couch part; you’re more than welcome to sit up,” but then she remembers how much he loves movies, his Air Force One comment from 2015, remembers Harrison Ford in his interview on Studio 10, and decides not to push the…
Fiction: An Excerpt from Visions by Troy James Weaver

That day, the first day, she didn’t believe me, and it would be another ten years before she finally would—and then only after she was dead. I knew she’d be in the kitchen. She was always in the kitchen. She was cooking grits in a small pot, and had the radio turned up, listening to…
“Slumroom,” a story by Stephanie Jimenez

At his insistence, Marisa’s father accompanied her to the prospective apartment off Northern Boulevard. It was September, and on the way there, they got caught on a side street behind a school bus. They didn’t know the cause of the hold-up until they saw a veiled figure run down the sidewalk and up to the…
Excerpt: SITU, fiction by Steven Seidenberg

SITU is a hesitant unfolding of demise, a text that occupies the interstices between diegetic, philosophical, and poetic discursive timbres. From this tension—which finds form in an indeterminate subject’s relationship with a bench, his anguished site of rest and motion—the subsequent flux at the center of the narrative voice facilitates a kind of epistemology of…
An Excerpt of Laura Catherine Brown’s Comic Novel Made by Mary

Made by Mary is a black comedy using magic realism to blow up myths about women, mothers, daughters and motherhood. Unable to conceive and, because of her husband Joel’s youthful conviction for marijuana dealing, unable to adopt conventionally, Ann and Joel pinned their hope on Jessica, an unwed pregnant girl who offers them her baby.…
Fiction: “My Father’s Great Recession” by Alex Kudera

Fierce rains pour from black clouds, and when at last we meet in the parking lot, I see an obese and aged semblance of Dad. He wears a blonde mustache, but his receding topsoil is corn-silk white. Beige slacks and a light blue sweater do little to mask his immense roundness. Three hundred pounds or…
Fiction: “Abortion Clinic, 2021” by Beth Fiset

We wait in rows along the walls until one of our names is called and we reshuffle. We wait seated in chair clusters. We wait huddled over one another to sleep for hours on end because we can’t help ourselves, though, we want to be awake when they call so we are not skipped over…