Category: Fiction

“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…
Fiction from the Future: “The Passenger” by Michael Sheehan

Caleb came at his appointed time but was surprised there was a line, there was a crowd, a disentangling order of people pressing toward the barrier. Stupidly he’d thought the offworld opportunity, now that it had finally come, would be something cleaner: he’d show at his time, be screened, show his repopulation report and pass,…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “The Magic of Certainty” by Kim Farleigh

Orville, prostate on a Jeep’s hood under a blaze of stars, aimed his gun at imaginary targets. A print of his wife’s last email dropped from the hood onto the desert’s sand. Orville’s typical scowl became a mean grimace after reading: “Don’t be angry now, but I’m in love with Denzel and we’re going to…
New Haunted Passages Short Story: “Abattoir” by Sofia Mosqueda

I imagine my husband as a shrike. This bird eats what he impales, wood splintering, his tree decorated with flesh. They immortalize death when they hang their prey on spines or barbed wire, feverishly pecking at their bodies for days, but their meat is never enough. At night, my husband wakes me by resting his…