Category: Fiction

Fiction for Side A: “Feast” by Andrea Marcusa

Feast The double-wide steel door clanks shut. I stand next to the man who collected me from the waiting room. We are the only people in the huge elevator. I am naked except for my thin gown. The man barely looks at me. He rolls back on his heels and digs his hands into his…
Side A Short Story: “Adults Told Me” by Mark Benedict

Adults Told Me 1. My science teacher told me that life was slapdash. I talked to him after class sometimes; science was one of the few subjects in high school I was interested in. “God’s plan my butt,” Mr. Burke said, slurping coffee. “Evolution is flukier than the weather. Would a divine plan really include…
Side A Fiction: “Before All That” by Lauren Woods

Before All That In the end, she sells me for only a hundred dollars. “Women in this market usually go for larger karats,” the woman at the pawn shop with the nails filed down to pink nubs tells her without blinking. She doesn’t stop to think it over, doesn’t caress my head a last time…
Side A Fiction: “To See the Moon” by Marlene Olin

To See the Moon What she hates most are the lights. There’s no dawn. No dusk. No silver sliver falling through the slats. Instead a light as bright as a photographer’s flash burns day and night. She’s almost sleeping. She would die for some blessed sleep. Instead she hears the squeak squeak squeak of a…
“Lurking,” a short story by Tam Nguyen

For P.A, C*, J, P, D, and friends The campus’ hallway remained silent since the university’s closure earlier this year. Education was halted after the coup took over. As soon as different parts of the country slowly turned into battlefields, faculties and students got together and constituted a union, partially to create a self-didactic community,…
“Pennies on Train Tracks,” a Side A flash fiction by Catherine Chiarella Domonkos

Pennies on Train Tracks You taught me to lay pennies on tracks to get flattened. Smooth brown ovals we stowed in this Skippy jar we buried under the house like pirate treasure. You showed me the brightest places on the tracks are best to get really flat pennies because that’s where the wheels make the…
Side A Flash Fiction: “Causality” by Anita Goveas

Causality When my placid younger brother scalded himself on his sixth birthday, the first time he ever cried, my mother declared it was inevitable and cultivated a hobby of having accidents. She could no longer touch a newspaper or our dog-eared copy of 1001 Nights without a papercut that rendered her helpless and table legs…
“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…