Category: Fiction

Fiction: “Dear Editor” by Paul Beckman

Dear Editor, Please cancel our subscription. I can no longer have your newspaper lying around where my children can read the “Letters to the Editor” advocating same-sex marriage, separation of church and state, atheist rights, teaching of sex education in school, locations where free condoms are dispensed, transgender studies (whatever they are), school book lists…
Fiction: Peter Clarke’s “Untitled in B”

My refrigerator in its old age sometimes quivers and hums when its fan turns on. The quivering is completely insignificant, but the humming, I’ve found, is B, the musical note. It’s not sharp or flat; it’s a perfect B. Just like the fan in my crotchety refrigerator, anything that moves fast enough will begin to…
Fiction: Timmy Reed’s “The Spider’s Eggs”

I woke up after the storm and went outside to see what had been broken. The deck was intact, but all around the trees were crushed like bad teeth. My eye was drawn to the center of the gray deck where above the strewn pine needles and sticks, just inches over a composite-wood plank, there…
Fiction: Harmony Neal’s “This Is What It’s Like to Die”

Jasmine My father beat me for giving the dog some bread. The dog had looked so hungry and scared. Its fur was missing in patches and it only had one eye. The other socket was covered in pus and red bumps. I wasn’t scared of the dog. I wanted to help. I could remember a…
Three Fictions by Megan Martin

Way Beyond Good and Evil I should be admiring and appreciating the Cloroxed whiteness of the shower curtain you Cloroxed yesterday. It certainly is a miracle: the whitest, most disinfected shower curtain upon this rotten earth. In Cloroxing, you have protected me from unimagined dangers like shower-bound disease. Instead, another man—an exciting one—is here in…
Fiction: Dan Crawley’s “Bonkers”

Becky and Coach stand shoulder to shoulder at the sliding glass door and watch what is going on outside. Earlier, snowflakes the size of teeming confetti poured out of the sky and covered the ground with a few inches. But now with the sun fully out, the white stuff sticking to the small backyard patio…
Fiction: Tom McCartan’s “Tennessee Williams Is a Hack”

I used to think I invented this one word. One day I looked it up and it turned out that Mark Twain had used it in some damn book. I keep trying to come up with these stories and everyone always says that they already are something, like a movie or a sitcom episode. “You…
Fiction: Andrea Kneeland’s “Side Effects”

Scene 73: Check-in When no one is looking, I pry nails from the wall with my bare hands and I tuck these in my pockets. When they ask if I have any sharp objects with me, I hand them the nails. I got them here I say. They were in your wall I say, which…
Fiction: “Roll for Damage” by Hannah Thurman

We cared deeply that people thought we didn’t care what people thought about us. We all wore black T-shirts during Spirit Week’s “white T-shirt day.” Of course we all had black T-shirts. As members of Carmichael High School’s Sci-fi Club (pronounced “skiffee”), we printed our own black T-shirts each fall with the year on them…