Category: Fiction

Bad Survivalist Microfiction: “Chess Problems” by Steve Chang

—after Diane Williams and James Robison Brian returned from the world and found Charlene was deceiving him again. He liked visiting her in her studio, a short distance from his mind. “That’s enough,” he said. “Charlene.” He was raspy and eager, but with a prickly thumb. It now prickled. She was beside the window, scribbling…
Spiritualist Erotica by Erin Lyndal Martin: “The Flower Medium” for Haunted Passages

I wrote down my findings about what happened that night, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell everything. Not even to you, Lieutenant. I hear you’re old and sick and you may die soon. I sure hate to lose you. You saw the force through some hard times, and no hard time ever met a…
Bad Survivalist: “A Neutralized Threat,” comic fiction by Analeah Loschiavo Rosen

It does not seem overly harsh to say the men and women who work on atomic weapons distance themselves from the moral implications of what they do. But me? I make sure they pass through clearance and are able to find parking spots. Not so much separates us when you think of the worst-case scenario.…
Nance Van Winckel: “Hole in the Fence,” a hybrid collage/graphic/poem-story excerpt for Bad Survivalist

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Nance Van Winckel’s fifth book of fiction is Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014); her eighth book of poems is Our Foreigner (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series). A book of visual poetry entitled…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction by Christopher Linforth: “Disconnected”

We came to the hotel to end it all. The building sat tucked in the mountains, part of an Edwardian-era resort. Gentlemen and women used to enjoy the crisp air for a few weeks, then exalt the health benefits back to their friends in the city. All those people, we realized, were long dead. We…
Lucy Zhang: “Raising Wings,” a flash fiction for Bad Survivalist

It happened slowly at first. Slits tracing shoulder blades down a pale canvas back, blood trickling like paint from an over-saturated watercolor brush. Feathers and bone and cartilage poking their way through the epidermis. At some point, my over-sized green eagle sweater could no longer hide the protrusions. I said my stomach hurt, I had…
“The Academic Agenda,” a satirical story by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

How much did you learn in school? There are hours when the subjectivity of days and nights overwhelms you. To the point that your mind runs smack dab against the Scylla and the Charybdis of the past. The past? And what the hell is it? And when the hell was it? You might sit up…
Haunted Passages Fiction by Alexa T. Dodd: “His or Yours”

When you come home from work, the living room is littered with a grease-tattooed pizza box and dented cans of beer from your husband’s favorite local brewery. You find him in the bedroom, on his laptop, playing a game. Lasers and explosions emanate, muffled, from the tiny speakers. A hundred seams knit the center of…
“mother, child : art doesn’t help,” an excerpt from Lance Olsen’s novel My Red Heaven

Set on a single day in 1927, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters—some historic, some invented—crossing paths on the streets of Berlin. The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rosa Luxemburg—as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier, a murderer,…