Category: Fiction

A Story from The Future by C.A. Schaefer: “To Whom Will You Seem Beautiful”

I am eighteen when I decide. I stand by the bed of the creek, watching the light on the surface of the water, when a man steps down beside me. He takes my face in his hands and turns it, side to side, as I might inspect a puppy or an antique, and then says,…
“The Butchers”: A Fiction Excerpt from The Future by Alana I. Capria

On Sundays, we butchered. It made us so happy, S— and me. We did not mind the blood or sound. We butchered what crouched and quivered, what was soft against a knife. S— and I butchered until our hands were wet. We prepared the butchering for a meal, for stews, steaks, and roasts. I carried…
Haunted Passages: “A Quiet Place to Sleep,” fiction by Nicole C. White

Angelica finds herself in the nexus of several intersecting red corridors. Everything is red: the walls, the stucco ceiling, the trim, the plush carpets. Each corridor recedes into the far distance and is studded with doors spaced at irregular distances apart, and each door has above it a tubular fluorescent bulb. But the bulbs are…
Hugh Behm-Steinberg Flash Fiction: “Wallace Stevens”

Anecdote of the Jar I placed a jar in Tennessee,And round it was, upon a hill.It made the slovenly wildernessSurround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it,And sprawled around, no longer wild.The jar was round upon the ground.And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere.The jar was gray and bare.It…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Unrecorded Existence” by Sebastian Castillo

“It’s when you gallop that your parasites are most alive.”—Henri Michaux I used to be a poet of great fame and intellect, but now I’m a dairy farmer. The circumstances under which I came to this station are not particularly unusual. Like many poets, I grew tired of the attention and accolades. I couldn’t…
Leland Cheuk: “My SMS,” short fiction from The Future

I sent one of my SMSs (Social Media Selves) to my friend’s reading way out in Longway Meadow. I didn’t want to go personally (too far, not in the mood), and I figured enough of my friend’s friends (or their SMSs) would be in attendance that I wouldn’t be missed. The holographic selves are very…
Short Fiction from The Future: “No God Just Google” by Nicholas Rys

Part 1: Man vs Nature After the president was eaten alive by bears on national television the country fell into various states of dilapidation. In a rare moment of unity, both fans and critics agreed it was a riveting and appropriate end to what ultimately culminated in both a condescending and overextended stay. The survivalist-themed…
The Future: Two Fictions by Liza St. James

I Didn’t Get to My Rage Yet I saw the man with the kid having too much fun together to be related, or else to see each other often. The uncle or the estranged father was telling the kid about a band he knew that ate kids on stage. Do they really? For real? The…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “The Woodcutter” by Mike Itaya

In the medieval woods of 1307, a gentle woodcutter and a spinsterly-type lived in a pristine cottage and shared a lonely life together, so lonely that in a moment of fraught miscalculation, the couple agreed to board Trina, a terrible person from Pascagoula, Mississippi. Trina had a chainsaw tattooed above her bottom, and used “blow…