Category: Fiction

New Side A Short Story: “In Cahoots” by Terese Svoboda

In Cahoots My son looked at his plate and looked at the dog and said he needed to go. I was still serving myself, my wrist flicking out sauce from a pot with a spoon. I sighed, placed my half-filled plate on the table, and took his hand in mine. After finding the key that…
Short Fiction for Side A: “An Evening Jog by the Lake” by Stacey Lounsberry

An Evening Jog by the Lake A human man with the top of a taxidermized bison head, its breast of fur still fluffed like a winter scarf, pushes a baby stroller just ahead of me. Its wheels bump fist-sized rocks, jarring the carriage; the man’s knuckles flash white like a warning. He stops to watch…
Fiction for Side A: “Tell me how it tastes” by Arielle M. DeVito

Tell me how it tastes Mia’s dead ex-wife turns up in the middle of the night, dripping. She’s soggy with the smell of the lakebed and gets stinking mud all over the mat. Mia doesn’t know what to do with her, but she runs a bath that’s probably too hot and sits with her back…
Fiction from the Future: “Civic Duty” by Meaghan McDavitt

Please press the button to indicate your choice. Tahara looked down at the blue and yellow lights. The electric voice reverberated through her mind, a robotic repetition of itself, relentless, forcing her to make the the decision. Please press the button to indicate your choice. Tahara looked at the surrounding cubicles. The maze of decisions.…
Side A Fiction: “Stoneware” by Katie Coleman

Stoneware We were packing boxes in the kitchen after a nice day: chimichangas, supermarket beer, loving talk. I thought I might as well pack the lobster bowls with the bedding, because we’d be inviting teachers for dinner in Thailand. My boyfriend’s certain to make a good teaching assistant. That picture of him in his camp…
Five Tellings by Moikom Zeqo from His Book Sellers of Chaos

Born in Durrës in 1949, Moikom Zeqo was considered one of Albania’s very most important writers and public intellectuals. (When I visited Zeqo in Tirana in 2019, we couldn’t walk more than a couple blocks without a stranger stopping us to pay respects.) In 1974, Zeqo’s writing was suppressed for incorporating free verse and surrealism,…
Fiction for Side A: “Dancer” by Joel Henry Little

Dancer Some days when I’m on all fours and the corporate ladder-climbers on retreat are flogging me with their big foam swords, I watch the LEDs halo around the nearest bald head through the honeycomb eyeholes of my wolf costume reeking of weed and piss and I try to make a desert sunset in my…
The Future Has Fiction: “Scarecrows” by John Mitchell

I was only ever good at two things and being a mother wasn’t one of them. I knew how to disappear when things got hard, and I knew how to make everything worse when I showed back up. True to form, the flood came six months after I returned home. The sea levels rose so…
Fiction from the Future: “Mar-a-Lago” by Matt McBride

Everyone’s thrown a party the night before they’re butchered. Tonight’s Jannelle’s, and she stands onstage in Mar-a-Lago’s Gold and White Ballroom, holding the karaoke machine’s mic as if it were a weapon. An AI Beyonce song plays from a speaker on a tripod. Jannelle can remember about half the words. Mark sits alone at a…