Category: Fiction

“Puzzle-Piece Blues,” original short fiction by Selene dePackh

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. [harsh black and white comix-style cyberpunk image of feminine face repeating within itself from multiple angles] Puzzle-Piece Blues Case Study [delete]* Bear in mind that I’m a suspect witness. Everything I say is subject to erasure. I make for deaf ears, pressure-popping like plastique in an airline…
New Fiction for Haunted Passages: “The Rose Salesman” by Daniel Beauregard

A man makes a living any way he can, sometimes even by selling roses by the side of the road; who are we to judge what merit such work has or make statements for or against it? Is it not work, and work, no matter what one does, is a thing to be cherished by…
“Encampeth,” a novel excerpt for Haunted Passages by Pam Jones

Once, when ET was a kid, a stranger came into the house. It was not a break-in; how could it be, if the fellow had come up the walk and through the door as though by invitation? Her mother was at home, but in the backyard. ET had been the one to greet him, as…
Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Devil’s Hopyard” by Jennifer Makowsky

I know something bad will happen by the end of the night. Maybe it’s the trees overhanging the winding dirt road, blocking out the daylight and making it look like midnight even though it’s only four-thirty on a June afternoon. Or maybe it’s that this area is always off in some way and gives me…
“A Night, Like Any Other, or Ooh, That Smell,” an excerpt from Gristle, weird tales by Jordan A. Rothacker

Gristle is alchemical theatre, a collection of weird tales, twelve fingers on the steering wheel, with D.H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath asleep across the back seat, Chekov shivering on the hard shoulder… Gristle is a post-beat riddle, a comedy, a nightmare … Gristle is Salinger descending from his eyrie with a bottle of Thunderbird. Jordan…
“Report of the Justification Committee,” original fiction by Jona Whipple for Bad Survivalist

We could not take the polar bears. We tried, but we couldn’t do it. By then, they were mostly extinct anyway, and the specimen that survived weren’t worth the trouble. We couldn’t take the snowy egrets, but downloaded all of the poetry about them and scanned every major work of art featuring them, which we…
“An Ending for Her,” flash fiction by Matthew Meriwether

What if I walked up to your front door again. What if, at the sight of me on the front porch, the same front porch with so many stale memories, instead of laughing at my patheticness, you smiled with surprising relief. What if you had gained a little weight, the weight symbolic of your settling…
“What He Said,” flash fiction by Matthew Meriwether

I ask her what he said. He her boyfriend. He her boyfriend, the bartender, the man who watches. He told her I was rude. He told her I made fun of him and the other bartenders. He told her I was with “that girl you hate.” That girl our old friend. Our old friend with…
Flash Fiction: “The Fire” by Matthew Meriwether

She sees a fire in the huge dark field to the left of the road we’re driving down. Do you see that fire? she says. I look ahead of me, I look up—all the wrong directions. I see the moon, that white fire, which is bright and full, unblinking. Why were we talking about fire?…