Category: Fiction

Side A Hybrid Piece: “Early People” by Jeffrey Hermann

Early People Early people looked at stars and just had no idea. Then someone had an idea. They drew it on a cave wall with a burnt stick. Meanwhile, I’m eating Sun Chips from a machine. If I had to explain the world to paleolithic humans I’d take them someplace quiet and wait for an…
Fiction: “My Dinner with a Thief” by David Luntz

I was looking for something for my wife I couldn’t afford. That’s when I first saw her. A younger-looking version of my wife. A customer had left a diamond brooch on the glass top and she pocketed it like a Three-card Monte pro. Her gray eyes clocked mine and said: No one likes a snitch.…
Fiction for Side A: “Thirty-Nine Bye-Byes” by Martin Kleinman

Thirty-Nine Bye-Byes 39. “You should see him.” 2. The phone call came while I was stuck in traffic on the Central Park transverse, the Met’s Temple of Dendur off to my right. A nurse from my father’s hospital equivocated her way through the call. My dad had been in failing health. “Where are you now?” she…
Fiction from The Future: “The Freewheeling Bicycle Coast” by Perry Genovesi

In which the people of the Coast realize that the new way of walking was so much like how a bicycle coasts, that when they even looked at the bicycle parts in their refuse bins, they wondered why it had taken them so long to discover. ᐧᐧᐧᐧ Before we met Delilah, we all suffered the…
The Future: “The Buddha Who Couldn’t Feel & The Fish on the Floor,” a flash by Emily Lu

You were the buddha who couldn’t feel. They carved you out of the grotto in Henan, dilated and full of stone. Sent you to look after a new mountain. On your journey here, they left your feet behind. They lost every one of your thousand arms and installed your seat too high up from the…
Short Fiction: “Adrift” by Max Wheeler

Like so much in Hassan’s long life, this transition was something done to him, not by him. My mom sounded resigned when she called me the night before my monthly visit. Her husband had been changing in small ways for a while already. “Look, honey. I have to tell you something.” I could tell she’d…
“White Girls with Cornrows,” a Side A short story by Brent Joseph Johnson

White Girls with Cornrows I first came across Amber and Ashley while I was working at Ego’s maybe six or seven years ago. Both as the doorguy and the barback. At the time I wasn’t at a good place in my life and I eventually had to quit because of how shitty it all got…
Fiction from The Future: “The Prank Caller” by Will Musgrove

Door flopping like an unknotted robe, Mrs. Robinson’s refrigerator sprinted past my living room window. Two human-esque legs powered the appliance down the street. The screams on the other line faded, and a few seconds later Mrs. Robinson herself zoomed by, collecting her milk and eggs as she gave chase. I hung up the phone.…
Side A Fiction: “In Pictures” by J.T. Price

In Pictures When girls asked who her father was, sometimes Norma Jeane said she didn’t know, and sometimes said she’d only seen him once, in a photo, and sometimes that her father was Clark Gable, the man in the photo. She said she could tell by his moustache, the way he styled his hair, and…