Tag: Fiction

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…
“If There’s a Window—a New Possibility”: Allison Wyss Talks to Mary Lynn Reed

Mary Lynn Reed is a fiction writer and mathematician—but I’ve learned she’s also a photographer, shark-level pool player, and ace bowler. Her debut collection Phantom Advances has a bit of all that. It’s a deep exploration of questions of identity, sexuality, and gender—with a sharp focus and a lot of heart. She and I talked…
“I Cherish the Act of Sentencing”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Lance Olsen

Lance Olsen is one of America’s most formally inventive and intellectually stimulating novelists. Few writers have been as consistently excellent over the past thirty-plus years. In that time, he has evolved from a cutting-edge sci-fi writer into a wizard of form and narrative, infusing his singular works with poetically imaginative language as well as a…
“Ghost Fingers,” a Haunted Passages short story by Justin Carter

Sometime in the 1940s, a school bus in Horton, Texas, was hit by a train after stalling on the tracks. One week later, a truck stalled in the same spot. As a train bared down on the truck, the driver braced for impact, but the truck slowly rolled down off the crossing, just seconds before…
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…
Haunted Passages: “The Gold-Eyed Plague,” a short story by Sophie Panzer

The girls arrived on a bad wind like blight and ate up our lives like locusts. Some of us believed they were a divine punishment for gay marriage and transgenders in bathrooms. Others blamed climate change (this happened in a swing state). Only a few of us realized they probably had something to do with…
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.…