Tag: Fiction

“Omens”: A New Haunted Passages Short Story by Andrew Bertaina

When the moon appeared, a violent red sphere riding low on the prow of the sky, everyone in the village watched it with an admixture of wonder and terror. Children pointed at it with stubby fingers, asking their parents about the gigantic moon, trying to capture it by closing their hands. Parents whispered to their…
Side A Flash Fiction: “Husband-Safe” by Sophie Newman

Husband-Safe Carolina didn’t know when the pain began, but one day she bit into a cracker, and it arrived like a needle through her jaw. She avoided that side of her mouth for weeks in hopes that it might disappear on its own, but when it didn’t, she had no choice. At the dentist, the…
Side A Flash Fiction: “Olive Gabardine” by Kevin Grauke

Olive Gabardine Every night I’d go home and complain to my wife about him—how he could never count out the correct change, how I’d find him asleep in the bathroom and the breakroom and the janitor’s closet, how he always wore the same pair of pants with a hole in the crotch that was impossible…
On The Year of the Monster with Tara Stillions Whitehead: An Interview by Shannon Wolf

I sometimes wonder how one person can do so much. At any one time, when I speak to Tara Stillions Whitehead, she is in departmental meetings, corralling children, squeezing in writing time, and still somehow finds the time to be a friend to all in the literary community. It is unsurprising to me that Whitehead—someone…
New Story for Side A: “Dark Rhymes” by Peter Gordon

Dark Rhymes They’re waiting for him in a Greek diner on 9th Avenue, hanging all the way in the back, in the last booth before the bathrooms. None of them look up as he approaches. He might as well be a ghost. Without lowering his paper Paul says, “Have a seat, Joel.” There’s no room…
Exclusive Story Excerpt “The Living” from Campfires of the Dead and the Living by Peter Christopher – Out Now!

Campfires of the Dead and the Living is a collection of short fiction by Peter Christopher. This volume contains The Living—an unpublished collection of stories written between 1990 and 2004—and Campfires of the Dead—Christopher’s first collection, out of print for more than three decades and originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1989. In his…
Side A Fiction: “Pieterjan Thyjssen” by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Pieterjan Thyjssen For Peter Bullen One day during my morning walk I ran into Jim sporting the most staggering of haircuts. All the people around us, with their boring lives, their tedious bangs and fauxhawks, walking their shallow dogs, oblivious to the very concept of absolute beauty, each became entangled in leashes as their animals…
Bad Survivalist Short Story: “Progress” by Derek Fisher

TurtlePhone and Positively Pete! roll across a hellish expanse of the Mojave Desert. Roll, and drag. TurtlePhone, equipped with wheels under his plastic frame, is rolling comfortably enough. Positively Pete!, wheel-less, and without autonomy or propulsion, is dragged by the green tail of TurtlePhone, an appendage of hard plastic and pointy at its tip, which…
Flavor Town USA Fiction: “Sin Eaters LLC” by Will Musgrove

It was my first day. Inside the company vehicle, my trainer, Bob, read me the client’s file: sampling grocery store grapes, getting a little too tipsy on Sunday wine, several ticky-tacky sins, nothing a newbie like me couldn’t handle. Bob assured me the job was easy. All you had to do was eat the sin…