Tag: Fiction

“Father Calls,” a Haunted Passages short fiction by Andrew Bertaina

Two weeks after my father dies in a freak accident, a dramatic fall while trimming fruit trees in his yard, he calls me in a dream. When the phone rings, I’m outside, watching a cloud of mosquitoes do a balletic dance around my shin. I’m drinking bourbon on the rocks, and the glass is sweating…
“Picking,” a collaborative short story by Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross from Vol. 9

I’m picking lemons from the lemon tree beside the back porch of a man I met a week ago at a fundraiser for the local cat shelter. Cocktails and Cats. I was mostly there for the cocktails, Josh was mostly there for his ex-wife, Maggie. She’s one of the shelter’s directors. “She’s my best friend,”…
Two Fictions by Teague von Bohlen from Vol. 9

Bombs in Dogs My ex Shelly and her new husband are moving out of town, a little over an hour’s drive from here. It’s a planned community on what’s now a golf course, but the whole thing used to be the municipal airfield back before the regional airport went in. They say they’ve treated the…
From Vol. 9: “80,” a short story by Stephen Dixon

He wakes up, gets his cellphone off the night table and opens it to look at the time. 3:02. He’s been asleep for less than an hour. An hour ago he checked the time after lying in bed awake for almost three hours. 2:05. So he’s gotten an hour’s sleep tonight. He’ll probably lie in…
From Vol. 9: “Invasion of the Dad,” fiction by Nicholas Grider

The dad arrived, as dads are known to do, in a large red SUV that was partly covered in mud and made a confident exit from the vehicle, stepping down from the driver’s seat onto the blacktop in dark brown shoes dwelling somewhere between “sensible” and “noticeably expensive,” and the dad was dressed as if…
From Vol. 9: “A Miniature Tale of Motherhood,” a short story by Oliver Zarandi

My children are cruel and look like goblins. Every day they take something away from me and I don’t ask for anything in return. I asked them this morning, “What do you want for lunch?” “Your breasts,” they said. So they had them. They suckled my teats, one apiece, and sucked them dry. No more…
Haunted Passages Fiction: “A Haunted House” by Mark Lamoureux

I.The Master Bedroom Not the heart of the House, but its crimson mouth. The undone belt droops like a skein of slobber over the bloodred cilia of the shag carpet, the cracked-open geode of a bad lung. Faerie lights gestate in the Negroni-colored teardrops of sick lamps. Spread across a dark wood dresser are pen knives &…
Side A Short Story: “Fragments in Color” by Chella Courington

Fragments in Color 1 When a kid I kept running away from home to see if Mama still wanted me. Never far and always to the corrugated camp near Sunset. I drank chicory with Maggie and chalked pink flamingos on the concrete. Tall yellow legs, long feathers with curved necks turned right. Beaks dark as…
Bad Survivalist Short Story: “Bear, Flower, Ferryman,” by Margaret Redmond Whitehead

For a long time that morning, the bear occupied herself with a cardboard box. Its walls were plushy and wet—soaked from the night’s rain—but rigid enough that it held its shape. It was on its side, with both ends open, creating a tunnel that was just barely too small for a bear to pass through.…