Tag: Fiction

“A Scream in the Ear from a Passing Car”: Dustin Cole on In Singing, He Composed a Song, a new novella by Jeremy Stewart

Jeremy Stewart’s newly released experimental novella is set in late 1990s Prince George, British Columbia, during the chilly month of November. It features the high school student protagonist, John Stevenson. John’s a rocker, dope smoker, cigarette “breather,” poet, and slacker. John’s a walker. He operates as the ponderous fulcrum of In Singing, He Composed a…
“A Veiling and Unveiling and Veiling Again”: An Interview with Elisabeth Sheffield by Marcus Pactor

Elisabeth Sheffield is the sort of writer most writers only hope to become: a ventriloquist offering up voice after voice. Each of her voices expands and complicates her readers’ view of her fictional world. Together her voices suggest the impossibility of ever fully seeing either fictional or real world. But hers are not Beckettian voices…
“I Couldn’t Stop Looking,” a flash fiction by Lisa Korzeniowski for Haunted Passages

I am standing in the backyard in front of the shed. My brother is at the kitchen window, moths circling his screened-in face. “What do you see?” Seth says. “Come see for yourself,” I say. “No way. He told us not to go in there.” “He left the door open,” I say, digging my toes…
Haunted Passages: “Raynaud’s Berries,” a new short story by Tony Burgess

—for Carrie On our way to the emergency room, we realize it is the twelfth day in a row of peppering rain. Solid grey foam fills the ditches lining the field beside our route. Beyond and up the escarpment, who knows? Now on this road though, tires engage with surface in a ceaseless shushing and…
“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…