Tag: Fiction

“The Barrel”: A Haunted Passages Short Story by Holly Day

For as long as he could remember, the barrel had sat in the back yard, behind a locked gate and a very tall fence. Only the father had the key, and three times a day, the boy would watch his father take a jumbled plate of scraps out to the back yard to leave at…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “Squimbop Fever” by David Leo Rice

I drove all night in the truck I’d found parked in front of the house on Cielo Drive, windows open so the last of the names Jim and Joe could flow out, leaving me in a purified state that I chose to call the Brothers Squimbop, though I knew I was alone. I drove through lowlands…
“Criminal”: A Bad Survivalist Short Story by Meg Tuite

My mouth belonged to me. “Your head is flat as a tape worm.” We waited in line to get measured. Anything over six inches was condemned as perverse and a student was sent home. These girls lived for high hair. She said, “Fuck your mother.” “My mother’s dead.” She gestured the sign of the cross…
“Digital Dreaming in Analog”: A Haunted Passages Short Story by Matthew Burnside

TUTORIAL It was on the thirteenth stage of one of those marble simulator games that Maxwell encountered a glitch and accidentally stole a glimpse of eternity. He was rolling full tilt toward the prismatic net when a ghost sparrow distracted him and he shot off a little too far to the right, ending up on…
“The Brothers Squimbop in Hollywood”: A Haunted Passages Short Story by David Leo Rice

After their disastrous tour of Europe, which had necessitated nothing less than complete rebirth from the womb of the witch who had claimed to be their mother, the Brothers Squimbop returned to America, disembarking at the edge of a New World that they could already see would never be new again. They quickly abandoned the…
“Shiny Shiny,” a Flavor Town USA short story by Mollie Schofer

When you live in a forest, there isn’t much to do but lie on your side and eat the open oysters offered to you by woodland sprites. (Open oysters are open like two palms cupping a skein of fresh-molted salamander skin.) Sometimes, of course, the woodland sprites are in a mischievous mood. They dust the…
Three Haunted Passages Flash Fictions: Becca Yenser

Tornadic Weather The Midwest throws neon-colored food at us. We have something microscopic in our throats. The trees procreate with pink, twirling helicopters that Carmen decides are magical. We go to a festival about a truce, called Truce Fest. We are trucing about colors of skin. You find a pair of earrings. Everything is pink…
“Neither Fish Nor Fowl”: A Short Story by Yunya Yang

He knows my name, my real name. Not Katie. Katie is my English name. I came up with it so that people wouldn’t have to be stumped by a name that starts with an “X.” During the uncomfortable pause as people stare at my real name, I will add, “I go by Katie, by the…
Three Flash Fictions: Andrew Tran

Moniker My “friends” kept calling me, Asian. And I was Asian, I am Asian. But they called me Asian as if it were my name. Like it was on my birth certificate, like I’d put it on a resume, or end a love letter that way, or even put it on my tombstone. At first,…