Tag: Fiction

“Lunch Break”: A Bad Survivalist Short Story by Stephanie Austin

The sky over my chosen park bench is summer and painful. Fold my hands. Block out the kids running with the little red ball. Close my eyes. Breathe. The bench shifts. Another woman, an older woman, situates herself next to me. She smells like cinnamon gum. She reaches into her coat pocket, and her elbow…
“Ten Reasons Why You, as a Country’s President, Should Send a Congratulation Message to a New President of Another Country,” a short story by Zhihui Zou

#10: You need someone to talk to because you have poisoned the tea of all your colleagues. #9: You need to suck up to them because your country has no nukes. #8: You need to remind the public that your country is actually a country and not a joke. #7: You and they share the…
“Sour Candy”: A Haunted Passages Flash Fiction by Lindy Biller

My mother carried bright colored candies with her everywhere. Usually Skittles or M&M’s. It didn’t strike me as odd until years after she was gone. She would stop at a red light and reach into the Ziploc bag in her pocket. She created her own complicated meaning system for each color—red meant turn back, green…
Flavor Town USA Fiction: “Dangerous Soup” by Alicia Bones

Diner comment cards from The Wild Boar: “The soup’s the only thing I ever order because it’s the only food I dream about. Why do you have anything else on the menu? The soup’s the only thing anybody wants.” —Addie R. “It’s fabulous. He’s outdone himself. This is the best soup we’ve ever had!” —The…
Flavor Town USA Fiction: “Cake Every Day” by Mike Lewis-Beck

Liam finds himself at a crossroads. His wife, Carla, has exiled him from their comfortable Iowa home, and he’s seeking solace in Oregon—Portland, to be exact, where he, a fifty-year-old Professor of Poetry, has secured a lowly visiting appointment at a local college. While that is a crossroads for him, it is not the crossroad. That crucial…
Regard novel excerpt by Pablo D’Stair

IT WAS UNTIL A POINT she was uncertain of she had kept a list of the topics on which they had walked at night (coming usually to rest under the several trees upon the bit of hill near the roadside) lost in discussion of. This list she now found she knew was not a complete…
“Bear Control”: A Short Story by Jennifer Lynn Christie for Bad Survivalist

Part I: The Beginning When I was small, I had dreams of the zoo. Putting mammoth-sized kibble in a bowl for the elephants, communicating with gorillas by hand, making sure the seal got her little fish. The painful, but necessary vaccine, the shot that might put a suffering tiger out of an agony that, even in…
“Owls in the Palms : The Uninspired Apartment : Notes from a Lost Decade (1)”: A Bad Survivalist Short Story by Reagan Wiles

The police left my iPod behind on the hillside in front of Red Lobster with my red leather journal, seven dollars and the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, which I had bought only hours before; they put me in the squad car without incident. I did not resist. In fact, I was so cooperative that I…
“I’m Resistant to Form, in Life and in Art”: An Interview with Loie Rawding by Laura Eppinger

Loie Rawding grew up on the coast of Maine. Her personal work exists as hybrid monster, a cocktail of prose and poetry that focuses on her lived experience and the subconscious or fantasy spaces in which she feels protected and strong. As an artist, Loie combines paint, photography, wax, fabric, and found objects to create…