Tag: Fiction

A Story from The Future: “Affliction” by Angela Woodward

I have fled to a floating island of trash to tell you stories of the peaceful north woods. Here’s one—A man woke up early, disturbed by his uneasy conscience, and went down to the stream. It was still so dark, the path appeared as a blacker indentation in the ground, the leaves and sticks and mud…
“Dissonance, Shock, and the Inevitable Truth”: Gay Degani Chats with Sandra Arnold

Both the title of Soul Etchings (Retreat West Books, 2019) by Sandra Arnold, the cover with its crackled baby-doll faces, and the uncapitalized chapter titles throughout, prepare the reader for the unease found in the pages of this collection of very short stories. The author seduces us into her world, subverting expectations, almost always putting the…
Bad Survivalist: Five Plane Crashes by Chance Dibben

The Disappeared The airliner is not at the bottom of the ocean. Nor is it blown to bits over a 1000-mile radius of uninhabited water. No one’s dead. Hostage situation perhaps, the airliner flown to a dark forest, stored for a ransom that never comes. Maybe the passengers are contented. Maybe they will reappear in…
The Future Has Photography: “Men with Their Guns 2” by Margo Berdeshevsky

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Margo Berdeshevsky is the author of: BEFORE THE DROUGHT (Glass Lyre Press/2017). She is the winner of Fiction Collective Two’s American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize: “a ‘thrillingly cutting-edge’ book of sensual short-short stories with photographs by the author.” (Robert Olen Butler on Beautiful Soon Enough).
Fiction from The Future: “Rabid Dogs” by Jason Arment

Time before the alarms, when violence was only overseas, seemed disconnected from the now—silent countdown. Clark glanced at his watch. Only two minutes left. He wished things could go back to the way they were, when his only worries had been never amounting to anything and loneliness. But something had changed. Now every sixty minutes…
A Story from The Future by C.A. Schaefer: “To Whom Will You Seem Beautiful”

I am eighteen when I decide. I stand by the bed of the creek, watching the light on the surface of the water, when a man steps down beside me. He takes my face in his hands and turns it, side to side, as I might inspect a puppy or an antique, and then says,…
“The Butchers”: A Fiction Excerpt from The Future by Alana I. Capria

On Sundays, we butchered. It made us so happy, S— and me. We did not mind the blood or sound. We butchered what crouched and quivered, what was soft against a knife. S— and I butchered until our hands were wet. We prepared the butchering for a meal, for stews, steaks, and roasts. I carried…
Haunted Passages: “A Quiet Place to Sleep,” fiction by Nicole C. White

Angelica finds herself in the nexus of several intersecting red corridors. Everything is red: the walls, the stucco ceiling, the trim, the plush carpets. Each corridor recedes into the far distance and is studded with doors spaced at irregular distances apart, and each door has above it a tubular fluorescent bulb. But the bulbs are…
Hugh Behm-Steinberg Flash Fiction: “Wallace Stevens”

Anecdote of the Jar I placed a jar in Tennessee,And round it was, upon a hill.It made the slovenly wildernessSurround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it,And sprawled around, no longer wild.The jar was round upon the ground.And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere.The jar was gray and bare.It…