Tag: Fiction

Fiction: “What Is Left” by Jen Michalski

You’re making good time. Keep this up, the splits will be amazing. There’s one guy ahead, a kid, really, who won’t even feel this tomorrow, the pain of achievement, his legs like spokes on a bicycle wheel, cycling, cycling, all legs and concave torso, a kid who hasn’t grown into form, into ache. You are…
Claire Polders: “Amsterdam,” a hybrid fiction

Aerial shot. The sun rises over a city of semicircles. Traffic noises are punctuated by shrieking gulls. The camera pans down, getting closer and closer to the earth until figures emerge on a street split in half by a misted canal. I – EconomyNothing is permanent except for the creation of junk. Bicycles. Umbrellas. Handbags…
Fiction by Claire Hopple: “A Catalogue of Leavings”

The situation really started to seem desperate after the death of a fake plant. Its fabric elephant ears were found shorn straight down the middle, fuzzy with the crosshatching of thread at the break. We knew maintaining a real one would be too much for either one of us, so this had seemed like a…
“Joe West’s Brother”: A Short Story by Siamak Vossoughi

The beautiful thing about fighting fascism, eighty-nine-year-old Joe West was saying, is that if you die, you die on the side of every work of art ever created, even the bad ones, you die on the side of every book and every song and every painting, and every one of them belongs to you now…
“More Fish Than Man,” a short story by Marcus Pactor

My cousin and I once fished under an interstate where a bent leg of swamp lay exposed and easy to approach. Its water was nothing to drink but it held plenty to eat. We caught a couple catfish inside half an hour. Then this not legendarily-sized gator but gator nonetheless came after his cork. My…
“They Had Turned into Something Else,” lyric fiction by Babak Lakghomi

To say it was just the voice in your head, that what you heard had nothing to do with anything. To say it was just about the fans blowing in the kitchen, that you couldn’t sleep, that you didn’t know for how long you hadn’t slept. To say that it was about your father, that…
“Blood Orange,” a flash fiction by Kate Garklavs

Shell pink, crab fat, lilac of a near-healed bruise: sunset over the Lombard Auto Body Shop, which Jack observes from the folding chair on his porch. The temperature hasn’t climbed above thirty all week, but Jack, bundled in parka and ragg gloves, has prepared. No entertainment on the porch—none of the formal variety, anyway—but Jack…
“Midnight at the Organporium,” a short story by Tara Campbell

I only did it for you, when I crept into the Organporium at the Southside Mall last night and broke the glass to the heart display and took what I thought you needed. I mean, how could I have known it wasn’t the right thing. I’d watched you and listened to you; I’d felt your…
Flash Fiction by Heather Sager: “SIT”

MOM TOLD ME I WAS HER BEST ONLY DAUGHTER AND I NEEDED TO SIT WITH GRANDPA BECAUSE OF THIS BECAUSE OF MY BROTHERS THIS IS A TASK SHE COULD NOT ENJOY—MY BROTHERS HAVE LIVES AND I DO THIS FOR HER.SHE DRIVES PLACES SHE IS A MOTHER BUT WHEN MOM DROPS ME OFF I CAN TELLGRANDPA…