Tag: Fiction

“The Complicated Twirl,” a flash fiction by AJ Atwater

Even with advanced techniques like the Complicated Twirl, the Deep Dive, and the candidly difficult balletic Shoulder-Spading, the Shovelers fail to unearth their client. Sweating from the attempt, they polish shovel blades and buff wooden handles with luminous wax from polish kits they carry. They settle shovels carefully into cases like those for violins or…
Michael Seymour Blake Fiction: “Still No Snow”

I ask the mystic about his nails. “Oh these,” he says, tapping them together, each as long as my foot and connected to gnarled, root-like fingers. “A tribute to Daddy Grace, miracle worker.” I tell him I don’t believe in miracles, and he laughs. He claims miracles are as common as tragedies. He claims he…
New Short Fiction: “The Way the Wholehearted Live” by Suzzanna Matthews-Amanzio

Part OneJust three days before the White House National Security Advisor would be forced to resign—four days before Russia would deploy a missile violating a Cold War era arms treaty—a meme of world leaders awkwardly shaking hands with #notherpresident was making its rounds. And Andie was sitting in a DC hospital, phone in palm, watching…
AWW Best-in-Show Fellowship: Ashely Adams’ short story “What the Water Told Us”

In 2017, Antioch Writers’ Workshop entered into a partnership with the University of Dayton, and is formally known as The Antioch Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton. The University of Dayton provides in-kind space—a physical office, mailing address, and space for the Spring one-day seminar and Summer week-long event. Other benefits include availability of…
Original Short Story: “Twenty-two Voicemails” by Chris Ames

— M. it’s Noreen. I’ve been very busy lately learning how to take a joke. It’s come to my attention that I have been taking them incorrectly this whole time. How embarrassing thinking back (knowing what I know now) on the hundreds and hundreds of jokes I must have mishandled. Those hysterical parties, those elevator…
Zachary Doss: Three Boyfriend Fictions

The Natural Man Your boyfriend decides to grow his hair out. He has always kept himself carefully groomed, but lately he had been going to greater and greater lengths to manage hair growth. He waxes, he trims, he clippers, he tweezes. He keeps every follicle under such careful control that when he says he’s going…
A Short Story from James Brubaker’s Black Magic Death Sphere: (Science) Fictions: “H.G. Wells and The Present Crisis in Human Affairs”

Sometime in 1935: Imagine Herbert George Wells sitting on a stack of wood in a soundstage at Worton Hall in Isleworth. He watches an army of carpenters build a façade of the future out of cheap wood while he awaits the arrival of his film’s set designer, Vincent Korda. The carpenters swarm around Wells, every…
Sean Lovelace: Two Fictions

Destiny James Franco mail ordered a monk. The monk was the son of a flea trainer, who was the son of a flea trainer, who was again the son of a man who professionally trained fleas. “The blood of the flea is within our soul,” the monk told James Franco over Pop-Tarts (this was in…
Kami Westhoff Fiction: “Until We Surface”

The quease in our bellies rises and recedes with the water’s insistent motion. We close our eyes, beat back the bile with an onslaught of swallow. For Andrew it’s worse, of course. He opens the kitchen window and vomits. His mother is a pinprick for now, but her motion snags the sky, tears it into…