Tag: Fiction

Fiction: “A Crushing Beauty” by Kelly Lynn Thomas

Mia has been dead for weeks, but she can’t bring herself to leave Nowhere, Pennsylvania. When it had become clear that the chemicals she’d poisoned herself with had only worked on her body, she’d planned to make for Los Angeles like she and her best friend had always dreamed. She makes it as far west…
A Short Story by Laura Hendrix Ezell: “Flight,” from A Record of Our Debts

The pain in childbirth was different for Rachel. When it was her time, she felt it in every part of her, as if the baby were forming just as she birthed it, tearing its muscles away from her own, drawing blood from her veins and breath from her lungs. It was, for Rachel, a splitting,…
Tina May Hall: Two Fictions from The Extinction Museum

Exhibit #408 from The Extinction Museum—Bisected baseball with cork center, two layers of beige yarn, white horsehide cover stained with dirt and grass, black and red stitching, unraveling Grandmother said a baseball of her youth had a sturgeon eye at the center. Spiny fish, nearly prehistoric, giants they wrestled in the mud rivers that bracketed…
Short Story Prize 2017: “Monument” by Kristen Gleason

Joanna Ruocco on “Monument,” winner of the 2017 Heavy Feather Story Prize: “A room in my apartment has windows all around (a box of glass), and the weird shining black-green of magnolia leaves presses up to the glass (a box in black-green). I read ‘Monument’ in that room and traveled from my own black-green world…
Fiction by Marcus Pactor: “Cake”

—after Blake Butler The cake reminded me of the twins’ wet sludge food. I could never shovel it well enough for them. My wife often replaced me halfway through their meals, as a mercy. I did not slice, then, so much as scoop dessert into a bowl. It tasted of egg and hair. That last…
Two Surreal Fictions by Michael Trocchia

The Uninvited It was the scene outside that would be of great consequence, yet they crowded around the uninvited guest, who in the larger picture had little to do with much of anything. The larger picture, in fact, was more than a frame of reference, for it was, of course, larger than that, despite the…
Two New Pieces by Vi Khi Nao

MY SKIN Because I dream of you as skin and door …I know you have been sublime beforeAs engorgedAs distorted as my view of the world If I could surrender your nameYour lipsYour invasionTowards more heroic hoursI would be asking you to slingYour kiss forward as if toKill what isn’t saliva, which isn’t the fiberglass…
Flash Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Slow Burn” by Kristina Ten

The explorer wakes up on a strange planet with no memory of how she got there, clawing at the black ground beneath her, gulping against the smoke-filled air. It wouldn’t be the first time, this getting to and forgetting. She scans her surroundings: no ship, wrecked or otherwise; no rations or equipment to help with…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Warehouse” by Chase Burke

Amazon’s warehouses are warehouses of commerce. Every item an American might desire, shelved and organized from floor to ceiling over acres of glazed concrete. Likewise Walmart—containing multitudes, now minus the hyphen. Likewise every mall of America. Ditto the dumpster. If trash is a record of consumption then it is also a record of purchasing power.…