Tag: Fiction

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…
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…