Tag: Fiction

Fiction from the Future: “Civic Duty” by Meaghan McDavitt

Please press the button to indicate your choice. Tahara looked down at the blue and yellow lights. The electric voice reverberated through her mind, a robotic repetition of itself, relentless, forcing her to make the the decision. Please press the button to indicate your choice. Tahara looked at the surrounding cubicles. The maze of decisions.…
Short Story for Bad Survivalist: “Clashing Perspectives” by Kim Farleigh

Waiting on the top of a hill to catch a bus to Agra, we saw vehicles below fleeing from traffic lights. Then: deceleration, swerving, horns bleating, collisions narrowly avoided, vehicles creeping around something on the road fifty meters from the lights. Seconds later, another metal spine started accumulating behind the lights. Unsuspecting vertebrae, stretching on…
Side A Fiction: “Stoneware” by Katie Coleman

Stoneware We were packing boxes in the kitchen after a nice day: chimichangas, supermarket beer, loving talk. I thought I might as well pack the lobster bowls with the bedding, because we’d be inviting teachers for dinner in Thailand. My boyfriend’s certain to make a good teaching assistant. That picture of him in his camp…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “The Murder Portrait” by David Luntz

After I killed my best friend, I dreamt I’d “walked into” the painting he’d left for me in his will. It was in the style of some Dutch Master: a portrait of a young man reading a letter above a bowl of fruit. I snuck up behind him and read the letter. The letter told…
Daniel A. Rabuzzi Talks with Ken Scholes about Rewriting the Bible, Genre, and the Influence of Music on Writing

Ken Scholes is the author of five novels and over fifty short stories published internationally in eight languages. His series, The Psalms of Isaak, is published by Tor Books, and his short fiction has been collected in three volumes published by Fairwood Press. Fairwood is also publishing Better Dreams, Fallen Seeds and Other Handfuls of…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “A Gentle Creature” by Madeline Vosch

I lie awake at night. Around me, in all directions, a few feet away, there are other bodies. The walls between us are thin. Other bodies lying down, wrapped in blankets, asleep. Other bodies next to other bodies, sharing the same bed. I can almost hear them, the way they turn, how their breath shifts…
Bad Survivalist Short Story: “Hexed” by Chelsea Catherine

I sprinkle a hex over six dead mice and bury them under the oak behind my rental. “Sick, sick,” I say, sprinkling bay leaves over the mounds. “Remember what congestion tastes like.” Normally, I would never, but the townspeople here have done me dirty for too long—my coworkers, neighbors, even people at the supermarket. Markle…
Original Haunted Passages Short Story: “Come Out” by Andrew Plimpton

In the hallway of the gym at our school, far past the changing rooms and the water fountain, there was a room where the door was always locked. You could, however, always see inside. There was a window in the door, a window the janitors kept very clean. In this room, there was nothing but…
Five Tellings by Moikom Zeqo from His Book Sellers of Chaos

Born in Durrës in 1949, Moikom Zeqo was considered one of Albania’s very most important writers and public intellectuals. (When I visited Zeqo in Tirana in 2019, we couldn’t walk more than a couple blocks without a stranger stopping us to pay respects.) In 1974, Zeqo’s writing was suppressed for incorporating free verse and surrealism,…