Tag: Fiction

Fiction for Side A: “Dancer” by Joel Henry Little

Dancer Some days when I’m on all fours and the corporate ladder-climbers on retreat are flogging me with their big foam swords, I watch the LEDs halo around the nearest bald head through the honeycomb eyeholes of my wolf costume reeking of weed and piss and I try to make a desert sunset in my…
Fiction for Haunted Passages: “Avalon” by Sarah Goodman

It was nothing new, really. A parking lot. A minor indignity. The driver rolled his window down and a man of some sinister age breathed out into the cold. Something about him was spiritually misshapen. He gaped at me with eyes so wide you could see the white all around his irises; like a cartoon…
The Future Has Fiction: “Scarecrows” by John Mitchell

I was only ever good at two things and being a mother wasn’t one of them. I knew how to disappear when things got hard, and I knew how to make everything worse when I showed back up. True to form, the flood came six months after I returned home. The sea levels rose so…
Fiction from the Future: “Mar-a-Lago” by Matt McBride

Everyone’s thrown a party the night before they’re butchered. Tonight’s Jannelle’s, and she stands onstage in Mar-a-Lago’s Gold and White Ballroom, holding the karaoke machine’s mic as if it were a weapon. An AI Beyonce song plays from a speaker on a tripod. Jannelle can remember about half the words. Mark sits alone at a…
Bad Survivalist Flash Fiction: “Pillow Talk” by Christopher Linforth

Jacqueline’s gone to sort out her bleeding. I stay in bed and text my last girlfriend that I’m over her. I don’t miss you, I say, I never missed you. Even when we used to get high and steal Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies from the bodega and taste the chocolate in each other’s mouths. That…
Fiction from the Future: “Professor & I” by Mukul

Outside, at dawn, this is same dew that was once a cloud, once a river, once a pond, once a ray of the sun, once a dust of the stars, and who knows maybe once a syllable of the Word. These ornaments of nature, ornaments of language, an exercise in style and sound and sight…
Side A Fiction: “The joint is mine, the wine is yours” by Tomasz Lesniara

The joint is mine, the wine is yours London was lonely. Cold. Empty. As soon as the sun went down and all the pint glasses were sprayed with boiling water inside silver, industrial dishwashers—it was time for laptops and noodles. One of the most celebrated cities on the planet turned into an abandoned ship, drifting…
Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Dancer’s Commute” by Genevieve Murdick

In the mornings, they hose the whole thing down, and the chemical smell of soap—the whirring growl of power hoses—this briefly supplants the pounding sounds of pop music, muffled across wet wood and brick. Some club jammer you remember from 2013; the same way you remember an old friend running into you at Rouses, but…
The Future Has Fiction: “Entering Heaven Alive” by Elijah Sparkman

I was telling my students about the drought that was coming. The floods. Climate change and refugees. Storms. Famines. The droughts and the deaths. We were at Northern Michigan University. It was a Good Books Class. We were reading Octavia Butler and my students were from the suburbs of Minneapolis, the rural farmlands of Wisconsin,…