Fiction
March Contributors
Traci Adams, Seriah Black, Camryn Brennan, Christie Chapman, Garima Chhikara, Blake Christian, JD Clapp, Cooper Clarence, Andrea Damic, Jonas David, Jessica Edmond, Miles Efron, Christina Ellison, Rahel Gamma, Mario Georgiou, Michael Hagen, Nevin Haque, Foxx Hart, Isabelle Hughes, Kathryn Kulpa, Oliver Land, Aster May, Helaina Pisar Mckibbin, Mitchell Miller, Pete Mitchell, Saee Motling, Kelly Murashige, Peter Naughton, Karl Nykwest, Michael E. O'Reilly, Alex Pugsley, Neil Randall, Michael Ranfone, Alexei Raymond, Frank Reardon, Frank Reardon, Sullivan Rex, AP Ritchey, Dane Rook, Adele Schultz, Peter Sipe, Kahlo Smith, Elizabeth Sundstrom, Elridge Thomas III, Brendan Todt, Tanuja Viswanath, McKenna Wilds, and Keiran Wyatt
March Highlights
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once i was medusa
Flash Fiction by Garima Chhikara
“They knew my name, but they chose Medusa, the goddess, the untouchable, the stone-eyed killer from their favorite game. I hought they meant it as mockery. But they shouted it in exaltation, like a banner lifted high.”
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the girl who ate her dreams
Flash Fiction by Michael Hagen
“Mother says: eat your dreams while they are fresh, or they’ll fester and rot. But he hasn’t. His skin, soft beneath my tongue. I have eaten all my dreams, a good girl—until him.”
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table for one
Fiction by JD Clapp
“I turned 55 today, double knuckles, racing headlong into they call the Golden Years. Shit, with the ways things are going, fool’s gold maybe. Happy fucking birthday to me.”
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dread of red
Fiction by Sullivan Rex
“I duck down to the floor and lift the tablecloth to see a huge pool of blood surrounding a severed arm. What the fuck is this?! I grab the fork and sit up straight. ‘Everything okay, honey?’ the woman asks. ‘Do you want some more casserole?’”
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a tribute to henry in apartment 8f
Micro-fiction by AP Ritchey
“The elevator took the long way down—it always did—and in that rattling, humming descent I caught myself thinking about Henry…”
solomon's good deed radio hour from angola
by Stan Kempton
“It was after midnight when the incident occurred…Whatever the reason, the signal was captured and carried, aiding in the brief escape of the sound of coarse fabric, the low-wheeze-of-a-breath settling in close to the mic, then a kind of voice only forty years of smoking can produce…”
the fall of mammon
by Mei Backof
“I could tell you things, things about the town of Mammon…None of the men swam Mammon Lake, not after the family down the street lost their little girl to the swallowing waters.”
synthesize
by Emily Teresa
“Loving tendrils guide my hard-segmented body up. In the mirror—I can actually see now. My new form. Red shell, like dried blood made into armor. Segmented plates running down my torso and my limbs. Sharp and beautiful…I truly am beautiful.”
the ecstasy of eleanor abernethy
by Tif Robinette
“Her mother knelt her at the altar of the cabbage soup diet as a young girl, a penitential broth of vegetables and powdered onion mix that left her perpetually dizzy and prone to fainting spells punctuated by thunderous sulphuric farts..”
once a hero always a…
by Tyler Efford
“[Society] always teetering on the edge, pretending everything’s fine while the cracks keep spreading underneath.
the duel
by Jesse Lifton
““If you do not duel me to restore the honor you have besmirched, I will shoot you dead.”
the self-checkout lane
by Rick Taliaferro
“But Harris kept his serious face on as he gingerly lifted and opened the bag. For a second, a whole fryer chicken. The next second, a tuft of dark hair, squinted eyes, blue lips parted. He recoiled as he dropped the baby.”
foreclosure season
by Christian Fuller
“When Paul set his shoes on fire, we told him to piss it out. That, like, he’d better hurry. He was only supposed to light up the insulation we’d pulled out from the eggshell walls…but we were sixteen and drunk enough to fist fight god and things just had a way of happening.”
the jackals
by Finnegan James McBride
“Sand crunched under Sharon’s feet as she approached the tent. The lake shimmered in her peripheral vision. Her hands were cold. In the woods, the jackals wailed like they were pleading for something.”
cat week
by David Hinson
“Cats appeared again the following year, in a newsroom in South Dakota, a design studio in California, a public relations firm in Texas, and a commercial real estate company in Mississippi. And then it didn’t happen again that year or the next year…”
pound 4 pound
by JP Lor
“We’re gonna watch my girl’s ex get beat up. The plan is simple: go to his cage match and collect a few things – his blood, sweat, hair, hopefully teeth. Then we’re gonna burn them in a pot I got at Goodwill. Burn him from our lives.”
break
by Christopher Kostyn Passante
“The cobalt light first appeared outside Caelan’s window the night Evie went through the ice. A small orb no bigger than a butternut and shrouded in updrafts of blown snow played at the witch window in the guest loft of their half-Cape…”
the zeppelins of desire
by Jon Wesick
“After taking the escalator to the basement, he set out lutefisk and loaded the coffee machine with K2-cups. Addicts filed in and arranged folding chairs in a circle. A man in a sombrero stood. ‘I’m C.D. and I’m a lawncare addict. I’ve been six-weeks clean.’”
you are a rock god
by Joelle Killian
“Whatever those chemical wizards add during synthesis to create this effect always leaves you with glitter-snot for days.”
the hour between dog and wolf
by Michael Holtzman
“Her hand rested at her side, fingers curled around a heavy key. In the hour between the dog and the wolf, the key slipped free and dropped slowly down the long well of a waking dream, striking the metal bowl beside her chair. The sharp clang broke the spell.”
the quintessence of evil
by William Jennings Chalk
“…narcissists are difficult and self-centred to the extreme, but they are not actively trying to hurt you. Malignant narcissists, on the other hand, take pleasure in causing others pain, they enjoy your suffering.’
the grandparent scam
by D. C. Martin
“The kid looked up at him and squinted at the light. Telford saw himself in the blinking reflection of the kid’s eyes. An angry old man with a sledgehammer raised above his head.”
about honey
by D.J. Huppatz
“Cruising back to Nassau after my arrest and subsequent release for obstructing a bulldozer in the last Irish rainforest, my thoughts turned to the fate of the high-vis goons who smashed the forest’s fairy ring.”
the bus stop
by Olivia Ardine
“I left work that day somehow more satisfied than usual, feeling like I had done something good for the world. This was not a feeling I had daily, not a feeling I experienced by following the schedule.”
bus driver appreciation day
by Craig Demi
“The picture taking didn’t last long. How could it? We were bus drivers, not supermodels.”