Fiction

May Contributors

X.C. Atkins, Kendra Augustin, Ioana Barbulescu, Amy Allen, Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Indigo Carter, Catherine Dean, Michael Fontana, Robert John Miller, Mitchell Ny, Brittany Pike, Albert Rodríguez, Nayt Rundquist, Daniel Sheen, Antonio Sodré, Mick Theebs, and Brian Washines

May Highlights

back in the city

Fiction by Brian Washines
“I took the radio out onto the balcony and tossed it. When it hit the parking lot it went into what appeared to be three separate pieces. Someone in one of the other apartments across the street laughed.”
flowers

Micro-fiction by X.C. Atkins
“I’d dump them into the lake just out of town, as usual. I sawed them into manageable pieces, listening to the Cocteau Twins.”
we dance the hula at the hotel luau

Micro-fiction by Melissa Llanes Brownlee
“and we dance the hula and we dance the hula and we don’t tell our stories not the ones you want to know…”
and then there is nothing

Fiction by Daniel Sheen
“‘I’m scared,’ I whisper, my voice trembling as the first celestial streak appears from over the horizon…can still see their polished brightness reflected in his black-water eyes. Painfully beautiful. The boiling sky veined with the fiery tails of a dozen artificial comets.”
long and behold

Fiction by Catherine Dean
“Let’s just say that if Plato’s Republic contained a perfect form for a bad mother, you might be it…A classic filiophage, like in Medea, like in The Brood. At least Medea knew how to create a beautiful table.”

David Estringel 6/12/25 David Estringel 6/12/25

two stories

by J.B. Kalf

“I can still smell the cockroaches, hear the crickets on the wall, taste the headlights on the cars. I am part of the hotel ecosystem, along with cleaning ladies and the teenage clerk and this ecosystem known as the hotel..”

David Estringel 6/9/25 David Estringel 6/9/25

ma’s elmo phone

by JD Clapp

“I just don’t have it in me to go back. But hell, at least she has Elmo now.”

David Estringel 6/6/25 David Estringel 6/6/25

shepherd

by Robert L. Penick

“Dad is passed out in the yard again, couldn’t stagger in from where his buddies dropped him at the curb.”

David Estringel 6/2/25 David Estringel 6/2/25

two micros

by Jack B. Bedell

“She’s there to get some film on the black-and-gold team’s coach. He’s a defense attorney who’s supposed to have severe disk damage at C3-5 after a fender bender, but you’d never know it from the way he’s laying into his wife behind the dug out…”