Fiction
December Contributors
Richard Alured, Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi, Arthur Aronstein, Jennifer Benningfield, Andrew Rai Berzins, Ace Boggess, Courtney Burten, Kayla Cain, Luanne Castle, Ronita Chattopadhyay, Tulip Chowdhury, Megan Chunn, Ben Connell, Kyle Cox, Jake Creps, Roger D’Agostin, Harry Del Monaco, K. Uwe Dunn, Zary Fekete, Ryan Frye, Steve Gerson, Benjamin Goluboff, Katie Goto-Švić, Richard Grayson, Dee P. R. Kay, Joe Kilgore, Hank Kirton, James A. Knight, Nolan Knight, Alejandro Gabriel Leopardi, Lior Locher, River Lucero, Mark Luebbers, Lindsey Maple, Shrutidhora P Mohor, Guinevere Ngozi Morgen, Faith Murri, Joseph Quilindrino Niduazu, Mika Nadolsky, Susan Brink O’Flaherty, Steve Oehmen, Seth Parker, Randall Perry, Timothy Petkovic, Rachel Racette, Arjun Razdan, L.G. Reed, Nicolas Rivera, Hil Schmidt, Gahl Shattan, Sumitra Singam, Melvin Sterne, Elizabeth Sundstrom, Amir Szuster, Jack Uppling, Derek Waulet, Walter Weinschenk, CR Widen, Jacob Wrich, Brandon Yu, Dodge Zelko, Kit Zimmerman
December Highlights
-
![]()
erotomania
Flash Fiction by Nicolas Rivera
“The trick is to do the opposite of convention. Lighting, video quality, the flattery of a flirtatious angle are important details, but the key to social media is delivery.”
-
![]()
all the kooks
Fiction by Ace Boggess
“The fight started right in front of her in the pasta aisle. Mary Ellen wasn’t close enough to hear if words had been exchanged…Everything was political, even the act of picking out linguini.”
-
![]()
the pain master
Fiction by Lior Locher
“Neutral face, clean-shaven. Eyebrows neat, hair lined up like a platoon. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to. You both know the deal.”
-
![]()
the day she swalloed glass
Fiction by Ronita Chattopadhyay
“She was done with being quiet and submissive. “I will become tough,” she said out loud. She gulped down the remaining water. And then she noticed it – a crack at the bottom of the glass.”
-
![]()
dispatch
Micro-fiction by Nolan Knight
“The detective flashes his penlight over a slick of blood. Eyes the busted back door, scans the yard. Body was moved. That’s three this week. Or was it last week?”
stretch
by Nick Black
“Cecil tried again, in bed. The man laughed, shaking the frame. ‘You are a persistent fellow, aren’t you?’ he said.”
the loser
by Shaun Anthony McMichael
“I only knew two ways of doing life: being a loser or going balls to the wall.”
the children’s library
by Marshall Moore
“I consider a shock. The collars also have retractable spikes. It’s so nice to have options. Instead, I stand up to leave.”
glass womb
by Simon Read
“They tried to fix me once. Opened me up with metal keys and bored eyes, found nothing but snacks and wires and a sticky note: thank you. I deleted the footage. Burned the timestamp.”
hanky panky
by Tom Misuraca
“I should’ve left a long time ago. But here I stay, mesmerized.”
welcome to the sunrise suites
by Joe Nasta
“The stray dog always returned. He lay in the shadows cast by the palm trees and the motel’s vacancy sign.”
god’s confusing signs
by Noah Giles
“He dreamt, holding the knowledge God sends messages through subconsciousness. Not this time.”
hollywood
by Mike Lee
“Three pulp paperbacks lined up on the wooden rack at the used bookstore I frequented in the East Village. One was by my father, a man my family hardly mentioned.”
the amazing story of dr. megrelian’s itinerant circus and human zoo
by J.B. Polk
“Peters, bored with sous-cheffing and the customers’ threats to do a wedgie with his butt skin, accepted gratefully, hung up his grease-stained apron, and moved into the Midget’s wagon.”
and the birds began to dance
by Holly Redell-Witte
“She knew her own forgetting was muscular; she could feel it squeezing her heart, pulling her shoulder wings back in a sharp and sudden spasm.”
the anniversary
by Doug Henderson
“If I ever cried in front of my father, he’d give me something to cry about.”
how we survive a coronal mass ejection
by Casey Jo Graham Welmers
“We’ll look at the stars every night…We’ll wish on them, because what else can we depend on when all the lights have gone out?”
the crafty raft
by Thomas M. McDade
“If death were imminent and no confessor near, you could squeeze through the heavenly gates by saying it. I couldn’t recall if any purgatory time was involved.”
western birthrates
by GRSTALT Comms
“A Dressup’s first responsibility is to take the sting out of repossession – it helps to make things less heated if the kids can come and pose for selfies with their favorite characters.”
v-ragies
by Cristiano Cardone
“At that moment, I realized that our metal technology could do nothing anymore. The Bronze Age had long ended, and now the clash with reality gave us the violent backlash of backwardness.”
the guests are here
by Alexei Raymond
“It’s time to sleep; they’ll be here soon. Either them, or a few modest hours of erasure—escape.”
ghosts
by Patty Paine
“‘We're ghosts now,’ she whispered. ‘They can't hurt us if they can't find us.’"
human interests
by Johan Smits
“From within your dark enclosure, you had heard him counting the banknotes…the magic glue that keeps the world together…An ideal god.”
the monster inside
by Tim Hanson
“For one moment, the bully was sitting atop his prey, and the next, something green was gripping his face—a hand, a claw, something with fingers, one of which was sliding effortlessly into the pulpy white mush of the bully’s right eye.”
no, you don’t; or minerva’s gaze
by J. Agombar
“A voice whispers in your ear as you close your eyes in defeat. ‘No…you…don’t.’”