Fiction

She wasn’t at his funeral, so I took the van around to where I knew she was staying while she was in town. He always taught us to stick close to our home. It was her ex’s place, a rundown one-story with dead grass and an old plastic playground for some forgotten children.

In October 2022 (Issue 84)

Flash Fiction

Quantum Eurydice

by Avi Burton

Eurydice has never felt as if she fits in her own myth. It doesn’t belong to her, not really, because the story doesn’t end when she leaves it. Orpheus gets to keep going to the land of the living, and he gets to grieve, and he gets to die a brutal death, and then the story ends. She is left abandoned in the aftermath.

In October 2022 (Issue 84)

Fiction

Queen of the Wilis

by Kelsey Hutton

Author spotlight

Paris Opera Ballet, 1841 / You’re enjoying your reprieve here at the opéra, m’sieur, are you not? All the wealthiest gentlemen do. Here in the exclusive foyer de la danse, wives are forbidden and young girls lightly clad. Champagne obtained, you complain of your tiresome wife—how she will never replicate a young girl’s bloom, no matter how much rouge she rubs on her cheeks!

In October 2022 (Issue 84)

Flash Fiction

Short Swims From Great Heights

by Stephen M.A.

Davvit was six years old the first time he saw a shark kill a man on the beach. It came up, looked the guy’s wife straight in the eye, then stabbed him in the throat, right there next to the cotton candy stand beneath the hoverboard rental hut.

In October 2022 (Issue 84)

Fiction

How to Join a Colony of Sea-Folk; or, Other Ways of Knowing

by K.S. Walker

Author spotlight

Step One: You Wait – You are patient and your love, true. There is nothing you cannot withstand.

In September 2022 (Issue 83)

Flash Fiction

This Blue World

by Samantha Murray

You leave while it is still dark. Your lover sleeps on his stomach, the sheet draped only to his waist. You don’t want to go. You want to slide back into bed and listen to him breathing. And for him to make you coffee later, dark and sweet. But you’ve never let anyone haunt you. And you’re not about to start now.

In September 2022 (Issue 83)

Fiction

The Weight of It All

by Jennifer Hudak

Author spotlight

Elizabeth is the first person to notice I’m inside her. “Tell me how to do it,” she whispers. It’s a shock. No one has spoken to me directly in ages. I’m nothing more than a whisper when I slip beneath her skin. I’m less than a breath. I should be undetectable, but somehow, I’m not. It might have been a relief—to be acknowledged, to be known—except that Elizabeth clings to me with her bony fingers and won’t let me go. I struggle to escape her, but no matter how hard I push, she’s got me trapped inside her body.

In September 2022 (Issue 83)

Flash Fiction

The Probability of One

by Jen Brown

Chained doulas pull a child from the womb in low-gravity orbit; a babe of the Many Mouthed Empire, unencumbered by duty. Defiant, I face the birthing altar—jaw, clamped; gaze, glassy. (I mustn’t. Look.) I dreamt of children, once. Now it’s as if Mama Caarine gazes through the newborn’s eyes; as though my brother, Zjor-Anu, thumbed […]

In September 2022 (Issue 83)

Fiction

A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, With Two Lemmas

by P H Lee

Author spotlight

Once upon a time, in the dark ages before the singularity, there was a fox who, while walking its way along a riverbank, saw a great big bevy of catfish fleeing in a panic this way and that. Curious, the fox called out to the fishes, saying, “Good fishes of the stream, I see you fleeing in a panic this way and that. I do not wish to interrupt your suffering, but I am curious and as a fox I must follow my curiosity: Surely, there must be some great evil from which you are fleeing?”

In August 2022 (Issue 82)