MARCH 2023, SHORT STORY, 4300 WORDS Terra – 2198 AD Baba lay slumped on his desk, his pen dangling from his parchment hands. His grey hair lay in knotted clumps over the notebook, his tongue sticking slightly outwards, almost licking the page he was writing on. His last scribble was his own name, Parikshit Mehta, …
FEBRUARY 2023, SHORT STORY, 1015 WORDS The best thing about being dead is no longer needing to breathe. The worst thing about being dead is, well, being dead. The gondola—the one you dove from before you knew, really knew that you’d died—passes overhead, and you are not drowning. Staying down on the seabed is as …
SHORT STORY, 4805 WORDS I can always tell what dish my customers will order. Knowing what the dead crave is my gift. Or my curse. It’s hard to know which. This girl, for instance. Brown, like me, but pale, as if the color’s been leeched out of her skin. Dark, staring eyes, weeds tangled in …
June 22 Evelyn didn’t agree with having a gun in the apartment. She’d discovered my father’s revolver in the closet and become violently angry. This was the last argument, the one that truly severed our engagement. “Michael, if you can’t get rid of it—if you can’t decide between me and a fucking gun,” she said, …
You’re sure you’ve been here before. You’ve met this perfumed man who watches you through glass organs below the wax mask. Before this, you searched for a mirror in this house without mirrors, and when you couldn’t find one, you found a sink. Thinking now at last you’ll locate your true likeness in water, you …
L’Homme de Houbigant, by Jonathan Louis Duckworth and Joe Koch Keep Reading »
The third time I see the bones is on the day all is lost. We sit around the big oak table, the other women and I, unsure of ourselves. We lost the war. That’s what the young soldier tells us. He looks miserable and emaciated. There is dirt under his nails and on his ragged …
We aren’t sure how much we’ve lost. We don’t know where our fingers end. The walls reach into empty space, crumbling with a gasp as they grasp at the fog. At the end of them, we feel (we might remember feeling?) our fingers slip into the still air until they might as well not exist …
The Counting Ghosts, by Bernie Jean Schiebeling Keep Reading »
and they said “I nor we, us, I mean the fifth one.” . . . …
It is Sunday afternoon, and Silvia is watching her husband from the corner of her eye while she tries to read a book in the lone armchair where he never sits. Her husband is standing at the door to the balcony, looking out at the city below with a frown on his face. She watches …
The Watchers in the Stairwell, by Emily Henry Burnham Keep Reading »
Shave your head every third sunset, and the eyebrows, as is proper; sharpen your beak every sixth; if its straps bite into your skin, well, remember it is an honor to keep the silence; your lobes will need piercing; the black robes are to be worn always; on ceremony days—the leather cloak; drape your back …
