3:AM Magazine

“The truth was that I had been thinking about you cheating for a while. I thought about it on several occasions while I was alone and touching myself and was beginning to wonder if I was fucking myself to fiction.”

By Patrick Howell O’Neill.

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“There are signs on the concrete parapet: “Suicidal? Despairing? Call -” and a number. Someone has to take responsibility, I guess. My shoes are too heavy to run in - I kick them off and run up and down. Sure enough, one of these signs has been altered. The 6 becomes an 8, the 0 becomes a 8, the 2 becomes a 4. In bad light it would pass, and I recognise the number. There is nobody here, and yet the place itself exists. I lean over and look down at the concrete-slab water. There are boats out there, bobbing like soap scum.”

By Krishan Coupland.

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I went home and I wrote all of the above down on my blog because I thought the world should probably know about it and within the hour I got offered a three-book deal with Big Penis Books, which I turned down because I’m not a sell-out, and anyway the advance was too small. I sent them a reply saying “Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather write for 3:AM Magazine for no money than commit to a long-term book project that would require an attention span of more than….”.

By Ben Myers.

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Yes, that’s what I’m saying. He was always giving things up. You know, like any pleasure he can think of, everyone should give it up. But what I think is, he wouldn’t have liked it, not really, if everyone gave up everything he’d given up, because then he wouldn’t have been any different. He wouldn’t have been special. I’ll tell you something I learned very young, when someone says something’s for your own good, that’s the time to be ready for the worst.

By John Barker.

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So I shuffled my feet and nodded my head and he let me go with a slap on the wrist. Andrei was pissed that the Dean confronted me on this matter rather than him, but after that, we did all our scanning ourselves. I did give the Scanning Dept. a final image to consider, however, by scratching a swastika onto their door——which apparently nobody objected to, because it’s still there to this day.

By Mark Spitzer.

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If one thing had kept him going, it was his poetry. This hobby he had negotiated all his life. Benjamin was pleased with his own recent work, but the thing about writing is that the most enjoyment comes through sharing. His mom liked what he wrote. Sandra, the manageress at the funeral parlour, thought it was okay too. It’s surprising how fast such support will form the basis of a man’s self-esteem. But Benjamin sought a wider audience. His Mom was his mom, and Sandra, well… he suspected she just wanted to jump his bones. Benjamin made a few enquiries and was soon invited to bring his collected works around to an English lit professor who managed a small university printing press.

By Nelson L. Eshleman.

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A woman wants to be honest, a man wants to be good. Let’s face it, a woman’s concerned with things as they are and a man is concerned with things as they should be. This romantic attachment to what should be is the cause of all my trouble. I can’t bear the truth of the pain I’ve caused. So I make it about myself. Flailing around back here, I’ve turned my guilt into an opera to drown out Flo’s simple song of distress.

By Michael DeCapite.

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I keep having this recurring dream: I leave my apartment, and walk down to Darcy’s apartment, which is over a restaurant. I call up to her window, “Bonjour! If I show up at your door, will you kiss my feet, and tell me I’m home?” And then I add, “Laissez les bon temps rouler!” She replies by opening the window; she says something trite, like, “I am with Ray because he has more money than you!”

By Lisa Linquist.

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Then the stevedores took to town, stealing whiskey, hoisting bordellos right off of their foundations, and moving them closer, to within a more convenient swaggering distance from port. Two stevedores, high on corn syrup malt, tossed the post office into the bay and as it sunk, plumes of letters floated to the surface and stuck to the side of their boat like stamps on a tourist’s trunk.

By Sean Ruane.

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I wish he’d left the music on; Avery’s a void right now, and all that I can hear is my own breathing, my heartbeat suddenly echoing through my neck. The call ends and I give Avery a look. He’s still eyeing the window, tallying scratches on the glass. I wonder how to get a reaction from him, how cohesive his thoughts are. Cohesive enough, I think. “She’s checking in on you,” I say.

By Tobias Carroll.

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