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We began to believe, as how could we not, that at least some of it was performance, fake news, theater created not for the sake of our entertainment, but something analogous to entertainment, a desire to keep us watching: the bombing this morning, for example, in a city on the other side of the world, a city we had never heard of, or else which we had an inexact sense that we may have heard of, a city the name of which may have been similar to some other city we had heard of before and forgotten. All at once this bombing filled our timelines, filled them so thoroughly that anyone who spoke of anything else, problems getting groceries, jokes about the president, complaints about the president, personal illness, opinions on television shows or movies, immediately outed themselves as heartless.

Three new microfictions by James Tadd Adcox.

the melodic line that obsessed my thoughts at that moment was, perhaps, a theme or theme-adjacent/theme-supportive, and in my head where notes often gather it started logically enough, pleasing to the ear, running through a normal chord progression for some measures, if I researched I may have discovered that this chord progression was one I had used before, and at a particular moment, still in my head, the melodic line made a jump, more a shift, to an unexpected note and continued from there using that new, unexpected note, that jump, as a framework a baseline, so normal normal normal, huhwhat, newnormal newnormal newnormal…

A short story by Michael L. Sevy.

Dawn stamps the window and tells the blinds’ outline.  Ten minutes later, sunlight taps the floor.  The Matchbox gasps.  Its windshield crystals; the air inside grows tight.  You’ve been sitting in there—in a tiny toy car—all night long.  Its doors, of course, do not open.

A short story by Benjamin Lytal.

They lived in terror of living animals. Animal blood and animal flesh alarmed and excited them. It didn’t help to install glass partitions in the rooms or fill empty corners with taxidermied specimens. Silence, stillness, the occasional snow of sawdust from tiny holes in old hide, these were good things, but not enough. Not reliable. More than once, in the black surface of a glass eye, they glimpsed reflected movement, a declining sun or a bending leaf. They dined in silent tension, in an atmosphere of seance, waiting to detect alternations of light and shade among the cutlery.

Three new microfictions by Addison Zeller.

At the mighty Fimbul Winter’s dawn, two hollow-faced boys eye their bowls. Now the boys pretend to play, watch their mother grip bow and quiver. At the homestead’s door she sniffs the icy air, a blizzard’s smell. Unnoticed, from beyond the pasture, wraiths bide their time.

A short story by Petra Meindl-Andrews.