Fiction

1. Habitat
You reside in the top story of an abandoned building in a unit known as a symmetrical skybox. It features floor-to-ceiling glass walls on opposite sides of the building for observing the external world.

To the west exists an animal sanctuary with artificial constructs known as trees. The sanctuary houses howler monkeys, black and gray, small and ropy. In the center is a retention pond in which the monkeys play and frolic or drown each other.

To the east lies the super ocean, pewter like the sky, roiling with dead sea life and toxic blooms. Almost hourly, the ocean births hurricanes, magnetic storms, and poisonous gases.

A short story by Patrick Pujolas.

Convergent evolution is a phenomenon by which two similar-looking species come into existence via completely different strands of evolution. For example: slugs. There are a lot of them, all over the place, all over the ground, crawling and slithering and writhing in various states of amorphousness. They all derive originally from one mollusk which had upon its back a shell and begat all the rest. Time passed. Descendants went in different directions and grew other stuff, like horns, and became different colors, like yellow, and decided to get rid of the shell without telling the others. But then many of the others just so happened to have the same idea, separately, because maybe the shell was heavy. And that’s what me and this one friend I have are like. And I know I’m taking liberties, because I’ve never been in the tiny beansprout mind of a slug before, but my friend understands how evolution works, I don’t have to explain it to her and I never would because that’d be condescending, and yet she doesn’t actually believe it’s real.

A short story by Meghan Proulx.

If someone asks you—like say the USPS guy passes by you where you’re tossed belly sunward on the lawn and on his way to the mail slot asks you—hey there kid what’s new, you say nothing much, except lately what you’ve been up to is you got the hang of holding your breath real nice & long, a good three minutes plus some change, is why you’re lying on the lawn like starfished with a belt three notches tight around your chest so you don’t cheat, until your eyes go flat & milky and your mom yells thru the kitchen window at you quit messing around and get your ass up off the grass and stop embarrassing the mailman.

A short story by Max Steiner.

I thought, if Eleanor could just kill me, my dad would see my stepmother for what she really was: vapid, self-obsessed, manipulative. An ex-courtesan who ran the town’s first power plant, she was the last person I would have expected him to marry. I first met her when he invited her to our annual pig roast and the two of us spent an hour by the fire. After talking at length about the moral benefits of reading, she French braided my hair and wiped the dirt off my pants. I was nine at the time and admired this woman deeply—her beauty, her reserve, her manner of speaking. Everything about her contrasted with how I had grown up: days tracking deer and skinning squirrels, hauling water from the creek, sleeping on a straw mattress, dirt stuck under my fingernails, clothes stiff with dried sweat. I even went into town and bought ribbons so I could style my hair the same way, and I wore them every day while I worked.

A short story by Brianna Di Monda.

Dr. Abubacarr Njie (placeholder name, as he was ferried by the Americans in 1945 from one continent to another, from one vessel of transportation to another, narrowly escaping Soviet spies in Germany by rail, spending several weeks in the western lowlands of Albania diagnosed with malaria, living incognito as Mr. Eduardo Alvarez, chief editor for Der Spiegel, residing in Argentina from 1949 to 1966, finally arriving in America under the guise of Dr. Abubacarr Njie, research scientist for the California Institute of Technology) died last month. Later in the month, I published an obituary of Dr. Njie in the local Pasadena Chronicler, describing him as a reserved man dedicated to his work and a humble father to two lovely daughters and a reclusive son. Then, yesterday, a muddy manila envelope containing two notebooks of differing sizes, shapes, and colors arrived in the mail, delivered from Dr. Njie’s home address.

A short story by Kevin Ye.

sunday 23th Juligh
my name is Charlie but my real name is Charlotte Lewis. I am 6. today is the Holleedays. I have a dad but he is at work and a mam but She is sick and a litel brother called Oscar but he is a pain in the nek. in the holleedays my nana is staying at are house cos Mam is in hostipal and dad is at work. today my nana gived me a noat book cos she said I do good riting and I can rite abowt the holleedays or rite a story or what ever. I said I want to rite non Ficshun cos we lurned abowt non ficshun in year 1. Nana said what is non ficshun and I said didunt you lurn abowt non ficshun at school and nana said I didunt lurn nothing at School. then I telled nana abowt ficshun and non ficshun cos Nana is not very clever. Non ficshun is a real story abowt real Stuff that really hapuns and ficshun is maid up with Monsters and prinsessis and advenchurs and stuff that is not real. Like a funkshuning helth servis said dad. nana said may be if you rite a ficshun story you can bring my Nee operayshun forwud so it doant hurt no more. I said no I am going to rite a non ficshun story abowt my holleedays.

A short story by C S Mee.

“I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t even hear me out. He said he didn’t want me to save him, because he’s fed up with those who want to lift his spirits, and if he did feel the need for someone like that, well, that’s what psychiatrists are for. That’s when he told me he’s seeing Dr. Berényi, to whom he’s been referred by the Kincses family. Dr. Berényi suggested that he should make a lifestyle change, because he has a so-called achievement complex. In other words, by the age of forty he has accomplished everything he could, a nice apartment, a car, a summer home, a wife, children, appreciation in the field of science, and the problem is that he has no more goals left, and therefore he has nothing to fight for. So, he must make some changes, swap apartments with someone, or God-knows-what, because once he finds himself in a new environment, he’ll then have a lot of things to keep him busy, such as moving, organizing, and so on, he’ll have lots of small goals, since he has no more big goals left and, as they say, many a little makes a mickle.”

A short story by Miklós Vámos, translated by Ági Bori.

Wrapping children’s books for Silver Lake MILFs; a target for the malodorous and the tedious: this isn’t really the end of the literary business I had in mind. If I wasn’t already a misanthrope, this job would have turned me into one.
How did it come to this?
It is what happens when somebody nearing the end of their prime, who is unfit for daily toil, and has a morbid horror of anything involving effort, is forced, through a harsh diminishing of circumstances, to earn an honest living.
It’s a long story, too sad to be told, and I am not inclined to tell it. Life is plotless. Plots are for graveyards.

Read the opening of Service, John Tottenham‘s stunning debut novel.

I once wrote about an entity called the anti-wizard. My thoughts turned out to be not all that original. I learned the anti-wizard had already appeared in a popular videogame long before my words ever fell to paper, although I inferred that the game’s creator had likely never researched the classics, never studied Gilgamesh, Aeschylus, the Septuagint, Galen, the Ynglinga, the Nag Hammadi, the Picatrix, Ficino, the KJV, Hegel, Blavatsky, Haraway, Mbembe, Negarestani, et cetera. To my embarrassment, however, my wife was familiar with the videogame. She used to play against the anti-wizard with an ex-boyfriend long before me.

A short story by Garrett Crowe.

Something is happening to me, I don’t know what, only that when I went to the bathroom one day during Mrs. X–’s class, a dead fish came out of my body and tumbled into the toilet bowl. It was flat and thin, crowned with petallike gills that shimmered under the dirty stall lights, a shock of red-orange against white. I did not know what to do. The toilet hadn’t flushed since the beginning of the year. If I left the fish in the bathroom, my classmates would be sure to trace its odor back to me; it reeked of rust and decay and salt water. So I took the little fish and I chewed it up. Salt flooded my mouth in a warm torrent. I did not tell anyone what I had done.

A short story by Maggie Wu.

She believed in the myth of herself. She believed it with such steel-eyed commitment that we couldn’t help but be drawn in. The sheer force of her belief scattered questions and repelled doubts, at least during the time we were in her presence. And did it matter, if we began to wonder about this or that when we were alone, when her stories cooled in the stillness of the walk home? Or if two women, over coffee, talked about what a self-satisfied bitch she was? If they asked, who did she think she was kidding with those microbladed brows and that wrap dress that gaped at the tits? She was forty-five if she was a day. Did it mean anything at all when that man with the voluptuous accent dismissed everything she’d ever said because he could see the lace edges of her knickers peeking over the top of her too-tight jeans? Not when we were with her. She wouldn’t allow us to think any of that mattered. She’d lock onto our gazes and smile her corrupted smile and tell us to stay until we became a part of it. And we wanted to. God, we wanted to.

A short story by Lynsey May.

The person occasionally glances back at the dog. Because of these nervous looks, it could be construed that the animal is following this solitary human, unbid. Or the dog is passively walking, its walk happens to be behind the lone figure, they have, by chance, fallen into co-existing step, like a pair of clocks back-to-back in adjoining rooms. (Such clocks have been noted to synchronise, one slowing down and the other speeding up until both pendulums swing with the same (though opposite) trajectory, for no reason other than ‘Sympathetic Symmetry’.) Or perhaps their paths have coincidentally conjoined, producing a situation where the dog independently walks the same path as the person, albeit ten seconds or so later. Perhaps both states co-exist, like the superposed alive/dead cat.

A short story by Niamh Mac Cabe.