Fiction

I wondered, so I asked Vivian why she was still single. As Communications Director for The Old Rats Motorcycle Club LLC, she was surrounded by men. Powerful men, exciting men, hoary and bearded men. She had her pick.

Vivian began to speak about her Old Rats leather motorcycle jacket. I assumed she was being metaphoric. What followed was an unbelievable tale involving the Cult of Saint Syncletica in the eighteenth century and their demonic thread. I just went with it. Long story short, the thread was eventually used to stitch none other than Vivian’s Old Rats leather jacket, and the wearer was at times under its dark sway.

Three new microfictions by Sean Ennis.

They knew, considering the price and the location, that the place would be desired, but not that the line of people would stretch out the building and round the corner, even thirty minutes before the appointed hour, so they hurry to the end of the line which keeps getting longer behind them, comically so, as one made sure to acknowledge to the others with little glints of eye, or a curt puff of air from nostril, the wait interminable, interminable, before the first little budge, oh the giggle when it happens, and the exchange of genial looks, as if to say there we are old boy, the politeness of it, as though they all might have this thing if they’ll just be patient enough, but they all want the same one thing, and think the same thing, that in fact they are rivals for it, but no one would betray such ungenerosity, no, of course these other fuckers want it, why wouldn’t they…

A short story by Elvis Bego.

My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I have come to accept this with the help of writer Daniel W. Foster and violinist Friedrich “Fritz” Kreisler, the latter of whom (in 1905, hoping to draw attention to his concerts) composed a piece he fraudulently attributed to the legendary Gaetano Pugnani.^[1],[2] And but here’s the thing: It’s amazing. It’s a fraud and it’s a soaringly beautiful piece of music. You might even say genuinely beautiful, if you’re in the mood for a paradox, which I’m going to have to insist you be, because the thing about paradoxes is they’re all about the tension of bothness—good and bad, true and false, existing and non-existing, etc., etc.—and the story you’re reading is about Daniel W. Foster, who is emphatically both. Good and bad. True and false. Existing and, now, not.

A short story by R. Gatwood.

I found the salmon in the middle drawer of an old dresser in my closet. I was looking for a hammer, but I couldn’t remember why. The salmon was a chum salmon, the adult version of the ones running in a nearby creek. It had a greenish tint to its skin and red ridges on its sides. The chum filled the entire drawer. Nothing else was inside. I couldn’t tell if it was alive or dead.

A short story by Ryan Bender-Murphy.

When I first knew myself, there were only two of us. Me and the other, and that was it. That was our entire universe. I could see nothing in front of me, I perceived nothing except this single other thing surrounding me on all sides. So I called it just that, nothingness, but not emptiness. No place was empty of it. I was always staring at nothing, and nothing was staring back at me. There was little else to do. When it was just the two of us, we were not hot before cold, light after dark, yin balancing yang. We were opposites, as different as two things can possibly be, but the world was far too simple then to allow for anything more. Features would come later, when many other things also existed to provide a context for such nuances.

A short story by David August.

The visiting poet sits facing her, so very clothed, at a table in a public place in the middle of the afternoon. He takes a sip of his hot cocoa and grimaces. Horrible, he says, pushing it away, and she recognizes the face he’d made at the bar the night before, when, on learning where she was from, originally, he recalled drinking a terrible cup of coffee at the bookstore café of a university some two hundred miles from her hometown. In a low voice he asks her how she made it home last night, whether she’d walked back to her dorm in the end or caught a cab, and she tries not to stare at the white patch in his beard, that thistly terrain her teeth—hers!—had grazed. She’s too warm in her wool sweater, the sudden change from the sharp spring air to the heated interior has made her throat go dry, so that when she tells him she did, in fact, walk, she begins to cough. She coughs five times in quick succession and with each of these short ragged expulsions of air directed into the back of her sleeve, the look on his face gets a little more impatient, the skin between his thick eyebrows pinching as it did when she first came up to him after the reading, mispronouncing several words in his mother tongue.

A short story by Katie Shireen Assef.

A pair of antique glasses dangle from a delicate gold chain atop the more than ample bosom of a kindly looking woman who is inside a small simple room with an uncommonly large disheveled man whose body is encased in a straitjacket and steel shackles who she asks, “Please share whatever it is you see in the inkblot?”

“What I see is a large pizza pie.”

“Is it all cheese or is it garnished with toppings?”

“Oh, atop the pie there are two hundred and thirty-four mushrooms and approximately sixty-four anchovies.”

A short story by David Sheskin.

1. Boiled (Soft)

Bring a saucepan of water to the boil. Lower the egg into the water—please use a spoon to avoid cracking—and leave for seven minutes. Remove the egg, peel it, halve it, check the yolks are soft. Season the egg with a generous amount of salt and pepper and bring to my bed on a tray.

A short story by Elliott Simpson.

For the purpose of writing this poem I decide to take the 145 all the way to its logical conclusion: the end of the line, the last stop at Dagenham Asda. It’s not often one gets the opportunity to ride the full length of a bus route, unless you’re the driver of course, in which case it’s generally advisable, if not in fact necessary, but it’s worth doing and I’d definitely recommend it.

For the purpose of fulfilling my homework this poem is now a landscape poem, by which I mean you need to read it horizontally. Yes, that’s right, turn it round if you’re reading on your phone, so it’s now taking up all the space. Now imagine that that space with those lines of text on it is a bus window, which is in fact a portal, as well as (ironically, for formatting nerds) a portrait onto the outside world.

A short story by JP Seabright.

you saw the best minds of your generation explain how the metaphor of a zombie apocalypse evolved from generation to generation

sometimes the minds agreed and others they did not but

they never stopped explaining

you could say that the best minds of your generation were almost

zombielike in their singleminded pursuit of explanation except that the best minds of your generation all and always agreed on one thing they themselves could never be the zombies

A short story by Christian TeBordo.

As I awoke one morning, from a blue-dark night of drinking and uneasy dreams, I found myself transformed into a cockroach. Figures it’d be a cockroach, skidded a deadpan between swollen thoughts. With newfound prehistoric maturity, I resigned myself to this evolutionary switcheroo, but I must confess to feeling a little disappointed that I hadn’t awakened transformed into a praying mantis, endowed with ninja-like coolness, or a scarab, with exotic ties to Egyptian mythology. Yet, in my insect heart of hearts, I knew that a cockroach was exactly what I was meant to be. God, that idiot savant, had instinctively banged down on the right combination of keys, when he outlined thus: man goes to sleep drunk as a skunk and wakes up a hungover cockroach craving the hair of a dog.

A short story by John Biscello.

Young men of talent and ambition follow many different paths in life. They imagine themselves inside of all sorts of things conducive to their perceived potential. The young man this story is about imagines himself inside a museum café cushion. This is not somewhere you imagine yourself overnight, or wake up one morning thinking it might offer you an interesting perspective on life. It was more like a corner his formative years had backed him into, a series of reductions and diminutions that defined his life’s purpose as accommodating the comfort of others.

A short story by Benjamin Robinson.