Every morning the petrichor came thick. Some days a tangible mist rose from the sun-hot macadam. We would sit for a time sipping cream in Persian tea on the front porch. No one came to the far end of our cul-de-sac, no sane one anyway.
A short story by Samuel M. Moss.
You are a guest at the demolition of your own reality. It’s like watching a building that’s imploding in extreme slow-motion and then realising you are that building. Buildings and buildings and buildings implode around you and within you. You’re a series of buildings that implode. You can see yourself in the fragments of concrete floating in the air. Everything changes continuously in the outside world, but your world remains caught up in a series of interconnected implosions. You take each day as it comes. One day at a time. You know all things must pass.
Read an exclusive extract from Susanna Medina‘s novel Spinning Days of Night.
On the day we met, in the part of the newsroom where we Business section reporters and editors did our daily work, he threw me a compliment as he went in for a handshake: “So you’re the guy who wrote that piece.”
“I guess I am.”
A short story by Jim Windolf.
I don’t know if it was residue from a dream of the night before, or the snowy dark November afternoon, the sort that carries within it alluring and overblown childhood fears, but as I opened the front door to the three-story Victorian house on Spadina Avenue, I felt haunted by the presence of my father.
A short story by Jules Lewis.
It seems that the English language only becomes bodied (comes back from the death of abstraction) in advertising.
A short story by Adrian Bridget.
The next person who wags his finger at me is going to get it bitten off, A. Schopenhauer thought.
Short fiction from Nathan Knapp.
Alan did not care about losing and he certainly did not care about winning. It was just that he would not be beaten. He knew that people were better at football than he was. Me for a start, although I was two years older. But he thought it was nonsense that you might measure victory or defeat in terms of who had scored the most goals, the most runs, the most points.
A short story by Robert Stone.
Instead of sleeping Kierk is out grabbing beers at a bar, sitting at the open window in the breeze and watching the late-night groups of people walk past in fits of laughter or discussion. Then he’s out to join them, meandering past the bright lamplights and shuttered store windows of New York City at night. To be a scientist again, to be working on consciousness again—he can’t believe it. He is a secular priest once more.
An excerpt from The Revelations, the first novel by Erik Hoel.
We were at the beach, I had been begging to go, to come along, and it was after a long lunch—your grandma wanted to talk to me about the Liberation—that we went for a walk along the coast.
Short fiction from Jacqueline Feldman.
Put your Rizla papers, dope stash, tobacco and lighter in the large kimono square pocket. Sling your camera bag over your right shoulder, the raft over both shoulders. Pick up the holdall. Push your feet into a pair of hotel slippers, which sit in front of the bedroom door. Swig back the last dregs of coffee. Put on the mirror shades tucked into the blue chain covering the front door. Struggle to exit as the chain gets wrapped around your neck.
Short fiction from Andrea Mason.
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