3:AM Magazine

Himmler is always the first to arrive, anywhere. He is a farmer of chickens—he loves chickens—and those who know about the tending of fowl know that keeping a doctrinaire schedule is critical to animal husbandry.

A short story by Tyler Smith.

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In the elevator you readjust your tights, your skirt. You pout your lips and dab them pink. You hate puppy showers but this time, you think, it might be different. This time you want to be pretty.

A short story by Laurane Marchive.

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Filthy shopping bags flapped in plain view on our world. Our husbands chased their women around kitchen islands, prescription erections flapping like hanged sheets. As children-gangs stormed our houses, waving assault rifles, we were speechless with virus rot. What did it matter anyway, to die there in our houses, choking on dictionary amnesia. But the children-gangs stopped us in our thoughts. They said, Find the patient zero for us and your lives will be spared. We slobbered virus blessings, hugging our tumored chests. We memorialized our suicided neighbors with ugly effigies, bulky statues on our lawns lit up and glowing.

By Jason Teal.

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“Table manners!”

His first words to me. We were both guests at a luncheon at the Anthony’s. The village had a new milliner, a Mr Bouchier who hailed from Ampleton and was sprucing up local heads with his urban chic creations; Thomas Anthony and his wife Barbara had wasted no time in arranging the get-together, which to all intents and purposes would be an interrogation. The Antennae, was the clandestine nomenclature, such was the fishmongering couple’s sensitivity to environmental change of any kind. Mr Lapel, a solicitor by profession, had only moved to the county a week or so before the hatter and was also to be scrutinized.

By Guillermo Stitch.

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Sometimes there is a form; a darkness, a heat. A scent of the unknown, sometimes, as wafts up when one is standing by the port at night; summer wind like breath, the black ocean of space, stars, and the lights of distant ships.

A story by J. E. Suárez.

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Workers all over forgot to turn up. They lost all sense of time to searching for just the right words, the right image, the metaphor that could decode the moment and let everyone name what no one was talking about. It had been on the tips of all tongues for more than a year but no one had managed to swallow it yet.

A story by Steve Himmer.

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I received a strange email a few days ago. Written in the body, it read, Alas, I lacked the will to be born…

There was no subject line. I didn’t know what it meant. There wasn’t even really a sender—just a string of numbers @ another string of numbers dot com. Spam, I thought, and moved to trash it, but something made me pause. “The will to be born”—it was such an awkward phrase! What did it even mean?

A short story by Rhian Sasseen.

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What was beyond doubt by the time I got back was that a new Transfixion had arrived in the form of Hermia Druitt, the woman in this photograph. This was confirmed by the sensations: flashes from Arcadia. Moonlight, of a kind, sighed up and down the tube of my spine, but above all, that indescribable note which accompanied all my Transfixions was present: humming beneath the high fine rush—probably not dissimilar to holy rapture—was an almost violent familiarity.

An extract from the novel LOTE by Shola von Reinhold.

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You have a strong stomach. You do not have a phobia of dogs, of flying, of large or small spaces, of blood, of speed, of heights, of water. You are a strong swimmer, even when clothed. You are highly controlled, but you sometimes find it necessary, pleasant even, to be out of control. You are a competent and fast driver with no points on your license. You are not a high-sensation seeker, but you are unfazed by risk. You don’t ask unnecessary questions. You are not afraid of loud noises. You are a good climber and are able to hold your own in a fight. You can fire a gun.

A story by Ben Fergusson.

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The killer awoke before dawn, the gray light entering the windows of an abandoned rest stop where he’d taken the life of the second and last night had finished the burning and grinding of his body so that what pieces remained in his possession might be scattered out the door of his car. This was Northern California and he’d come down through Oregon over the past several weeks. He’d lost time and perspective while within his state and this was part of it.

A short story by Grant Maierhofer.

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