Start your week with some short fiction that I’ve read and loved recently. I try to remember to share these on X when I read them, but on Mondays I collect them here. If you dig these, subscribe to the newsletter to make sure you don’t miss them.

Two from Bethany Cutkomp:

More Static than Skin in Fictive Dream: weird speculative fiction about a student who is terminally online: “Nobody believes her when she introduces herself as a poor signal.”

Tog(ether) in HAD: scuba diving and space exploration merge — this story has a real Jeff VanderMeer feel to it

Copperfield by blog fave Kelli Dianne Rule in JMWW, about an unravelling woman in a small town. I love the way Rule writes characters

The Thing by Nick Ekkizogloy in X-R-A-Y — a great narrator’s voice on a fishing trip, and a lot more:

So, this creature comes in and it looks like a caterpillar if the caterpillar was nine pounds and pink and gelatinous as a huge earthworm with flute holes along its side in the style of a woodwind instrument or an ocarina.

The Astronaut by Jamie Gill in BULL: my note after reading this simply says “holy shit“.

Inheriting It by Garrett Crowe in Vol. 1 Brooklyn: a young guy goes home from NYC to rural, depressed Tennessee. Great setting and characters

Alchemy by John Haggerty in Five on the Fifth starts with “We are imprisoned by our bones, entombed at birth by flesh”, and doesn’t get less grim from there

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