Last week was very hairy between work and preparing things for this whole Year Zero thing, so I’ve got a shorter short fiction list than usual. Still, these five stories are worth the few minutes it’ll take you to read each of them.

Girl Scout by Elise Jeanmarie in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, a story about a first date that contains a ton of charm and a surprising amount of tension

Clunkers by Meghan Louise Wagner in BULL: A gorgeous story about a woman whose father had a problem with gambling, running a business and telling the truth. First sentence: “God and poker saved your father’s life.”

By My Father’s Hand by prior fave Avitus B. Carle in Taco Bell Quarterly. The first sentence reads, “I like to carry my father’s hand with me.” Every subsequent sentence begs more questions than it answers.

We Have Little Time Left by Sudha Balagopal in (new to me) Atlas and Alice, a tender and sad piece about a woman saying goodbye to her dying husband

This Mine of Mine by Brandon Forinash in X-R-A-Y: One of the weirdest stories I’ve read recently, starts like this and gets weirder as it goes:

You wouldn’t guess it looking at me now, but I had a pretty ordinary childhood and early adulthood. My parents weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. I grew up in one of those suburbs where every house is a variation of four basic designs. I went to a state school for college and took out student loans. I got a job in a satellite city which had nothing to do with what I studied in university. Along the way, I had several more or less serious relationships which, by the time I was twenty six, made me rethink my definition of love.

Anyways, all of that changed, kind of got lost in terms of my identity, when I became a mining camp in South America.

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