Fiction/Nonfiction: fiction

  • Ken & Sirina by K. A. Polzin

    A charming, sweet and sentimental story about an aging couple and their shorthand and in-jokes.

  • Lessons by Kevin Sterne

    My stepdad would throw knives at me. It was a like a reflexes thing, catching a fly with chopsticks. Character building, a boy’s first funeral. I learned to write my name with bandaged fingers. That’s how I became a lefty. Rick threw knives like a pitcher throwing long toss. It’s how I got these gnarly…

  • Cold Weather Protocol by Erin Striff

    The world that Striff builds in this story is vivid and terrifying. Having grown up in a place that gets brutal winters, she nails the atmosphere and feeling of the deep freeze. In this interview she mentions that she’s working on a set of stories linked to this one, which sounds terrific and dreadful.

  • The Ghost Coat by Catherine Lacey

    Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years, and her weird, dreamlike, off-kilter prose is cranked up to 11 in this short story. I’ve read it three times; each time another section stands out to me.  The curtains caught fire and he sat there staring at me…

  • Dreamer, Passenger, Partner by Colin Alexander

    A sci-fi story from the perspective of an AI custom-built to rehabilitate a criminal. It’s wildly original, and has a classic sci-fi feel to it.

  • Sforzando by Timothy Reilly

    It’s a story about tuba lessons, kind of. It goes in unexpected directions, and also contains some good tuba trivia (18 feet of tubing!).

  • Signs of Suffering by AD Schweiss

    This is how it starts: I want to make it home sober but there’s a bar sitting perfectly just between the station and my house and I need to sit somewhere in between until my jaw can loosen up; the stink of your burnt car still in my nose. Schweiss uses repetition and a slow…

  • Blueberries by Chris Scott

    This story is way too short. It’s a bit of a John Marrs-type concept – people start getting texts from alternate-universe versions of loved ones. Put me on the preorder list for the novel already.

  • The Prank by Amy DeBellis

    A group of kids set up to prank a peer, but things go sideways. The reveal in this story made my jaw drop.

  • Endlings

    A ghost story revolving around a fictionalized version of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who you likely know of if you don’t know the names. Written in the lyrical and absorbing language typical of Machado: I told him the truth, or the truth as best as I understood it: I was born under an erratic star…