Publication: Fictive Dream

  • Our Daisy Summer by Annalisa Crawford

    This story about a lost love has followed me around all week. It’s a short, simple story with an ending that brought a tear to my eye. All summer, we danced with daisies in our hair, and when the evenings started to shorten and the start of the new school term lurked like a demon…

  • Anyway, I Wish You Well by S.A. Greene

    Greene’s very meta short story plays with language and contains some real surprises, I read it three times in a once I figured out what she was doing with it.  There’s an epiphany, an acceptance, a glint of hope or resistance somewhere, because that’s how stories should finish, so they say.  A crock of gold…

  • Saturday Girl by Frances Gapper

    A light and surprising ghost story about a kid who works weekends in the bakery: I had a Saturday job at the haunted bakery, where they can’t keep a Saturday girl for love nor money. But it wasn’t haunted when I worked there.Thirteen and a young thirteen, I spoiled their window display by putting cakes…

  • Blackhearts by Beth Sherman

    A child watches her mother struggle to adapt after her marriage falls apart. Sherman writes this story like a memoir, and I had to double check that it wasn’t. You have to be badass, she told me. Make them want what they can’t have. I was twelve.

  • Murder Hotel by Emily Rinkema

    This story goes places I didn’t expect. It made me sit up and gasp at one point. …I whisper that there’s nowhere in the world I would rather be, even if people have been murdered in our hotel room. Steve laughs and insists they probably haven’t, even though the stain on the rug is dark…

  • The Dog and the Giraffe by Ruth Brandt

    A story told from the perspective 9-year-old Cara, about getting used to a new family arrangement. Brandt channels the child’s point of view so well.

  • 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!).

  • Sting

    A creepy camping story with and ending that’ll haunt you. The perspective shift in this story is done brilliantly, and the ending will linger for a while.

  • Juice

    I’d read this when it was new and forgotten about it. It’s funny throughout, with a brilliant final paragraph.

  • More Static than Skin

    Weird speculative fiction about a student who is terminally online: “Nobody believes her when she introduces herself as a poor signal.”