Publication: Fictive Dream

  • 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.”

  • Stan

    About a sad, homeless man that comes around the house now and then, told through the eyes of a child.