Publication: X-R-A-Y

  • On the Nostalgia of Dried Apricots and Other Garbage

    This is a fierce piece of writing that hits like a sledgehammer: “The man I chose to wed is miles away in the next room weighing down the couch as he wrestles his way through another hangover, offering some caustic rebuke of my failures.” It reminds me of Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, but the text…

  • This Mine of Mine

    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…

  • The Thing

    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.

  • WE LOVE KIMBERLEY

    A woman whose quest to quit biting her nails has unexpected results. It’s funny and morbid, with a very unique narrator

  • TOM CLANCY DID NOT WRITE DOMESTIC THRILLERS AND DEFINITELY DIED ON OCTOBER 1ST, 2013

    One of the funniest short stories I’ve read. All you need to know is in the title.

  • You Work in the Worst Diner in Existence That’s Always Open for Business

    This is a postapocalyptic horror comedy if that’s allowed to be a thing. It’s wild, gruesome and hilarious. I don’t want to spoil it, but it contains the sentence, “A man asks for an eyeball in his large glass of gasoline served with a bendy straw.”

  • Go To Hell

    I thought I knew what hot was. Humidity I could swallow. The wings of dead fish flies going translucent in the sun. Sprinkles melting off my ice cream cone the second I walk out of the shop.  There is no ice cream here. There are plenty of dead things, but they are not stiff and…