Creative nonfiction by Sarah Gerard, Jennifer Pinto and Kyla Hanington, and fiction stories by K. A. Polzin, Kevin Sterne, Erin Striff, Catherine Lacey and Colin Alexander
Fiction Stories
Ken & Sirina by K. A. Polzin
A charming, sweet and sentimental story about an aging couple and their shorthand and in-jokes.
Published in Forge
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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 callouses on my palms that look like I was trying to catch knives with my bare hands. Because I was. One day I did.
Published in Maudlin House
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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.
Published in Forge
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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 as the flames grew overhead, staring at me like a perfect picture of apathy, motionless as the flames ascended his pant leg. This was not how I thought that Tuesday was going to turn out.
Published in Granta
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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.
Published in Radon Journal
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Nonfiction Stories
M.A.S.H by Sarah Gerard
A memoir piece about being sexually pursued and harassed as a teenager, by an employee of her father’s. She describes the toxic masculinity of the advertising agency in the late 90s so well you can almost smell the place. At times it reminded me of Jill Ciment’s Consent:
Is it scandalous or naïve to say that a teenage girl wields power over a man? That I honed it to get cigarettes and later weed and alcohol, that my friends used men for the same purpose? That I used John, and that at times, I let him use me, too?
Published in electric lit
Read more by Sarah Gerard
Lost in Translation by Jennifer Pinto
A half-dozen glimpses into the life of a kid growing up with a Deaf mom. This is funny, sweet and bursting with affection.
Published in Citron Review
Read more by Jennifer Pinto
October by Kyla Hanington
This knocked the wind out of me three times. Once when I finished reading it, again when I saw it categorized as ‘nonfiction’, and a third time when I read the author’s bio at the bottom.