Now that the Arctic isn't cold anymore, The Blob is awake and tearing through malls like a post-breakup trust fund baby. After it drinks the oceans dry, The Blob returns to North America. The 24-hour news cycle was made for this. On their websites, you can watch the...
For only seventy-seven dollars, the TV preacher promises God will grant me a miracle. He clasps his hands in prayer, gold rings glinting, while I clasp the telephone, punching the numbers from the TV screen that casts the room in a greenish glow. “There, there,” the...
Michael Czyzniejewski, who is the interviews editor at the flash fiction magazine Smokelong Quarterly, has written four collections of short stories. His most recent is The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023), which writer Mark Polanzak describes as a...
I bury my dead in this garden. Over there, under the cabbage roses. They haunt me through the day. At night, they sleep in the shadow of a fig tree with branches as wide as an archangel’s wings. I used to sit there and knit the smallest of garments. I chose thin...
We asked for new ways to tell these kinds of stories, and these 52 writers did not disappoint! We're working on getting down to a shortlist very soon. We can't wait to send it to our guest, Judge Aimee Bender! Dear Goldilocks Snow White and the Sleep Study Heart of...
For two years now, Leonard’s wife hasn’t wanted to have sex with him. He figures it might have to do with her mother passing, or maybe it’s because both their kids are in college and the house is empty. Maybe it’s biological. He has no idea. Hell, for all he knows, it...
so I know you are eggs. Sunny side up, salmonella-scrambled, salsa-slathered, over-hard yellow-white discs fried in bacon grease until the edges curl like wispy brown lace. Your dad was the original egg man, eating five every day, insisting you ate at least three. One...
The third store we visit has been raided. The shelves are like rows of gapped teeth—missing flashlights, missing batteries, missing fans, missing gallon jugs of water. Our list is a prayer in your clasped hands. “What about candles?” you ask, and the nervous girl...
I used to tell people that my first kiss was on a December night, under a pine tree, when a boy I sort-of liked kissed me after a dance recital; but actually my first kiss was older, and with a woman. In this memory, I’m twelve (it’s seventh grade), and I wake up one...
Here is what you’ll bring to grandmother’s house: two eggs flour cocoa powder a baggie of your mother’s herbs from her grow closet (for her glaucoma, your mother claims, and don’t even think of sneaking any) the bill from QVC with STOP GIVING THEM MY ADDRESS in your...
I know something is wrong when the spot in the corner of my right eye won’t go away. I was hit until I saw stars, years ago and not by you, but this is different: this isn’t a star but a fuzzy gray cloud. Whenever I read, it floats along with me on each line, blotting...
We want to celebrate the 39 stories on our Anthology Four shortlist! We loved reading these stories, and we can't wait to see which ones Judge Morgan Talty chooses! tell me how it works Protocol for What to Do After Hearing Another Rape Story in Exam Room Five...