Stories Archive - Page 19 of 25

Latest Stories

Stage Makeup

Olivia Martello

i. I wore black pants, a white button-down, and shiny black dress shoes that pinched my toes. My feet had grown like weeds over the summer, and I hadn’t broken in these new ones yet. They were still a bit squeaky as I paced around the other boys in the dressing room, watching Jamie, the […]

There is Not an Alligator in the Sewer

Nathaniel Lee

Harrison Burke sat on a park bench at midnight with a sack of six Burgerito’s bacon double cheeseburgers and a giant alligator. Harrison had not been sleeping well lately. Or at all, really.

Living in A Dead Father’s Existence

Ahmad Adedimeji Amobi

Dear Baba, I sit my mother down this morning to dig from her throat everything about you. I have been hearing about you in bits while peeling cassava with my brother, Ridwan, or while sieving the soaked cassava into a bowl of water, or while sitting down outside when heat beat us out of our […]

Deadly Dance

Trina Phillips

Heddera pressed the warm sonic node into the channel that separated the Dekteron’s fourth arm from his secondary shoulder blade. With a low hum from deep in her diaphragm, the pitch of the node changed and the Dekteron snarled his pleasure. For symmetry, she applied another node under his third arm on the other side and sang a dissonant twin pitch that shifted into a harmonic. His body arched so hard he almost fell off the table. She placed her hand on his back to steady him.

Neofan

Gwen C. Katz

Fifteen hundred people was a lot more than Marv had realized. They milled about in the narrow aisles between the rows of tables, the heat from their bodies mixing with the muggy August air to turn the hotel lobby into a sweltering stew. Marv, sweat plastering his shirt to his back, was beginning to envy […]

Lady Whitmer’s Waterlogged Revenge

Lincoln Michel

One day Lady Whitmer realized, with some distress, that she was at the bottom of the ocean. The last she could remember, she’d been on land in the spot where she eternally dwelled—the manor’s second-floor bedroom where she had been violently stabbed in her sleep by her vile husband, Beaumont, and his conniving mistress, Lucinda—and now she was floating in salty water. Not that she could taste the salt. Or anything at all.

We Never Close

Lyndee Johns

Apparently, when you turn sixteen and get your driver’s license, you’re everybody’s errand boy. Never mind that you have twenty geometry problems to finish and it’s nine-thirty at night. Nope. You have to drive to the new Walmart and get some treat bags for your mom. And when you ask why she can’t get the […]

How To Remain Safe During A Conversation If You’re Somebody’s Wife

Debbie Urbanski

“Don’t leave me home alone today,” she says. “You’re home alone every day. You work at home,” he points out. His name is Johnny or, more informally, Jon. Hers is Katherine, or Katie, or Kat. They sit in the neutrally decorated living room of their colonial-style house. The most striking aspect of the house is […]

What Comes After

Caryn Pine

Content warning: Domestic abuse . Sometimes I forget what it feels like to exist. To breathe. To actually be alive. Him. There’s a start to all of this, a middle, an ending, and then a new beginning, and every bit of it has his face, his eyes, his voice, his hands surrounding it, surrounding me. […]

Seven Stars

Erica Ruppert

Alice had sung that single phrase to Paul one night as they sat on their haunches at the back of the yard, stoned and gazing up at the black shape of the hill in the middle distance. Her voice was flat, and the words didn’t fit the tune, but she repeated it until she got bored with the sound of herself. Alice had started calling the hill The Empress sometime over the summer. No one else Paul knew called it anything but the hill.

Nebula

Michael Morell

Content warning: Death . The Saddest Clown. It pinches me, that he’s remembered that way. His character’s name was Wag. Audiences came alive whenever Wag appeared. Dad blamed himself. But inside, I can’t help feeling, it was me. * The night of the fall was particularly steamy. Program sales were high, the audience fanned themselves […]

Your Mother and Other Ancient Denizens

Michael Tager

On your fifteenth birthday at the bowling alley, your mother’s cheek turns to stone. You glimpse it for only a moment between blowing out the candles, and the sudden death of the flame. You aren’t sure what you see behind her brown eyes—was it just a twitch?—but you know somehow that the world is suddenly a less-safe pace.

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