Tag: short story

Close to Home

Myra Slotnick

Today is a good day to die. The neighbor’s mother is dying next door, fifty feet from us. She has been dying for some days. The son arrived yesterday, though, from Ohio, all red-eyed, sleep deprived, and unshaven, and I happened to be collecting the mail. “Hi, how are you?” I Read more

Myra Slotnick

Myra Slotnick is a queer playwright and activist living in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Covid struck she became eager to explore other genres, culminating in a collection of stories, and several essays.

The Shipwreck of the Ispolen

Emma Wells

For one hundred and twenty-five years, I’ve been nothing more than a watery whisper, dissipating in shifting waves, crumbling to shadowy fragments, perpetually washed upon the sandy shore. My fingers are ghosts stretching longingly and painfully back to Norway, where love was once known. Cruelly, my spirit is trapped here: entrapped Read more

Emma Wells

Emma is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry and prose published with various literary journals and magazines. She is currently writing her fifth novel. Emma won Wingless Dreamer’s Bird Poetry Contest of 2022 and her short story, ‘Virginia Creeper’, was selected as a winning title by WriteFluence Singles Contest in 2021. Recently, Emma won Dipity Literary Magazine’s 2024 Best of the Net Nominations for Fiction with a short story entitled ‘The Voice of a Wildling’. Her poem ‘Rose-Tainted is the winner of the poetry category, Discourse Literary Journal, February 2024 Issue.

Dieting

Gustavo Barbur de Melo

This is the story of how a sixteen-year-old me ended up in the hospital malnourished, almost taking my boyfriend along with me in a quest to look my best for Winter Formal. Before we start, it’s important to remember that I grew up very sheltered in a small suburban community Read more

Gustavo Barbur de Melo

Gustavo Barbur de Melo (he/him) is a Brazilian satirical writer with a successful track record of one failed marriage by the age of 25. Knowing little about smart financial decisions he got a highly practical master's degree in writing for screen and television at the University of Southern California. To deal with those and other failures he often writes humorous pieces which he workshops by testing whether his therapist will finally throw in the towel.

Fat Tuesday

Emily Nelson

Layla tells us that she was down to 500 calories a day when she saw God. We’re all at Bri’s house, the four of us knee to knee and shivering because her mom turns off the heat at nine. The basement TV is paused in the middle of an episode Read more

Emily Nelson

Emily Nelson is a writer and editor from the Pacific Northwest. Her writing has been featured in The Rumpus, Ayaskala, Drizzle Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at the University of Montana, and is the fiction editor for CutBank Magazine.

BODY JUSTICE 1977

Katherine West

The university doctor examined me. Then all of his students examined me. “As you can see,” he explained, “the uterus is tipped, making bringing a fetus to term unlikely.” After I had dressed and sitting in his office we had a conversation. “The risk of miscarriage is high.” “I’ve already Read more

Katherine West

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, Writers Resist, Feminine Collective and Southwest Word Fiesta. New Verse News nominated her poem And Then the Sky for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico, the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado, and the Tombaugh Gallery in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is also an artist.

The Visitor

Cate Carlyle

I had been to see Mom every Monday and Thursday for the last two years, since the day she arrived. Not that she would have noticed. My visits had become a comforting routine, predictable and unchanging. Each Monday I would stop at William’s Cafe at precisely 9 am and use Read more

Cate Carlyle

Cate Carlyle is a librarian and the author of two young adult novels and a library reference book. Her short story “The Brothers” was shortlisted in the WFNS Nova Writes competition. Cate lives in Nova Scotia with her partner and supportive first-reader Bruce and their fur baby, Zoey.

Witch Way Out

Ernestina Aggrey

I befriended a witch who detests mankind. ‘Men are rarely kind,’ Joy says often, and when she does, I resist the urge to tell her that mankind is just another word for human beings. She loathes corrections, and I don’t want to feel her wrath again. ‘The human race is Read more

Ernestina Aggrey

Ernestina Aggrey is a Black British aspiring writer. She is a law graduate and is currently working on her first novel. She enjoys reading novels filled with characters who are fictional but feel real. She was mentored by Cesca Major after a mentor-mentee match on Black Girl Writers. Her flash fiction is forthcoming in Sweetycat Press and Brittle Paper.

Cowboy in Red is Cheating

Jerri Jerreat

1: The Heroine A funeral is lace, carnations, pinks, and old flesh. For Emma, dressing hurriedly for a grandmother’s send-off, it was going to be a showdown. Emma frowned as she did up pearl buttons on her white blouse. The yellow shirt had been too happy; the pink, too gentle. Read more

Jerri Jerreat

Jerri Jerreat’s fiction has appeared in The Yale Review Online, The New Quarterly, The Penmen Review, The Ottawa Arts Review, The Antigonish Review, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, The Dalhousie Review, Room, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Everyday Fiction and in four anthologies: Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (World Weaver Press): Solarpunk Winters; in Nevertheless: Tesseracts 21 (Edge Publishing); and in a collection of international eco fiction, Solarpunk: Dalla Disperazione Alla Strategia, (Future Fiction). Her play was a finalist in the Newmarket National Ten Minute Play Festival, 2019.