Tag: short story

Nest

Paula R. Hilton

Even in her sleep, the girl knew the wasps were back. She felt one land on her bare leg. I must wake up, I must wake up, I must wake up. Her fingertips grazed her eyelids. They refused to open. She thrashed and kicked and yelled until she willed her Read more

Paula R. Hilton

Paula R. Hilton explores the immediacy of memory and how our most important relationships define us. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and has appeared in The Feminine Collective, The Sunlight Press, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Dear Damsels, The Tulane Review, and elsewhere. Her novel, Little Miss Chaos, was selected as a Best Indie Teen Read by Kirkus, and her first poetry collection, At Any Given Second, received a Kirkus star. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans.

The Dangers of Independence

Robin Vigfusson

There was a one-room cottage in the woods that looked like a dollhouse, painted powder blue and shielded by willow trees. It was near the railroad tracks, where we were warned never to go since a classmate was hit by a train, there. No one magical lived there, just a Read more

Robin Vigfusson

I earned an M.A. in Political Science from NYU, but my real love is fiction, especially short stories. My work has appeared in Coe Review, Windmill, The Blue Hour, Referential Magazine, Caravel Literary Arts Journal, Lunaris Review, Bookends Review, Junto Magazine, Jewish Fiction.net, Fine Flu Journal, Old 67 and podcast on No Extra Words.

Today is the Day

Michelle Dinnick

Today is the last day of my life. It was inevitable, and I had accepted it. In fact, I had embraced it. I was almost looking forward it. I expected – well – I hoped, that it would provide the release that I wanted. The relief that I needed. But Read more

Michelle Dinnick

I am a contributing author in the most recent Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Spirit of Canada, and a quarter finalist in the ScreenCraft Short Screenplay contest. My writing has won several awards, and appeared in The Globe and Mail and a number of local magazines and newspapers in Alliston, including The Briar Crier, Total Sports, Voice of the Farmer, and Focus 50 Plus. Last summer, my short story “Lightning Strikers” was made into a series in the Focus 50 + Newspaper because fans asked for more! You can find me online at www.commuterlit.com; www.fiftywordstories.com and www.michelledinnick.com.

Emotional Odyssey at the Department of Motor Vehicles

Maddie Swenson

I always see at least one handsome man at the DMV. It’s never one of the workers (bitter civil servants who never give you adequate time to prepare for that little picture they take of you because it is the one joy they have left) but some other poor, unfortunate Read more

Maddie Swenson

Maddie is a full-time college student with dreams of becoming a librarian. She likes books more than people sometimes, demonstrating a nearly sacrilegious affinity for books written by Shirley Jackson and Sylvia Plath. Her writing appears in secret diary entries and in letters to friends and on her personal website: https://msweny.wixsite.com/write

The March on Washington

Sally Bellerose

“Call her.” Bo steers their late model Buick into the dirt driveway with one hand and flicks her Camel out the window with the other hand. “Regina worshiped President Kennedy. She won’t refuse a call today. Someone dies, you want a phone call.” It’s Bo’s week to chauffeur herself and Read more

Sally Bellerose

In her writing, Sally Bellerose loves to mess with rhythm, rhyme, and awkward emotion. Bellerose writes about class, sex, sexuality, gender, illness, absurdity, and lately, growing old. Her novel The Girls Club, Bywater Books, won many awards including an NEA Fellowship. Her poetry has been widely published and is featured in Lady Business, Sibling Rivalry Press. Bellerose’s current project, a book titled Fishwives, features old women behaving badly.

TRAFFIC

Liz McAdams

I was dumber than shit when Big C started talking to me. Don’t know what I was thinking, guess I kinda liked the attention from the new guy at school. He’d just arrived that term and was busy hanging out with the guys hanging out at the basketball court, they’d Read more

Liz McAdams

Liz McAdams is a short, sharp writer living in the wilds of Canada with her laptop and black cats. Although most often known for her dark fiction and fantasy, her writing embraces a human element as well. With a more than a few novels in various stages of doneness and work scattered around the globe (including over at Twisted Sister lit mag), Liz is hard to nail down, but you can connect with her through https://lizmcadams.wordpress.com/

Beyond the Finish Line

Tom Lagasse

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings. Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move. – Rumi Nicole Harkin didn’t believe in making New Year’s resolutions. Like most people, she would break them Read more

Tom Lagasse

Tom’s poetry has been published in Black Bough’s Poetry Freedom & Rapture and Dark Confessions; Faith, Hope, and Fiction; Silver Birch Press Prime Movers Series, Freshwater Literary Review, Word Mill Magazine, The Monterey Poetry Review, and Plum Tree Tavern, along with a half dozen anthologies among others. Several short stories appeared in The Feminine Collective. He lives in Bristol, CT.

Here Inside the Mirror

Beatriz L. Seelaender

There comes an age when screwing up is not cute anymore. You know that, because people are constantly telling you. It’s not cute anymore, Raleigh. My name is Raleigh, by the way; Raleigh of Boston, Massachusetts. Although to be fair, my mother is from Raleigh the actual city, so it Read more

Beatriz L. Seelaender

Beatriz L. Seelaender was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1998. In 2016, she published her first novel "De Volta ao Vazio" (a good translation would be "Emptiness, Revisited"), in Brazilian Portuguese. Seelaender's work in English has been featured in websites such as the Manifest-Station, and she currently studies Literature and Languages in the University of Sao Paulo.