Category: Short Fiction

After Hours

Kareem Tayyar

I’d arrived in Los Angeles two years earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1979, after completing graduate work at the University of Minnesota and deciding that I wouldn’t survive another midwestern winter. So after a three-day road trip in my ex-husband’s Chevrolet Impala that included striking a deer in South Dakota, Read more

Kareem Tayyar

Kareem Tayyar's work has appeared in publications including Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and North Dakota Quarterly, and my most recent book, “Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems,” was published in 2022 by Lily Poetry Review Books. His poem, “Visiting My Father in Iran,” received the 2020 Glenna Luschei Poetry Prize from Prairie Schooner, and my coming-of-age novel, “The Prince of Orange County,” received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Prize for Young Adult Fiction.

Box-bed

Emma Wells

Austrian winters cut deep, brandishing exposed skin with bitingly cold plumes, descending from mountain tops. The only feasible way to survive a rural Austrian winter in 1820, especially the duration of its bleakest months, December to March, is to obtain a box-bed. A simple box-bed. Raised from the floor, enclosed 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.

Races, Rules, and Ringlets

Eugene Franklin

The trouble started the day she was born. Before that, really—as soon as the sonogram showed up. She was a she, and he couldn’t register that. He was proof that even some of the smartest gator-poaching hicks remained fluent only in the language of macho: talk of bullets, ballistics, and Read more

Eugene Franklin

Eugene Franklin’s myriad endeavors occasionally achieve something. A brief stint in a Catholic seminary, a few cross-country treks, and an unintentional run at the world record for the number of jobs held are a few escapades aimed at finding his place and capturing the insights embedded in everyday life. His most recent work has appeared in Iconoclast, Wild Roof Journal, and The Alembic.

Red

Emma Wells

Hiding. Always hiding. He keeps to dark corners of woodland, ghosting trees, with sharpened blades for claws. Often fractious, taking to gouging lines of discontent within woody bark, leaving imprints of dissatisfaction in his wake: macabre tattoos that speak of moroseness and an unspoken curfew. His having, and then, not 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.

Bitten

Zach Knowlton

“Yes, those do appear to be mosquito bites. They’ve swelled up somethin’ fierce. You sure you’re not allergic?” “No. At least, I never have been. I don’t know, everything seems to be hitting me harder since I got this little fella.” “Well, pregnancy can do a lot to the body. Read more

Zach Knowlton

Zach Knowlton (he/him) is a high school English teacher, husband, and father. He lives on the northern coast of California, surrounded by the redwood forest. He teaches at the same school he graduated from, and has started a Creative Writing club on campus. Zach loves reading, writing, teaching, and connecting with others. Although he reads all genres, his favorite is horror. Finally, Zach Knowlton is proud that Feminine Collective is the first publication to print one of his short stories.

Washed Slate

Hunter Prichard

Classes wouldn’t be back in session until early January, so Alice had a little time to go up north for a visit. She hadn’t seen them since summertime. That’d been a nice, long weekend lounging with her feet up and nothing of much importance in her head. It was a Read more

Hunter Prichard

Hunter Prichard is a writer born and raised in Portland, Maine.

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.