Latest Stories
Most recently published stories in Fiction.
Romantic Picnic For Two
The evening air hung heavy and hot, unseasonably warm for April. As the sun sank down, hovering just over the mountains in the distance, its angry glare blinded Tanya as she walked westward. Cursing herself for forgetting her sunglasses, she shifted the weight of the pack on her shoulders, letting a rivulet of sweat slip down her spine. Her feet angrily protested her choice to place fashion over function as the leather of her sandals chafed the back of her heel and sides of her toes. But Tanya didn't stop or slow. She moved forward, watching the trees in the distance grow closer with each step.
By A. J. Schoenfeld7 days ago in Fiction
Maps and half-assed cures
My best friend is sort of mad at me but can’t blame me so he has to just suck it up, as my husband says. “When I literally had broken bones last time we did this—- we still carried on. We don’t even know what’s going on with you, Bex…” Hudson grips, looking at all the laid out papers that Jack left me.
By Melissa Ingoldsby7 days ago in Fiction
A Guest at 10:17
Every night at precisely 10:17, Marianne set the table for two. The ritual was simple. A chipped ceramic plate beside a slightly smaller one, two spoons of sugar heaped into matching crystal bowls, and a single pale lavender candle placed between them just so. It had begun the night Calvin first asked her to stay, to make dinner together before he went back to the city. A momentary thing, she’d said. A simple meal. But something about that first night had felt like the hinge of an old door. Once it closed, she could still feel the vibration in the frame.
By Christine Nelson7 days ago in Fiction
The Box
"I'm telling you, Man: it's real, and it's worth a fortune!" Duke had that look in his eyes again. Somewhere between a kid on Christmas morning, and a crackhead looking for his next fix. The last time Ronny had seen it, he spent two months in the hospital recovering from a weird, tropical fever nobody still could tell him the name of. The time before that, he'd spent three weeks rotting in a Mexican prison. Which he vowed never to speak of again.
By Natalie Gray8 days ago in Fiction
The Third Knock
Every year on the night they met, Mara and Julian knocked three times on a stranger’s door. They did not speak about why three. They did not remember deciding it. The number had arrived the way habits sometimes do—half joke, half dare—then calcified into something that felt older than both of them.
By Lawrence Lease8 days ago in Fiction
