All Stories, General Fiction

The Stranger by Timothy Yam

She reached the sea.

It was not what Sukarti had expected. The poster at the bus stop made it look like paradise – azure blue water lapping onto sparkling white sand, framed by swaying palm trees – an image so real she could step right into it. The reality facing her was less seductive. The sand was rough and gathered under her feet in damp clumps. The water was a sickly, anaemic shade of green, and while it was indeed lapping onto shore, each wave bore a load of grimy debris – crushed plastic bottles, hollowed-out coconuts, a broken sun-bleached frisbee.

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All Stories, General Fiction

 Trash Music by William Cordeiro

 

My dog Scrapple was digging up my yard one day. I hightailed to scold him. Come to find out, Scrapple had dugged up this old thing, looks like a paper, a document of some sort. I don’t know what it means. Don’t right know if it means anything, actually. Letters a buncha hooks and ciphers squiggly as a tub of nightcrawlers.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Small Succulent and an Octopus Pot by Anna Lewis.

“We launched the plant conservation study in an abandoned natural reservoir. Fields of sagebrush set against three icy active volcanos. And there I was, naked on the side of the dirt road. Covered in ticks. A poison oak rash burned up my waist. I had four wasp stings.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

Control by Dorian J. Sinnott

The knots in Alexander’s tie were becoming tighter with every twist and loop he made. His fingers moved in rhythm with his jaw, teeth grinding to the furling and unfurling of the silk in his hands. Again and again he coiled the fabric, feeling as it constricted against his skin. He had to admit, the first knots were sloppy, smeared in the sweat of the unstable fingers that made them. But, the further down they went, each became more and more precise. Practically a work of art.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Man in a Pinch  by Tom Sheehan

He was thinking if he had a deep jacket pocket he would thrust his right hand into that pocket, hide it. But of course, he couldn’t. His right hand was laying back there on the slab of rock, near the stump of the tree that had fallen back on him, pinned his hand on the rock.

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All Stories, General Fiction

To Sleep Perchance to Dream by Stephen J Matlock

There it was, in black and white: Cecily VanDeGroot, dead at 88. Rich. Well-known. A good-sized family who’d want a good show. One I could give them.

Damn. “Services provided by Eternal Rest.” Lo’Retta had beat me out again. Early bird gets the worm.

And so do the dead. But we don’t tell the customers that.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Neither of Us Are Boyfriends by D.T. Mattingly

 

Bailey and I met two years ago. Since then, we’ve found comfort in quantity, since quality failed us before, and so many times. We found each other on the same platform we often fiddled with—two people fighting the conventions of monogamy at the time—fed up with a pattern of receiving the short end of the stick in previous partnerships.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Homo Sacer and Her Lover by Ewa Mazierska

When Sarah woke up, Thomas was already making coffee and smoking a cigarette. He couldn’t live without fags. He seemed to be anxious to even go to sleep, because this would deprive him of his favourite object of consumption, and he smoked straight after they had sex, like a character in films about prostitutes and their clients. But Sarah did not mind it, even liked it, because cigarettes suited him and after sex she wanted to be left alone. Thomas also liked to eat, and his eyes were always on the best risotto or cherry pie in the city. In the past one would call such a man a bon vivant, but these days this term had an archaic inflection, so in her diary she named him ‘Agent Cooper’. Despite not paying much attention to his health, in his late forties he still looked good. Probably he even looked better in his forties than in his twenties. For her he looked best when he was naked. Most men look ridiculous without their clothes and they try to hide their shrinking muscles, dicks and balls or try to puff them up by this or that means. Instead, he simply liked to spread himself on the bed, as if unaware of the space he occupied or offered his body as a vessel into which she could escape into a different reality.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Romance

Globsters Anonymous By Leila Allison

Starry-eyed couples who take moonlight strolls along the Sea of Love do so at the risk of their hormone-driven happiness; for the beach along Sea Of Love is littered with “Globsters”–those unidentifiable, high smelling, amorphous sacks of putrescent goo–which, to paraphrase the words of the Munchkin Coroner, are not just really dead, but are most sincerely dead.

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