Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

Hana by Mariam Saidan

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I’m baking a cake, a well-mixed paste of carefully measured amounts of flour, eggs, oil, sugar, banana, baking powder and a pinch of cinnamon, ready to go in the oven for 45 minutes, when she knocks on the door. I think of taking my apron off, but I decide not to. It’s cute, with birds frolicking in a pink world. I look like an unusually traditional woman for our time, I feel. A woman. A kitchen. An apron. A cake. Pink. But I feel something perverse, almost noble, in quietly subverting these clichés still viciously clinging to these symbols. 

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All Stories, General Fiction

Perry by Dianne Willems

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He wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be a hero so badly he could hardly think of anything else.

The Parrot sighed, and thought. A lump the size of an orange had formed in his throat, and he wanted it gone. It felt suffocating.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

The End Of The World by Dave Henson

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When my broadcasting partner, Screwdriver Dan, drops his jaw, I think he has a dental problem. When the station manager texts me to stop by her office after our show, the thought of a raise flashes through my mind. The first inkling I get that something’s wrong is when our call screener informs us the switchboard is lighting up, and no one wants to talk about home repairs.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Light by Yash Seyedbagheri   

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It’s the first clear winter night in almost two weeks. I drive the streets into our valley community, 2003 Subaru Forester rattling with age and emptiness. Well, more like I’m driving down the one winding main street that slopes down a hill, flanked by cathedral-like ponderosas. A few side streets branch off to the market and the cluster of shops and the one or two churches that flank either side of the river. The outskirts, the hills beyond, my cabin,  darkened rooms, and bills wait behind me, all splayed across the kitchen table. Power, water, a myriad of cards maxed out, in part due to my fondness for Fat Tire.

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Fantasy, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Rapturous by Marco Etheridge

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The Rapture came to pass on an Easter Sunday and the irony was lost on no one, except perhaps the two and a half billion people who were vacuumed off the face of the earth. What exactly the departed experienced, ironical or literal, remained a mystery. None of them ever returned.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 332: At War With Reality, and The Apocalypse A to Z

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At War With Reality

I like to create an artificial sense of order. To achieve this I write a To Do List everyday. I neither accomplish nor consult the thing after I make it, but the act of creating a To Do List and peeling it off the pad and sticking it to the wall behind my monitor temporarily places me in control. It makes me feel like I’m doing something; that I am in charge.

I write my daily list on one of the dozen or so multi-colored sticky pads that may or may not have at one time been inside the office supply closet at my workplace. I use one of the fifty or so black “Precise Rolling Ball” pens that may or may not hail from the same source as the sticky pads to write my To Do Lists (used to do them in a fine point Sharpie until the supply dried up). I take heart from the pastel squares of Great Deeds to be Done accumulating on the wall like coral. Many have given up the stick and have fallen into the slim space between my desk and the wall, down amongst the spiders. But looking up at those which hang in there gives me the artificial sense of order that I crave.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Rewind by Yash Seyedbagheri

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Streaming services kill our multiplex. The multiplex my sister and I went to Friday nights, as regular as anything. They don’t say it outright, but I know Fridays, Saturdays, Mondays even, people are hiding behind the glow of screens, including some of my own friends. They sink into names like HBO, Netflix, Amazon Prime, contrivances with big letters and feigned cleverness.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Bones by Jennifer Walkup

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There were eight candles on my birthday cake the year my sledgehammer mother shattered us like we were blown glass. I remember it specifically because when the ninth candle flickered at the last minute, I thought, with the force of gale force winds, oh, extra candle for good luck, please don’t go out on me.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Psalm for Eddie by Tom Sheehan

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“One day,” Ed LeBlanc said, up to his crotch in the swiftly flowing Pine River near Ossipee, New Hampshire, rod tip high, a bright Macintosh apple half eaten in his left hand, his words more oath than wisdom, “we’re going fly fishing in Curt Gowdy country.” He said little else that morning, intent on the merest sensations electric at fingertips, on early May temperature of water laying heavy tongue on our boots, on the Mac’s sweet taste, on delicious silence falling on our heads as if the world was a mushroom and we under that still cap.

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