Tag: Short Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

The Weight of Nothing by Kip Knott

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Sam doesn’t like sunsets. Sunsets for Sam are a daily reminder that death is just over the horizon. Sunrises aren’t much better for Sam either because they just start the clock running again, marking time until the next sunset. Even now, as he stands outside his mother’s house smoking a cigarette while the hospice nurse tends to his dying mother, Sam is unpersuaded by the light of one of those sunsets in which people swear they see Jesus’s outstretched arms in the iridescent rays that beam between clouds. Sam just shakes his head in disgust, then turns and walks inside.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Swordfish by Graham Mort

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Swordfish laid out in the supermarket, next to tuna steaks and mackerel. Marlin, the guy behind the counter offers, wiping bloody hands on his white jacket. Mussels laid on a bed of samphire. You can almost taste the salt. Call me Ishmael. A wide Sargasso Sea. Wind over waves. Barnacles on the hulls of schooners, where a man could be keelhauled. As it happens, I’m shopping for other things. Breakfast cereal, yoghurt, pineapple, white wine. The list written out on a scrap of cardboard torn from a tissue box. So, yes, move on.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Love Handles by Susan DeFelice

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After his anxiety attack in the barely cold sea water, Barry walked to the outside European-style tiki bar where a woman with a roiling accent was singing Sinatra, with just a stand-up bass and conga player accompanying her.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Woman With Jigsaw Puzzle by Tom Bentley-Fisher

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“I am the Seven Wonders of the World … I am the Endless Ocean and the Garden of Eden … I am the Mountains and Valleys and a Great Desert.” 

Gabriella has a complex system for organizing the loose pieces. What might look like a haphazard pile of small cardboard shapes is a clearly thought-out symmetrical pattern waiting to be employed in a system of elimination “far too sophisticated for even the Venezuelan postal service to figure out”, she used to tell her little boy when they sat together day after day working on a new puzzle, waiting for him to die. “It’s like DNA,” she’d say, “every piece unique onto itself.”

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction

Everyone Dies by Danni Meek

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There’s a man in my home.

He’s staring out of the large windows, the ones that I sit by and read my books because they’re the only source of natural light on this side of the apartment. The light from the moon almost gives him a glow, making him look vaguely angelic. It’s almost comedic how ironic that is, considering the fact that he’s broken into my home.

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All Stories, Fantasy, Science Fiction

The Time Machine That Was and Wasn’t at the Same Time by Jonah Jones.

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Several years ago or yet to be, Frank Fullie had written on a whiteboard in his garage:

“You can jump forward in time by falling asleep.”

“You can jump backward in time by looking at old photographs.”

“Sideways in time by having empathy with another.”

“Outside time by dying.”

As an afterthought he’d written “Does the Higgs field come into it?”

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Night They Brought Him Home by Jake Bristow

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When they brought him home that night, the lid was strewn canted off the wooden lip and jacks and queens ornamented astray around the box like a ring of fire. Someone- I do not remember who- had loaded coal into the fireplace and after some poking it begun to lick its flame at the iron grate. Ma was cold and Paul and Jane huddled around the hearth for they were cold but I suppose not as cold as him. Still, it only felt right to keep him warm.

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