A young man reflects on moments of friendship with two other boys; there is both an intimacy and a distance in their relationships. An air of melancholy suffuses the story. This story…
Tag: fiction
“Crawlspace Oracle” by Richard Gavin
A woman has dinner with an old acquaintance who has gained a reputation for financial wizardry, hoping to get some advice for how to invest some money her husband has recently acquired….
“One of the Good Ones, or: It’s a Gas!” by Gordon B. White
During a hot summer of protests, a young cop participates, somewhat reluctantly, in an unauthorized experiment with an old psychoactive substance that some of his fellow cops intend to use on the…
“In This Twilight” by Simon Strantzas
A young woman meets an itinerant young man in a deserted bus station and tries to avoid conversation with him. When he gets on the same bus as her, and waxes rhapsodic…
“Napier’s Constant” by ArLynn Leiber Presser
This is a fun and lighthearted take on the theory of multiverses and the end of the universe, set at a wedding where a “virtuous but not sober uncle” has fallen asleep…
“Scold’s Bridle: A Cruelty” by Richard Gavin
Well, this is a grim little story to read with my morning coffee … A down-on-his-luck blacksmith is approached to create a medieval torture device; the requester is a teacher, who claims…
“What the Forest Remembers” by Jennifer Egan
This story feels a bit like a mid-century John Cheever story – middle class professional men of the buttoned-up cul de sacs encounter a proto-hippie commune in the redwoods and partake of…
Rooms by Lauren Oliver
Family members converge on a house in Upstate New York upon the death of Richard Walker, their secrets and disappointments mingling with those of the ghosts of two of the house’s former…
Undertow by Elizabeth Bear
Against a backdrop of corporate and political intrigue, environmental and cultural pillaging, and the unraveling of the very fabric of reality, an assassin, a knowledge broker, and a “conjure man” betray, bedevil,…
Join by Steve Toutonghi
In a near future ravaged by environmental disasters, people are able to join their consciousness with others into new, multi-bodied selves, with their previously individual bodies as mortal avatars, or “drives,” through…