AUGUST 2026

We’re going to call her Marge because we don’t really know who the hell she is. Or what. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

AUGUST 2026

We had been watching whales together since we were kids. Typically, when one of us spotted a whale, we didn’t tell the other, “Hey, look.” We just knew that the other had seen it too. 

JULY 2026

It’s been like this all day. Smoky. Fire season snuck up like a dentist appointment. Already, memories of blue skies are fading like the grey horizon, which once featured mountains.

JUNE 2026

The blades cut the air in regular intervals like a heartbeat that never varies, never responds, never adapts. It is life-like without being alive, pulse without flesh, rhythm without the irregularities, neither close enough to see clearly nor far enough to ignore.

APRIL 2026

Your parents lay you gently on your thin mattress and closed the door. I crept out from below and perched over you as you settled into a restless sleep. You smelled of sweet powder and grunted and gurgled like a youngling of my own kind. 

MARCH 2026

She’d be complaining and sighing and muttering under her breath. I was well rid of her, the day she ran off. I was grieved when I got the news, but not surprised. She’d been chaos from the start.

MARCH 2026

The sun glared down on the paddy field where she lay. She looked about his size and age, blonde hair and a dark green dress. Next to her floated a man in a muddied white shirt, blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a black hat.

MARCH 2026

Everything he could have said sounded like something too late. And yet the same conversation seemed to play out every day between them in strange rehearsals of temptation in which only she spoke. 

FEBRUARY 2026

Arrived at Manor Vail Lodge Hotel around 4:30pm. Front desk noticed it was our fifth time here. Nice that they noticed us as VIP guests! Room is luxurious. The bathroom has a new gold shag carpet, gold wallpaper and a sunken bathtub. This is the life! 

FEBRUARY 2026

i think this sad excuse for a short story has melted my brain, or at least my creative faculties. i need to lie down. take a good long nap. maybe for the rest of the day. maybe for the rest of my life. 

FEBRUARY 2026

I have not slept. Not for the previous ten nights. And now, on the eleventh, I lie atop this bed as though already a cadaver, limbs arranged, stiff and angular. The mattress beneath me may as well be a slab of marble.

JANUARY 2026

It’s been over two months since your last visit—even though you drive within a hundred yards every day on the way to work. You tell yourself it’s because you’d rather remember her as she was. But deep down, you know it isn’t about what you want.

JANUARY 2026

Predawn, the pier was all angles and salt. The air smelled of metal and warning. Luc entered the lab, heart still beating to the rhythm of the storm, the echo of the sea’s breath heavy in his chest, metal giving way to the clean brightness he trusted...

DECEMBER 2025

Finding warmth in a warm place is not hard, finding intimacy in the cool night is just as easy. Finding love in a temporary town such as this is only possible if real-life rules don’t apply.

DECEMBER 2025

Two weary travellers docked at 0π0, seeking respite at Galactic Central Point. The taller of the two was an indigo-skinned Pybite with a prominent thorax and a forked tail featuring cybernetic enhancements common for pilots. The smaller was...

2025 Short Fiction Contest Winner

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2025 Short Fiction Contest Runner-Up

DECEMBER 2025

Inside, the bathhouse smelled different from what Irene had imagined. Not fresh, not sweet, nothing so gauche as that, but heavy, wooden, almost bitter. She felt distinguished just sniffing the air, and then profoundly stupid for thinking that.

NOVEMBER 2025

A single fruit among the orchard’s bounty is enough to preserve your life. 

OCTOBER 2025

The watch ticked backward the way it usually did when the world was suspended upside down. Hard going for a sphere with a gravity well, but sometimes physics flowed strangely around Dot. 

OCTOBER 2025

The dry air seared the inside of his lungs a little, but as he trembled on the ground, the feeling in his arms and legs slowly coming back to him, Charlie realized that the problem wasn’t that the air was hot; it was that everything in him was cold.

SEPTEMEBER 2025

Noor closed her eyes for a moment, willing herself to remember the warmth of her father’s study, the scent of ink and jasmine drifting through the open window. But the memory was a fragile refuge, offering no shield against the cold of Dachau.

SEPTEMBER 2025

Behind her, watching the lace of her skirt sashay, was that brain dead boxer, hog-tied and gagged, the uptown amateur all washed up before he’d even hit his prime. 

AUGUST 2025

The feel of her hands in his hair was a kind of warm magic. A spell he never wanted to end. 

AUGUST 2025

He espies a centipede tunneling inside the dirt, making way for the water and nutrients to reach a dormant seed in the earth’s womb, which puffs up, quieting those who prophesy its stale, living world will never burgeon.

JULY 2025

Clayton had told him where he could shove his wrath of God nonsense during the reverend’s hour-long attempt to steer him onto the straight and narrow after his clandestine joyride in the neighbor’s truck.

JULY 2025

The sun hung low in the sky, a yolk bleeding gold and orange onto the corrugated roofs of our compound. The air smelled of ripe mangoes and distant charcoal smoke, heavy with the languor of a typical afternoon.

JULY 2025

The bay window has half a dozen panes with glass circles, like something out of Dickens. A bell jingle-jangles as I step inside. The walls are thick with tiny cards in a copperplate hand, while embroidered pennants hang from the bumpy-head beams of the ceiling, advising that...

JUNE 2025

I sit on the bed and observe my husband, bent over his work, eyelashes fluttering in the dim light. His demeanor is boyish, a reflection of the childhood friend I once raced along the quays of Dublin Bay.

JUNE 2025

The purpose of the field is still a mystery. A single structure stands nearer my side, pitched roof and boarded doors and dilapidation encroaching, and I still don’t know what it ever was. 

JUNE 2025

Is this ‘harvest moon’ one of those things where rebels meet behind a barn and plan an act of subversion or something?

MAY 2025

The drifter’s hands smelled of alcohol and cheap cigarettes, and for a long while, the mutt would associate this aroma with the ragged man’s essence. Together they would face the hardships of the contemporary world as an inseparable duo. 

MAY 2025

I don’t watch pornography. I don’t read it either. That doesn’t make me a prude. Sex is simply low on my list of interests.

I wonder how much of that can be blamed on my husband?

MAY 2025

The night before the joyous event, Isabelle lay in the dark, mouthing the vows Hilda had written for her. Worse. Poorer. Sickness. Obey. Isabelle’s grandmothers, aunts and cousins had all made these pledges, and now it was her turn.

APRIL 2025

I’ll tell you the things I remember, then you can show me the things I don’t. How does that sound?

APRIL 2025

Never made it beyond captain. Spent all those years in the Marines and that’s as far as he got. Kinda tells you something.