Category: Fiction

“Cut it out!” Sam Cooperman protested as Mark Withers reached across the aisle to extricate a tan notebook from under Sam’s arm. Mark pulled it in spurts. Sam was gradually conceding as the notebook was slipping out from under...

“She accidentally killed a puppy,” my brother Keith whispered to me. “What, who?” I asked. I had just sat down at the family dinner table and was looking for the silverware. My mother usually had it at each setting. Where was...

March 3, 2036. I finally have the time to take a vacation. Or, more accurately, the police chief told me that I had to take the time. He had decided that he was tired of finding me in the coroner’s office, especially since there...

One breezy October afternoon, Eddie left work and drove to Parham’s Lounge. The route led through Springfield’s rough inner-city streets, ones that needed paving and were lined with run-down houses that cried for renovation....

Lying in bed, regaling me with tales about his father’s morgue, Bird rocked his head back and forth, led by the birdlike beak of a snow-white nose. I watched and listened from my bunk in the closet-sized room we shared in Breen...

Members of the selection committee: I have come a long way from my working class roots. My father supervised the night shift. Even though I was a girl, my father trusted me to keep tabs on my mother when he was at work. So, from...

Melissa Peabody sat mumbling in her lime Volvo. She was parked in an alley off the main street of the town. She felt a time-space vibe with cars and trains going back and forth, and passengers disembarking into the station. She...

CHAPTER 1 LOST PARENTS Once upon a time, there was a girl named Anna, who lived in the forest with her siblings and her cousins. Her siblings were a brother and a sister. Anna’s parents lived next door, so Anna and her cousins...

Eileen’s hands shook as she pushed back the living room window curtain. At 6:15, Samuel was over an hour late. Her husband prided himself on his punctuality, a character trait Eileen adored until the lack of it added to...

The following texts are a verbatim record from a Homo Sapiens, an AI engineer on Earth during the AI revolution, over the time interval from 2021 to 2242. The texts were restored from a broken chip discovered in 2817 by a group...

My father’s caregiver knows how to build bombs; “I’ve dealt with metal all my life. Metal is all around us,” he said as he picked up a teaspoon and waved it in the air to make his point. Yuri is a tall man with large feet. His...

“Is this one Ringo?” my sister, twelve years old, asked our brother Keith, who was fourteen. She was holding out a glossy page from her Teen Talk magazine. “You’re so stupid,” Keith replied and slumped back against the blue...