X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

LET’S TALK ABOUT DESIRE by Dana Jean Rider

December 1, 2025 · Fiction

The woman in the window doesn’t know I’m watching her. Or, if she does, she’s fine with it, having assessed me as nonthreatening. I’m just the skinny white girl raking leaves outside her first-floor apartment patio. Hired-by-the-landlord equals vetted-as-safe. And she’s right, I don’t mean any harm—but it’s probably still weird how many times I’ve raked these particular leaves, which are now effectively mulch. She’s doing yoga in the middle of her living room. Not especially good at it, but she’s giving it her all, and when I rake really softly, I can hear her faint, vocal sighs of satisfaction…

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YOU THANK THE MARQUIS DE SADE: AUDREY SZASZ’S ‘TELEPLASM’ by Jesse Hilson

November 13, 2025 · Fiction

My dictionary of British slang tells me that “Sloane” was the first name of an insufferable female archetype of the upper class in the 1980s. When I saw that the protagonist of Audrey Szasz’s novel Teleplasm (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2025) was named Sloane Epstein it suggested great wealth and privilege crossed with echoes of the human trafficking, pedophilia, and white collar underworld of Jeffrey Epstein. Indeed, the novel exists in a narrative Petri dish of high-class travel, Internet media celebrity, psychological deterioration and pervasive sexual violence. Sloan Epstein is a young woman attached to a roving paranormal researcher Dr. Novák, her…

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MAKING CONNECTIONS AND DRAWING LINES: AN INTERVIEW WITH EMMALEA RUSSO by Rebecca Gransden

November 11, 2025 · Fiction

Since its release in fall 2024 Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne (Arcade Publishing) has had time to percolate with the culture it so sharply interrogates. A slanted satire, the book poetically autopsies online mores and offers a giddy sojourn to the realm of the artist, both the world they invent for themselves, and that imposed from outside. Three generations of a family are positioned as focus for the novel, and Russo bestows this trio with an enchanted ordinariness. What constitutes a violent act? By the end, flesh and blood puts words to shame. I spoke to Emmalea about the book. Rebecca…

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BECKETTIAN by Shane Kowalski

November 10, 2025 · Fiction

Murphy was visiting Malone. It had been a while since they had seen each other. Murphy being busy in the city, while Malone had lingered in the countryside. Murphy remembered those dark country roads, whizzing down them in the nights as a youth. No noise. But at the same time, all the noise in the world. The humming shadows. Malone was always the type to leave enough room between himself and other people. Murphy, on the other hand, had become a successful C-AWP II, a thing he so frequently had to explain to new acquaintances that it had lost all…

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THE BROKEN TOWER by Kaden Griggs

November 5, 2025 · Fiction

The hulk of the Orizaba lulled hugely in the calm spring water as if the waves were tongues tasting the air in broad gulps like old hounds lapping water from ground puddles. Not much moved. The poet was drinking and avoiding his beloved. His father had died and he was very sad tonight. He had never felt emptier within. Lust enters when the hollowness leaves nothing else behind. He makes the mistake of believing again that the drinking will bury the lust and set things aright but it only invigorates the lust. Lust for all things. Lust for the remembrance…

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HI by Erin Kelly Smith

November 3, 2025 · Fiction

She filled out her first dating profile in a frenzied whirl, half-drunk on the yet-undigested news that her ex had brought someone with him to Thanksgiving that year. For a photo, she uploaded the professional headshot that was on the “Meet Our Team!” page of her work’s website, then quickly removed it, fearing these unknown, savage internet men could reverse-image search their way to learning every private facet of her life. She snapped a brand-new—and thus unsearchable—photo of herself standing and staring into her hallway mirror. She intended a smile, but only captured once its bloom had faded, her expression…

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NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT: ELEVEN BOOKS FOR HALLOWEEN by Matthew Kinlin

October 31, 2025 · Fiction

Nightmares come at night. The poster for Halloween III: Season of the Witch shows the silhouettes of three children walking in Halloween costumes against a red night. A ghoulish apparition evaporates above them into electric blue. The tagline at the bottom of the poster reads: “The night no one comes home.” Here are some recommended books that approach horror and other areas of eeriness in new and unexpected ways. Eleven lost souls drifting into darkness. The night goes on forever. Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (Fab Press,…

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IN ANOTHER LIFE, I AM A DIRECT DESCENDANT OF SHARKS by Bethany Cutkomp

October 30, 2025 · Fiction

And if I do not keep moving, I will pass away. They call this ram ventilation, a shark’s way of breathing. My invisible gills demand the same method of survival. Since hatching from your womb, I have been burdened to forward momentum, a squirming force to be reckoned with. Raised in a realm above sea-level, however, the current has always worked against my nature. Most mornings, you barely squeeze in the chance to slather sunscreen over my ampullae of Lorenzini—freckles, you insist I call them—before I’m out of the door and down the street, bike pedals whirling, thrusting through the…

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THE DEN by Andy Bodinger

October 29, 2025 · Fiction

I’d been in the Midwest a month. I had stepped off the Greyhound with clothing, toiletries, documents, and a cremation urn, which I kept my savings in. The locals considered my new town dead. At first, I disagreed. Or, I figured at least, if it was dead, its corpse was flowering. Everything I needed was within the grid of a few blocks. Connecticut was unwalkable, nothing more than tree-lined roadways connecting one muddy village to the next. Soon, however, I ended up bored out of my mind, never imagining that I could do everything right and be so listless. One…

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DARRIN DOYLE RECOMMENDS: EIGHT BOOKS OF FICTION THAT EVOKE THE LIMINAL

October 28, 2025 · Fiction

Opening your eyes at night, unsure of where you are, half-dreaming, half-awake…staring into the darkness of a living room, thinking that the shadow near the door might be a man…or a coat rack… the tremble along your spine as you hear the voice of a deceased loved one on your voicemail…the uncanny sight of a mannequin that may or may not be a living person. We all know that sense of dread that comes from uncertainty during transitional moments, as well as the relief we feel once we settle into the known. Below are a list of fiction books that…

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