X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

TWO SHORT PIECES by Ellie Powell

October 9, 2025 · Fiction

In which Kazuo Ishiguro runs a dating hotline on the radio like in Sleepless in Seattle ME Hello? KAZUO ISHIGURO Hello, you’ve reached the Kazuo Ishiguro Dating Hotline. My name is Kazuo Ishiguro. How can I help you tonight? ME Oh, wow. I didn’t think you’d actually pick up. I’m Ellie. I loved The Buried Giant. KAZUO ISHIGURO Everyone loves The Buried Giant. We’ll see what Guillermo does with it. Are you dating, Ellie? ME No, but it’s all a bit more complicated than that, don’t you think? KAZUO ISHIGURO No, not really. …

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HEIR APPARENT by Jack Lennon

October 7, 2025 · Fiction

1 Your wife was overjoyed when your uncle drowned in three inches of water at the bottom of a cave. It meant your family would inherit his house. Although you both wished it wasn’t in such tragic circumstances. That’s what you kept saying to people. Not that you had any strong feelings about him or his death. You barely knew him. Was spelunking in Chile a normal pastime of his? Nobody knew him well enough to tell you. Not at the funeral, not during the will reading, nor when you took his place in his very respectable neighbourhood. They would…

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PORTRAIT OF YOU IN FIVE PSYCHICS by Kirsti MacKenzie

October 6, 2025 · Fiction

First guy says: you’re gonna see a UFO. Like, BOOM. He lays this on me. Right now you’re probably thinking well, if that doesn’t torpedo the whole thing for you. But it didn’t. Okay? It didn’t. I sat there and let him tell me I was gonna see a UFO because sometimes you’re in the middle of a divorce and sometimes staring down the barrel of your life and sometimes you’d pay someone, anyone, to tell you that you’re not completely fucked. “Where do I go with this,” he says. “Do you believe?” “In UFOs?” I ask. “Sure, what the…

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PILE DRIVE ME INTO THE EARTH by Thora Dahlke

September 19, 2025 · Fiction

Althea Downs spends all summer break in her bedroom. Through the pivot roof window, the sun deep fries her no matter where she sits. She drinks berry-kale smoothies and listens to macabre podcasts that give her strange dreams about swimming pools full of blood. She showers at midnight and sweats through the entire night, wakes up cocooned in sheets so soaked you’d think the scale would finally plunge below 100. It does not. She thinks about killing herself, but only casually. This is her tenderest hobby, lazy and indulgent, she spoils it like a rescue. It’s not really death she…

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COAGULOID by Hank O’Neill

September 17, 2025 · Fiction

It tastes so god I can’t hav another bite I say — and the hole of evrybody jus shuts up like oh is she about to stop? Loud one second and then gasping like is this reel? I hear somone literallay go holy fuk is that the end of Mis Plasteek? They’re holding out ther phone recording as they say, Guys I can’t beleev I’m catching this on video, plees like and subscribe. Meenwile I see the Produser behind the curtain mouthing to me: okay nice, now milk it. Which is jus wat we rehursed. The guy with the phone…

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YOU TEACH ME HOW TO BE by Emma Burger

September 15, 2025 · Fiction

You’re all so thin and beautiful. I only wanted to be like you. To want for nothing. To live in a gorgeous Tribeca loft. To wear Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana like it was nothing. To show up to morning drop-off at P.S. 234 with an expensive blowout and a full Alo set, en route to pilates. You lived the life I thought I deserved. One day. For now, I was supposed to be your yoga teacher. Your guide. I wanted my body to look like all of yours, but I was the reason yours looked the way they did….

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TWO DAYS AFTER THEIR MOTHER DIES by Kim Magowan

September 10, 2025 · Fiction

Josie uses her key to let herself and her sister Amy into Cora’s apartment. She walks in first, then turns to see Amy standing in the doorway, hand braced against the doorframe. Josie says, impatiently, “Come on.” Finally, Amy enters this apartment their mother lived in for three years, moving here after she injured her knee and at last accepted that it made no sense for an older woman to be living in a house with two sets of stairs. But Amy has never seen it, because she’s so stubborn and unforgiving. Watching her older sister walk slowly into the…

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AVALON by Saoirse Bertram

September 9, 2025 · Fiction

On the Fourth of July the grandmother took Vase to the top of the warehouse where a rickety carriage of iron stairs led to the roof. The sky was as orange as a snake’s belly and smelled of powder and dust and oil. They sat without speaking watching the brilliant detonations which Vase had never seen before just as she had never seen the full horizon of sky over Los Angeles and when the grandmother felt tired Vase was sorry to have to leave the sight so soon. Vase had only been with the grandmother for a couple months at…

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COME AND SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM by Saul Lemerond

September 3, 2025 · Fiction

It’s another hot day, and the tide is rising. The son shoulders his father’s rifle and walks back toward the beach house thinking the reason he’s shot the hole in the tank is because his dad refused to buy him a half million follows. “Please like, comment, and subscribe.” He says, holding his phone at eye level and trying to steady his hand because he is still shaking with generational anger he will probably never understand. Water spills out onto the ground as the cat patiently watches the flapjack octopus scurry to the opposite side of its tank. Time is…

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WOULD YOU TREMBLE IN THE PRESENCE OF THE VIRGIN SHOULD SHE COME TO YOUR TOWN? by Cortez

August 25, 2025 · Fiction

When Mother’s belly bloomed again, she pointed a french-tipped finger at the richest man in town. The accusation, though baseless, haunted him– it polluted his polished lawn, noosed his silk ties. This was a man shrunken, a spirit corrupted, a man of real stature driven sick. But the town was small, and Mother was only getting bigger, and so he wished her away with a lump sum. Mother had two girls at home. The little one, blue-eyed and painted with the peachy, airbrushed skin of Jesus, thought she might’ve been born of dirt, like Adam, or rib, like Eve. The…

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