Emily Kiernan

Emily Kiernan is the author of a novel, Great Divide (Unsolicited Press). Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Pank, The Collagist, Redivider, Quarterly West, and other journals, and she has received support from MacDowell, The Ucross Foundation, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and other organizations. She is a prose editor at Noemi Press. She lives in Pittsburgh with her man and her dog. More information can be found at emilykiernan.com.

MEPHISTOPHELES by Emily Kiernan

December 10, 2021 · Fiction

Judging by the state of his teeth, the vet estimated he was five years old, but Ella thought he was older than that—a persistent street-cat scrawniness, knots they could never comb out of his long, black fur. She’d had pets before, but he inspired a desperate love in her the others had not, a need to hoist him up in her arms and wrap his skinny body in hers, to protect him. The friend who had found him in the alley behind the Get Go station called him FluffFluff, but Ella had been reading Faust, and she named him Mephistopheles….

Crow Jonah Norlander