Rebecca Rubenstein

Rebecca Rubenstein is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. She received an MFA in Fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, is an alum of the Tin House Writers Workshop, and her work has been featured or is forthcoming in No Contact, Hobart After Dark, Past Ten, and elsewhere. When not writing, she is a Senior Fiction Editor at The Rumpus and the Editor-in-Chief of Midnight Breakfast, and can often be found thinking aloud on Twitter @rrrubenstein.

KERNEL PANIC by Rebecca Rubenstein

October 1, 2021 · Fiction

When his mind went blank, Benno walked to the water store. Smack-dab in the middle of a strip mall a block downhill from his apartment, it was the kind of place that didn’t pull punches. It sold water, and vessels with which to hold water, and that was it. Water cooler jugs lined the walls on one side, and empty aquariums formed a barricade on the other, and the floors teemed with pallets of imported bottled water—glacier runoff from Iceland and Switzerland and all the lands. Metallic shelving flanked each side of the store, and on those shelves sat sturdy,…

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