Fiction

DAWNS by Bright Aboagye

August 14, 2025

On some days, you’re a ghost to your own body. Some mornings, your bones feel borrowed. Never been yours. Just something you’re renting till it all breaks down. You lie still and feel every joint light up like someone lit a match inside your marrow. *** It’s 4:27 am and you’re staring at your laptop, trying to write a suicide note that sounds less dramatic than it is. All you’ve got so far is, I am tired. Three words. Nothing more. You backspace it and watch the cursor blink like it’s judging you. It’s the only thing in this room

RENTAL LEASE APPLICATION by Anna Koltes

August 12, 2025

Name: You almost write his surname in place of your own, a knee jerk response. You slap the mosquito that has landed on the back of your neck to feed. Upon assuming his name, you forgot your own. You grapple with the correct spelling. The vowels squish uncertainly inside your head, the consonants bumping awkwardly like soup dumplings. But this should be the least of your concerns. After so long together, your name isn’t the only possession you’ve left behind. Reason for moving: You can make something up here. It will be simpler. A barbecue fire that got out

LUKE by Sam Berman

August 11, 2025

He was known as the best guitar player in the United States. Maybe the world. I didn’t know; I’d never met him. Luke. I had friends who knew him, had seen him play in the French Quarter, or they themselves had jammed with him in one of those hill houses in San Francisco when he was part-timing as a tour guide in Ghirardelli Square. They attested to his skill. His virtuosity. The word “singularity” was used. “Heaven sent,” got thrown around. I was told outside a restaurant that there was a girl in Morocco who was “nearly his equal.” Close

OTTERS AND TIGERS by John Jodzio

August 7, 2025

I work part-time at a dry cleaners, but I’m mostly known for posting cute videos of otters that make people smile. Most people thank me for my work by liking and sharing my videos but some people, like two or three a month, ask me to post videos of otters having sex. When I tell them I don’t post lewd otter content, these people usually say mean things about my penis. For instance, how it’s microscopic. Or how it’s bent like a Russian sickle. Or how it smells like pot roast. If I could brush these comments off I would,

JUST ANOTHER FRIDAY by Stefanie K. Yang

August 6, 2025

When Gary died, nobody mourned—not even his siblings. Everyone agreed he lived like a ghost, practically invisible and emerging only when absolutely necessary. He had no children and accomplished very little. He wouldn’t be missed. Like many before him, Gary simply ceased to exist while time and the universe continued on. Yet, for a brief moment, Gary mattered. Gary was murdered. He was killed in his own home in his own bathtub on a Thursday evening between nine- and ten-o’-clock. The most conspicuous evidence was his severed leg. The killer left it in his bathtub in a shallow pool of

PRAYER BREAKFAST by Emma Ensley

July 30, 2025

I knew that downloading music was illegal, but my dad was the one who showed me how to do it, so I didn’t worry too much. I still prayed at night for God to forgive me, just in case. *** The Australian’s username was koala_rocks47 and he was thirty-two, though I didn’t know that yet. I was eleven and three-quarters. I’d found the John Mayer fan forum through a Google search after Drew read the lyrics to “Why Georgia” in Literature class, during our poetry unit. “am I living it right?” over and over again, while his hands shook. I

HAUNT ATTACK: DENNIS COOPER AND ZAC FARLEY ON ‘ROOM TEMPERATURE’ by Jack Skelley

July 29, 2025

Room Temperature is the latest film collaboration by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. It focuses on a family-run, amateur haunted house and was shot on location in Southern California. The film recently screened at San Francisco’s Frameline film festival, and before that at Los Angeles Festival of Movies. It will soon show in Europe. Although the concept of co-directing a film is unusual, the rapport between Cooper and Farley is natural… as evidenced by how they often finish each other’s thoughts in this QA with Jack Skelley. And this reflects in the quietly supernatural vibe of Room Temperature, which is

FOREVER by Spencer Lee

July 25, 2025

I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, listening to the gardener trim the hedges. The world right now is loud and whirring. When the gauze comes off, everything will be graceful and good. My surgeon’s a short man with steroid face–large, skeletal nostrils–but he has great taste in women’s faces. My face feels taut and ready for anything. Underneath the bandages, I swear that I’m smiling down at the boys. I lower my feet into the lukewarm water. The sun is injecting undulating crystals of white that look like ominous little spirits. Or Xanaxs. I wonder what my husband’s

SWIMMERS by Tobi Pledger

July 24, 2025

Doc Raeford lifted the tail and stepped back to avoid the torrent of steaming bull shit. After the last wink of the bull’s anus, he leaned forward and pushed the electroejaculator probe into the rectum, completing the docking maneuver. “Bull’s eye.” Mike would never have imagined that he’d enjoy helping a veterinarian anally penetrate a two-thousand-pound Angus bull, but he did. Raeford shrugged. “It’s a gift.” The bull resisted the intrusion, lunging forward, shoving his chest against the gate of the squeeze chute with a jolt. His nostrils flared, flecks of foamy mucus blowing out on the exhale. The Texas

MUTUAL by Caroline Porter

July 21, 2025

Amelia-Rose followed first. She even had the audacity to message Francis afterwards, as if following real life acquaintances on Tumblr was normal. Hi Francis! It’s nice to see someone else who is as online as me lol. xoxo—AR Francis freaked, of course. She couldn’t picture Amelia-Rose as a fellow Columbiner, not even as one of the fangirls exclusively in it for horny reasons: the ones who posted crime scene photos of Eric’s body captioned idk hes kinda cute without his face, who posted drawings of a shirtless Dylan Klebold, passably rendered in ballpoint pen—not that Francis thought there was any