Fiction

VACUUM by Filip Jakab

“Choke me!” Vinnie yells. His skaterboi Gen-Z body—a pale, rampant, mangled flesh to be further detested, desolated, deprived. Though the flesh and bone he otherwise soothes with a daily intake of smoothies that include collagen, selected antioxidants, and protein powders. He drinks a lot of purified water. He’s one of the lost by-products of his generation.  He nourishes his Promethean body to the max so Sean can destroy it. He pumps it up twice, three times a week, with an unfuckable gym bro who goes by Dixon in the city center. Post-pump, they take dumb selfies (he never shows them to Sean). Dixon and Vinnie giggle like stuffed pets. Vinnie’s thirsting for it to be rough. He gets off when Sean calls him an ugly faggotina, a piece of shit, a pumpslut, a nobody’s buddy. He also gets rock hard during a Netflix documentary about Sydney Funnel-Web Spiders that they both stream sometimes. Neither Vinnie nor Sean is into footplay. While they’re doing it, Vinnie begs Sean to hit him more and harder. First, it’s all just slow and practical. Practical in the sense that Sean and Vinnie get into their roles. Some days, Vinnie’s not even there, not with his mind; he scrolls gooners’ Reddits. He brainrots. The only point Vinnie feels he’s alive is when his self-pity peaks and boils, then blends with the physical pain. Like a junkie whose psyche’s hardwired to the intake of insults, swelling, and bruises in a thrall. He doesn’t care about what Sean wants because Vinnie’s wants are always prioritized. Fists smashing his head, torn lips, cracked ribs, spits and a black eye. The regular stuff. It’s only at that submissive point that Vinnie comprehends what it is that he’s been all these years. A howling, twisted fuckin’ mongrel dog. Maybe a goofy roach. “Pound-d-d-d.” Inside their hyperkinkdom, pain tastes like cotton candy. It’s as addictive as gaming. After a good round of beats, Vinnie approaches his max. A psychological zenith. He feels beautiful antigravity, like covered in warm liquid, then washed away.Sean knows that to act like a real good sadist, it takes the most sincere guts to perform it. Most of the time, Sean puts up with all the sick that Vinnie desires. He looks up aspirational stuff via the “r/pseudo-psycho-perv” group he follows on Reddit. He doms and beats the shit out of Vinnie like he’d be a dirtbag. It’s love they do? Who cares? Their way of loving tastes like a smoothie of salt, iron, sweat, saliva, sanitizer,…   The other day, Vinnie started smashing his head under the bleachers till he could hear only a singular white noise piercing his ears. He bleeds. He grunts. His lips curl up. The whole thing’s transformative. His eyes roll like two ‘pills’ in casino roulette. His face, a manic, messed-up, cretinous crimson-colored rictus. He bites his lower lip like a rabid dog. He has a new idea: Next time they’ll do it, he wants Sean to seal him in a human-sized vacuum. But then he doubts Sean can do it. 
January 5, 2026
Fiction

X-R-A-Y 2025 SAMPLER

in 2025, X-R-A-Y published 169 things ! we read 2,808 submissions & accepted 114. here are some favorites for u to sample. 

but first, a big thank u to all the editors & readers !

Joshua Heppburn / short story editor / joshuahebburn.wordpress.comRebecca Gransden / interviews & reviews editor / rebeccagransden.wordpress.comClaire Hopple / fiction editor / clairehopple.wordpress.comAlice M / short story editor / instagram: @notveryalice / bodyfluids.orgTex Gresham / fiction editor / squeakypig.comMichael Todd Cohen / creative nonfiction editor / michaeltoddcohen.comJo Varnish / creative nonfiction editor / jovarnish.comChris Dankland / managing editor, founding editor /Jennifer Greidus / founding editor / american-lit.com 

shorts (2,000 to 7,500 words):

 

interviews:

 

recommends:

 

creative nonfiction:

 

flash (300 to 2,000 words):

 

micros (up to 300 words):

 
January 1, 2026
Fiction

FROM A DONOR FILE by Christian TeBordo

Charles “Chip” Prime, Jr. has no previous connection to the University and was not considered a prospective donor prior to his contacting this Advancement Officer requesting an urgent meeting at the Quattro Bar of the Four Seasons in East Palo Alto, California. Chip contacted Officer directly by text message, and when Officer attempted to explain that the Bay Area was not part of his regional portfolio, offering to forward him to the relevant staff member, Chip replied that the Bay Area was not his region either, and that he only wished to speak with Officer, being familiar with certain work Officer had done before his association with the University.  He wished for this meeting to be in person, on neutral territory. Chip immediately proceeded to forward Officer a first-class plane ticket from O’Hare to San Jose International departing later that same afternoon and did not hide his frustration when Officer informed him that he was not authorized to accept it, nor was Chip any more gracious when Officer informed him that, “due to scheduling difficulties,” he would not be able to get to Palo Alto in fewer than 72 hours. Nevertheless, the meeting was scheduled, and Officer arrived, sleepless and disheveled, promptly at 2 p.m. August 30.Chip was no more sheveled than Officer. He is a large man of 62, with a brow so prominent this Officer feels dutybound to mention it lest any future officer who meets with him be caught gawking as Officer nearly did. It’s positively Rushmoric, and it makes his eyes, which are probably of average size, look small and demonic and warped behind the thick lenses of his glasses. Chip greeted Officer, and they sat down at an isolated table for two that Chip had requested. Conversation was stilted and halting until a waiter arrived to attend them. Chip ordered a strawberry daiquiri and Officer a Laphroaig 15, double, neat. Conversation was again stilted, and halting, and Chip seemed preoccupied. This lasted an uncomfortably long time because the Quattro does not serve a strawberry daiquiri, but the restaurant staff knew better than to deny a man of Chip’s wealth and prominence his request. Officer mentions this so that any future officer might be spared the awkwardness. The drinks arrived at the same time, Chip took a long sip through the straw, which made his eyes look more crazed than demonic, and once they were left alone, conversation began to flow more naturally.“I bet you know why I asked you here,” said Chip. Officer, not wishing to contradict him and, feeling that first flush of good, peaty scotch, grinned and said knowingly, “I think I have an idea.” Chip attempted to mirror Officer’s grin and the results were frankly gargoylesque, which, again, Officer is trying to prepare you for. “That’s right,” said Chip, “it’s time to solve the Hundred Years’ War.” “The Hundred Years’ War,” Officer nodded as he tried to rack his brain for what it would mean to “solve” it, and Chip mirrored his nod as well, saying, “That’s right.”Chip went on to propose endowing professorships in computer science, materials engineering, and history, as well as funds for the operation and upkeep of the University’s quantum computing system in order to pursue this solution. Officer tried very hard to understand what kind of solution Charles “Chip” Prime, Jr. sought without betraying his ignorance. Officer had the vague notion that the sheer carnage of the Hundred Years’ War had circuitously led to the rise of the middle class via both depopulation of the potential workforce and loss of faith among the peasantry in the divine mandate of the aristocracy. Officer understands the University’s position on the continued existence of the middle class and how it could be considered an obstacle to the University’s mission as we initiate the fourth industrial revolution, but when Officer hinted at this as a solution to the Hundred Years’ War, Chip was uninterested. His quest, he says, is neither political nor sociological. “Dad invented the Prime number,” he said. “I have to do something just as big.”The University does not have a dossier on Chip, so Officer had taken the liberty of improvising one during his long Amtrak journey. Chip’s estimated net worth is in the area of seven billion dollars, placing him among the 400 richest Americans. He uses a conventional financial advisor with investments pegged directly to the market, which is, of course, unusual, but he has no apparent interest in investing qua investing, and his net worth has outperformed those of his nearest peers over time. He has no partner and no heirs. All of his wealth came directly from the inheritance he received on the death of his father, Charles Prime Sr.Prime Sr.’s origins are murky at best. In 1984, a decade after his death, renowned Nazi hunters suggested that he had been born Karl Prim, better known as the Madman of Muritz, a conscientious objector during World War II who allegedly did not, however, object to randomly slaughtering fellow German citizens throughout the Mecklenburg Lake District, and who disappeared from Germany around the same time as a number of war criminals, possibly in their company, hence the theory that he was Gestapo, and was rumored to have entered the U.S. over the southern border sometime before Japan’s surrender. None of this was ever established, though, and the first evidence of the man who would amass Charles Prime Sr.’s fortune appears on a 1947 trademark application.Inspired by the Lanham Act of 1946, Prime Sr. attempted to trademark the very concept “prime number,” which he claimed to have invented, and which he insisted should be capitalized, as it was named for him. The application was, of course, denied quickly and flatly, but that did not deter Prime Sr. He formed an LLC, Prime Industries, that existed solely to bill any business entity that might conceivably use prime numbers, which is to say all business entities, for the use of Prime Numbers. He simply sent an invoice on official-looking letterhead to every corporation, nonprofit, and educational institution he could think of. The trick, he believed, was to set the price high enough that a license for using Prime Numbers seemed important and necessary, without making it expensive enough to trigger alarms in Accounts. His intuitions proved correct, and the money poured in. For this he is credited with pioneering the dynamic pricing with which contemporary retailers are currently experimenting, as well as with laying the groundwork for our contemporary information economy and the managerial state. When an organization failed to pay its annual fee by his arbitrary deadline, which was surprisingly rare, he didn’t threaten legal action but merely sent another invoice with “Second Notice” stamped prominently in red ink at the top, and that usually produced the intended results. If it didn’t, he continued to send second notices, never a third or a final.It’s estimated that at Prime Industries’ peak, 11 percent of all businesses in the United States were renting the right to use numbers from him. When word of what he was doing finally began to spread, the consequences were few. There was nothing illegal in sending his invoices, as he neither claimed to offer any services nor warned of consequences for refusing. Some blue chip corporations even continued to send checks, monitoring them for further innovations in rent collection. When they finally accepted that no further innovations were forthcoming, they eventually let their licenses expire. Still, he is credited with inspiring, and even modeling, the global pivot to financialization, and to this day, voting board members are known to ask, “Is this another Prime Number?” when considering new imaginary products and properties that would likely have baffled Prime Sr. himself. Many out-of-the-way libraries and churches, on the other hand, paid their fees like tithes until he died and the invoices stopped arriving.This is a classic iteration of the American Dream. The young immigrant, lunatic or Nazi or not, arrives in the country and flourishes so thoroughly as a confidence man among confidence men that he not only comes to be perceived as legitimate, but the world warps itself around him to legitimize him. However, as in other versions, the hustle and, hopefully, alleged National Socialism have skipped a generation while the madness has not. Charles “Chip” Prime Jr. has no idea what he’s talking about, and his grasp on reality is tenuous. By the time his straw slurped the daiquiri dregs from the bottom of his fishbowl, he had become loud and erratic. “Sieges lifted!” he was shouting. “Heads off pikes! Oil unboiled! Who needs one point 21 Gigawatts,” Officer noted that he pronounced Gigawatt correctly, “when you have one million error-corrected qubits!” As Officer stumbled out of the Four Seasons Silicon Valley into the blinding sunlight of Palo Alto, he could still hear Chip hollering about the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting from his corner in the bar. It would be unethical to accept his fortune with the purpose of pursuing his goal of solving the Hundred Years’ War, and if the University chooses to do so, this Officer refuses to be involved.
January 1, 2026
Fiction

APPRAISAL by Sam Corradetti

I’m the ripped jeans and dirty flip-flops type. Vaselined lips, no eye liner. Zip-up hoodies and flannels looted from my father’s closet keep me mostly covered, worn loose enough to capture the coveted sirs and young mans while I navigate crowds at the deli counter. Weddings, however, mean dresses. As a bridesmaid, I am spared the search for some tolerable combination of lace, sequins, tulle, fringe, satin. Every detail of dress, hairstyle, jewels, shoes, nails, lip gloss, panties, and—ugh—strapless bra has been mapped out for me. The other bridesmaids crowd me, brandishing mascara wands and crimpers and elastics and hairspray and soft-tipped pencils of assorted colors and sizes. They clap and whistle and say how pretty I look, how feminine. Acceptable. Free of sirs.I now resemble Woman: a value bestowed on me in a currency whose conversions I cannot calculate. In a treasure chest with busted drawbolts, I am a counterfeit doubloon that these other Women have rinsed half-clean in a tidepool and hurriedly priced at face value. I allow them this delusion; I know my worth. My markings may be faked, but I am still true gold. One day the ocean’s salt will grind my surface smooth enough to reflect fistfuls of sunlight into their eyes.
December 31, 2025
Interviews & Reviews

MEMOIRS IN THE MORAL MUD: DAVID LEBRUN AND JOSHUA MOHR TALK SHOP

My debut memoir, Delirium Vitae (Tortoise Books, 2025), recounts five months of hitchhiking and street busking I did from Costa Rica to Phoenix Arizona, in 2001, when I was broke and struggling with addiction and mental health issues.In 2020, I was halfway through editing my memoir, when the pandemic left me happily unemployed. I read Joshua Mohr’s Sirens and discovered he offered editorial service through his Decant Editorial. We worked hard on my manuscript for three months, but what stuck with me most was his encouragement and certainty that the book would find a publisher. Four years later, when I was done tinkering, Delirium Vitae found a home with Tortoise Books and Joshua Mohr’s generous blurb landed on the cover.Josh and I recently talked about my long road to finishing the memoir. What followed was a conversation about grief, spiritual blind spots, voice, benefits and hazards of beta readers, and our characters’ moral mud. Joshua Mohr: Of the many things I love about your book, it's the quest/road trip angle that makes the work feel so utterly alive. Can you walk us through how you calibrated the book's kinetic energy to speak to the main character's arc?David LeBrun: It's an interesting question because it started the other way around—where I first had to calibrate the character's arc to speak to the kinetic energy. Some of my early readers sensed something missing in my character's emotional arc—something to justify his behaviour. To dig deeper, I saw a therapist, attended a trauma workshop, even ate a hero-dose of mushrooms with a shaman. Eventually, I understood I had been carrying some unspoken grief for most of my life, and it was that silence around loss that had propelled my character into chaos and self-destruction. With that realization, it was easy to keep the pace moving—to know what mattered to the story and what didn't, as I shaped the book's emotional pacing around a character who thinks he's running toward something, but gradually awakens to see he's running from something.JM: Ah yes, the ol' “hero-dose of mushrooms with a shaman.” I've been there! What you're describing—the unspoken grief—is such a potent driver for the book. I'm curious about how you calibrated that balancing act between what your character knows about this grief and what exists in a kind of spiritual blind spot. Did it take a couple drafts to get that “yin yang” properly aligned?DL: I worked on the book for eight years, so there were countless drafts. At some point, I decided I didn’t want to drag the reader through another fifty pages for the sake of chronologically. Instead, I folded some post-journey realizations—and other scenes—back into the road narrative. I shuffled those into every possible configuration, wanting to embed them in places where they’d feel natural and rewarding for the reader (to sense the character's blind spots before he does) but also emotionally true for me—moments when memories would have been triggered, where the unconscious would have come knocking.JM: I super dig that! It makes the juxtapositions between past and present so dynamic on the page. You're also telling this story with such a strong voice, an evocative cadence. Did the “sound” change much as you wrote across all those drafts? If so, how?DL: Thanks for the compliment. I started writing this version of Delirium Vitae in 2016 and I found myself writing with different authors’ voices. But I didn’t want to write something derivative. I wanted to record the sound of the voice in my head—that lifelong inner monologue. In the middle drafts, I leaned on critique partners, and some of them were great at pointing out when I strayed from that voice. Once a solid draft was finished, I read the manuscript out loud many times, and relentlessly combed through it, like rewatching a movie. I mean, if someone told me I’ve read through my book two hundred times, I’d believe them. So, I'd say I came to that voice thanks to obsessive compulsion.JM: I sure feel that! I must've read my memoir MODEL CITIZEN aloud hundreds of times, too. There is no better way to dial in cadence and time signature than hearing the sonic potential. Your answer is making me wonder about the other ways your beta readers helped you get closer to your book's intentions. Are there other ways that they helped you zero in on the project? Or maybe the other way, as well? Did they make any suggestions that you had to disregard in order to write the book you felt called to create?DL: I learned to spot and pull away from those who would try to steer me toward a safe, cookie-cutter story. But, sometimes, those folks would give me a reaction so pointed that I just had to play with it.There’s a scene early in Delirium Vitae where my boss reprimands me for an inappropriate conversation with his daughter. A beta reader commented, “This scene doesn’t reflect well on you.” And I thought, Of course not, that’s the point! I’m showing the protagonist’s flaw here! That reader’s comment stuck with me, and their specific concern would improve the scene’s tension when I gave my boss the line: “That conversation (with my daughter) does not reflect well on you.”So, in my quest to make sense of myself and my character, the resistance often helped me anticipate: I know what you’re thinking—here’s why it still stands.JM: “This scene doesn’t reflect well on you” is basically my whole career on the page! LOL. I love writing characters who have no idea how to get out of their own way. Since I've written a lot of autofiction, I know what you mean by “myself” and “my character” in your answer. Every author will approach those two “identities” differently. How did you balance that? And are there any solid examples of when “you” the character surprised You the author?DL: I guess I sometimes refer to my character as someone separate from me, because I no longer identify with who I was at 25. I know I couldn’t have written as openly if I’d imposed my maturity onto him. That split gave me permission to lean into his flaws and needs. It helped that I was working from notes and recordings I’d made back then, and from a very rough draft I’d written at 26.As I gained distance from that period of my life, I'd have moments of objectivity where I was shocked that the lifestyle and situations the younger me had put himself through—eating very little, hitchhiking over 5500 kilometers (3400 miles), refusing to call someone for help, sleeping on the streets—somehow, felt safer than going home. It still amazes me how the pain we choose is sometimes so much worse than the pain we’re hoping to avoid.JM: Pain! I love that you're answering this through the mud of suffering. I often tell my grad students that characters need to exist in the moral mud, as that's where true, nude, human complexity lives. What are you able to see now, through the perch of remove, about that suffering that you admire/appreciate, and which aspects of that ache are you glad to leave in the past?DL: I admire the young me for his hunger—for thriving in chaos. While I wouldn’t stomach it now, I’m grateful he did, because all that raw chasing of experience left behind a lot of material.But I’ve outgrown the type of suffering that hinges on self-destruction. Back then, I thought there was meaning in throwing everything and everyone away. Now I don't romanticize that anymore. When I think of how many artists drank themselves to death, I’m glad to have left it behind.JM: Does that relief mean that you're ready to turn your attention to the next book? What's been kicking around your imagination?DL: Stepping away from Delirium Vitae was too easy 'cause that book really took a lot out of me. I’m nearing the obsessive read-through stage of a novel based on some... turbulent relationships I had in my late-twenties and early-thirties while I worked overnight at a ketchup factory and later the film industry. I’m also finishing up three feature screenplays and have another on the backburner. So, I'm kicking tires on some agents now, 'cause I've got more stories than time.Purchase 'Delirium Vitae' here.
December 30, 2025

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American Air

by Mike Topp

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Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.

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