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Fiction

Fiction

Automaton Boy

I wrote this story while reading Terrorist Assemblages by Jasbir Puar, and with some songs on repeat from an Iron & Wine album, The Shepherd’s Dog.

Fiction

Grottmata

The soldiers start rounding up us factory girls just before sunrise. We smoke cigarettes and stand in a line against the remnants of a brick wall that used to be a bakery, facing the sheer black of the mountains above the town as muted light spills across the fog and folds of the ridgeline. One girl wearing four layers of coats asks if we’re still getting paid, and everyone has a good laugh.

Fiction

Billy Blue

Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there . . . The first time she sees the stranger, he’s coming up the stairs. The estate agent grimaces at the “UNDER MAINTENANCE” sign, assures them the lift will soon be in full working order. “What’s down there?”

Fiction

The Dark Devices

As so many pieces of this length do—and I’m not the only writer who will report this—the idea and storyline for “The Dark Devices” came to me in a very visceral, very disturbing (wait for it) flash. The writing itself? A little research on Pieter’s period and country before that could happen.

Fiction

MAMMOTH

If you haven’t seen it yet, you will. Three hooded figures sit cross-legged on the floor of a candle-lit warehouse. There’s something strange about the middle one: its torso somehow both too long and too hunched. The figure flickers, like a transcription error in crimson candlelight.

Fiction

like blood on the mouths of death

I first saw them one evening in May. I couldn’t tell what they were: small, like kids, like me, but they rustled, raffia fronds for skin. My eyes fizzing with dreams, I found Mama cradled on the sofa, hugging herself. She wore that faded floral top she loved so much.

Fiction

Solve This One, Mrs. Miller

Math has never been my strong suit. Still, I’ve always rather enjoyed logic puzzles (particularly ones like Einstein’s Riddle), and after falling in love with Return of the Obra Dinn last year, I got really into the idea of using puzzles like these to build a narrative—especially a mystery.

Fiction

An Offering from the Void

There is something uniquely squalid and sad about estate sales. To traipse through a cluttered house, one of a teeming crowd here to bear witness to the end of a life and all that it held, not to pay respect but instead to lunge for whatever goodies you can find.

Fiction

Backseat Kiss

CW: violence, blood, death. It didn’t come as a surprise when AJ told me she wanted to open our relationship. We’d been an item for four years, but by the middle of the third year the two of us had long since checked out. You could feel it in the air: a static, something pushing […]

Fiction

There are three children jumping over a can outside a bodega

In early 2022, there was a comedian on TikTok, or at least I thought they were a comedian, who said, and I’m paraphrasing here: My biggest fear living in the city today is not crime or something scary happening—it’s actually some person with a camera and a mic running up to me, asking me to do something for a dollar.

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