Short Stories

They tell me the future is broken. Will be broken. Has always been broken. I was wide awake the first time they spoke to me and have been every time since. They come from there, then, when the future is broken. Which is now because the break stretches in every direction. That’s what they tell […]

Nell is coming to terms with life after her beloved partner Tig’s death in a story from Atwood’s first collection since The Testaments jointly won the Booker prize in 2019, and since her own partner, Graeme Gibson, died in the same year

“I stay because my mother lives here. Can I say that about a dead woman?”

Art by Peter Szmer: – click to enlargeWhat he loved was the silence, the pristine clarity of the ice shelf: the purposeful breathing of the dogs straining against their traces, the hiss of th…

From 2007: “It was startling to see such a famous face look so vulnerable and empty.”

Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast. This page: The Children of Main Street by A.C. Wise

We picked this place to live in for one simple reason: it was dirt cheap.

the-great-escape-by-hilma-wolitzer

When I was twenty-seven, my Sleep stepped out of me like a passenger from a train carriage, looked around my room for several seconds, then sat down in the chair beside my bed. This was before they became so familiar, the shadow-forms of Sleep in halls and kitchens, before the…

Growing up in Dieu-le-Sauveur, my friends and I told stories about ghosts—the Starving Man, the Sleeping Girl, and the House at the End of the Street. The summer I was twelve, I saw my first ghost for real. That was the summer my little brother Gen disappeared. The first official day of summer, the ...

‘Human nature is not improved by concealment, especially when it comes to the past.’ A short story by Andrew O’Hagan.

A man loses his wife to Alzheimer’s disease. Does he also have to lose her to another man?

Sergio’s lovers give him many gifts. His two-bedroom luxury apartment is a recent milestone in his relationship with Cass; he’s only lived there for a year and it has yet to feel like home, but he doesn’t complain. He knows what it’s worth.

“Here comes Meg now.” Sally waved to the woman shaking her umbrella in front of the shop’s glass door. Meg passed the refrigerated case of variously colored gladioli and smiled her greeting to the manager. “Aren’t you disgusting!” Sally said, circling Meg with a swoop of her hand. “Here everybody el...

For 'Marie Claire's Makers issue, author and poet Leila Mottley pens an evocative piece of short fiction, 'Sea to Sea.'

Algerian-born, Nobel Prize winner ALBERT CAMUS is the author of THE STRANGER, THE PLAGUE, and THE FALL.

McKenna Marsden   The year we were thirteen years old, I got pertussis and my best friend Dani became obsessed with cigarettes. She liked French New Wave movies and Audrey Hepburn and The Velv…

We saw the first billboard while driving along Lake Road. We’d driven the road a hundred times before, because it was the only road out of town that went anywhere worth going, and there was fuck-all to do in town except get drunk, get stoned, and get in trouble. Lake Road let us go ice fishing in th...

This variation on the elixir of life pairs the flavour of roasted roc with the medicinal potency of the philosopher’s stone. But buyer beware: this dish isn’t for everyone.

Silvio, whom everyone called El Sapo, had been coming the longest, but only during the wet times when the fields ran muddy and no one else would brave the kind of cold that would lock your knuckles, no matter how thick the gloves.

About the Feature Author: Kelly LuceGenre: Featured, FictionPublished: Summer 2023 Photo by Graham Holtshausen on Unsplash   After Carl left me for a woman he met buying manure off Craigslist, I put in for an out-of-state letter carrier transfer with the postal service. I wanted a fresh start, a cha...

An engineer who frequently travels for her job, suddenly finds herself in airports other than the one she arrived in...

“Mama, we need to drive, my mother said. We need to drive now. We need to go.”

"My Sister is in Pain," a story by Bonnie Jo Campbell on KROnline.

Mix was about ready to ditch the weird old bastard already. Too slow, too clumsy, too loud. Not even a block into Hollow City and already they’d captured the attention of one of the wagoneers, and in her experience you could almost clap your hands in front of their faces and they wouldn’t know it. E...

It started when Leda lifted her head from her pillow and a dead fly tumbled onto her pillowcase.