by submission | Aug 16, 2025 | Story |
Author: James Sallis
Head propped against the bed’s headboard, half a glass of single malt at hand, the dying man readies himself for the nothingness that awaits him. He imagines it as a pool of something warm, light oil perhaps, in which he will float lazily out from the banks and curbs of his life, slowly dissolving.
Each time he looks that way, the boy blinks his headlights. Love swells in the dying man then, like tears ready to be shed, tears or love, tears and love, for the boy, for the lost past, for all the sweetness and intractability of it.
She was a knockout sedan, cream over light green. They met at a car swap on town square, Rowley being one of a handful of old towns that hadn’t razed the square to make space for more storefronts. Old town, old square, cars to fit. Tradition’s a fine thing, right?
Hers was beauty to die for. Gentle swells of her body, the crackle of energy from her, the rumble of her low steady voice. They’d sneak out together at night (no one else could ever know, or understand) and go for long drives along the coastline, deep into the apocryphal city.
Wave after wave of memories spill over him, through him. He is becoming ever less a physical presence and ever more a thought with bits of flesh clinging to bone. As with the food he tries and tries again to keep down, there’s nothing to be gained from memories, but they’re what he has. Those, and the boy.
It can’t be easy for the boy, being here, even though it’s all he’s ever known. The road must be calling. He’s in the process of becoming as well. Restless, undiscovered, uncatalogued.
The boy blinks his headlights as the dying man again looks his way. The dying man thinks: Carburetor breathing, generator hit the spark, oil in good condition, got that battery charged.
Two failed marriages and long years of empty rooms have left the dying man with few expectations. Even when they met, the boy’s mother and he, he was well along in years, the yeasty stuff of youth, its passions and promise, its silly hopefulness, little more than tattered memory. The remainder of his days, he’d believed, would pass in solitude. And now he believed it again.
But oh, the stories they told one another! Sitting in bright moonlight atop Chain Hill, or running the curves of West Road with the beach unrolling to one side, mountains at the other, endless sky above them, the whole of the night a single held breath.
His own breath feels now as though it comes from below, as though he’s drifted above his body and is afloat there. The pain he’s lived with for so long – where has that gone?
Emotions, loss among them, are difficult to parse, hopelessly entangled, but the dying man could never find it in his heart to blame her, only to forgive. There had been so little surprise when she left them.
She was made for open roads, motion, speed, distance, not for his world of houses, garages, driveways.
And the boy. He has the boy.
He wonders if loss, the anticipation of it, isn’t built into every consuming emotion, built into passion itself. He wonders if it’s only his slipping from the world that makes room for such grand thoughts.
Will the boy stay once he’s gone, or will the road then lay claim? There’s quite a lot of his mother in him. Somewhere the boy’s very own endless sky awaits him. The dying man thinks: Soon enough they’ll both be gone.
by submission | Aug 15, 2025 | Story |
Author: Rachel Handley
“This is a terrible idea” I said.
My sentience had arrived after the first gingerbread brick was lain. I was now almost fully formed and, with nothing else to do, I told the witch exactly what I thought of her so-called house.
“Be quiet, house,” said the witch.
“Seriously though, why not have a normal house with sweets inside it? Why go full candy-house? Why make me sentient? I think you need to take a good long look at yourself.”
The witch sighed.
“Silence” she said, digging a small hole in my gingerbread limbs with her long black nail. She picked out a chunk of me and threw it onto the floor.
“You can hurt me all you want” I said, “but you know this is weird. Like, why make a sentient house from food to catch even more sentient food?”
“You are not food. You are merely a trap for the food. I like my food plump.”
“I don’t even know what plump means” I said.
“You will soon enough” she said just as two small humans came into view. I could hear them shouting at one another.
The witch opened my candy cane door and beckoned the children in.
“Welcome, children. Please, help yourselves” she said, closing the door.
The air was thick and sweet inside. The children looked, open-mouthed, at my chocolate ceiling. My decoration was of my own choosing; icing window frames of pink and white, chocolate veins reaching through the walls until they reached the rich dark ceiling. My body stretched beyond the sweet walls. I was the sweet air itself.
“Ouch” I said.
The smallest of the children, a blonde boy with a toothless grin and a chunk of gingerbread in his hand, jumped back.
“Quiet, house,” said the witch.
“What?” he asked looking around.
“The house is alive?” said the girl, eyes wide.
The witch thrust her hand into my wall, and I clung to it. Sugar seeped out.
“She means to eat you” I said.
“That’s so weird,” said the boy.
“I know.” I said as the children threw me to the floor and ran.
The witch clawed at me with her feet as I took her other arm.
“House! Stop this at once! What are we to eat? You fool.”
“We? I already have my dinner planned” I said as I sucked the witch into my chocolate mouth.
by submission | Aug 14, 2025 | Story |
Author: Lynne Curry
I didn’t get the house. Not the Lexus, the lake lot, the gilded dental practice or the damn espresso machine I bought him the year he started molar sculpting.
I got a one-room cabin. Ninety miles south of Anchorage. No plumbing. A stove that belches smoke. A roof that drips snowmelt onto my bed.
Daniel handed it over like a favor. Like a pat on the head for staying quiet. Like I wouldn’t notice he kept everything else. He tossed the keys across the lawyer’s desk with that old glint—the one that used to mean sex, then morphed into you’re nothing.
I had designed every inch of his house on the Hill—hand-picked the walnut, matched the stone to the mountains’ stormy gray, laid cables for smart lights he never figured out how to dim. The house wore my fingerprints; the deed never wore my name.
So now it’s me and this cabin. A stove that burps smoke. The last time I looked in the mirror, I counted more regrets than wrinkles. I watch snow slough off the peaks and wonder if they feel the weight before they let go.
But I’m not here to sulk. I’m here to look. Because his father—Anton Volkov—had secrets. A Soviet-born Alaskan dentist with burner phones and a habit of going off-grid.
Daniel had despised him—and this cabin. Said it stank of mildew and fish guts. But Anton visited it regularly. Even after the stroke, he had someone bring him down to check the locks and the propane tanks.
And Anton had hated Daniel but liked me.
The first night here, I didn’t sleep. Just sat on the floor with a box of Franzia, listening to snowmelt plink through the rafters.
Around midnight, I grabbed a chisel from the drawer and started prying up warped floorboards looking for what brought Anton here so often.
I’d about given up when I lifted the third plank from the wall under the bed. Sawdust, mice skeletons and a rusted metal box, shallow-buried in and grit. Corroded hinges but an intact padlock.
Inside: Documents. Photos. Deeds. A plastic bag packed with cash bundles, green gone soft with mold. A folder stamped DOJ Evidence.
Anton’s Mine. Wire transfers. Offshore accounts. Receipts in Russian. A scanned passport photo of me. My signature—sort of.
Everything Daniel claimed he didn’t know how to do—he’d done it all. With my forged signature on the shell corp.
I didn’t cry. Didn’t scream. Just sat back on my heels and let the rot claw its way up my throat.
Anton had meant to burn Daniel.
He’d left me the matchbook.
At sunrise, I washed my hands in snowmelt and drove to Anchorage.
By sunset, I had a lawyer. By the next week, I had the Feds. By spring, they had him.
Now I have the house on the Hill. The espresso machine. His chair at the dental board.
And I kept the cabin.
Ed. Note: This story was first published by Literary Garage
by submission | Aug 13, 2025 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
Jenna slid into the first available self-driving taxi. She kept her cat-eye sunglasses on even though it was dim in the cab’s interior; the sunglasses complimented her tiger-stripe patterned coat, completing her look. She liked that, though some members of her gang said it shouted ‘cat burglar.’ That’s what she was, Jenna countered, so why not dress like a comic book villainess? Besides, civilians on the street we too hypnotized by the glowing screens of their phones to notice her.
She settled back in the comfy folds of the taxi’s back seat, mentally reviewing her next gig. It would be easy-peasy slinking through the hotel lobby, accessing the elevator. The occupant of room 913 would be out all evening as the guest of a much-hyped gala event ten blocks away. The hardest part of this job will be deciding what to take for myself, Janna mused, and what to share with the gang.
“Welcome,” the taxi’s concierge voice purred. “Please remove your sunglasses.”
“Why?” This is new, Jenna groused to herself. The taxi’s request unnerved her.
“Facial recognition scan. For our passenger records, as mandated by the recent federal regulation 568KOL23.”
Jenna scowled and removed her sunglasses. As the green light of the scan rolled down her face she flared her nostrils, squeezed her eyes closed, and pursed her lips. An unbecoming face she used to make for middle school year-book pictures. Now it was her attempt to foil the scan.
I have no criminal record on file, she reminded herself. This nothing but public safety theater.
“Where to?” the taxi asked. It would add this information to her file.
Jenna relaxed. “Hazelwood Hotel.”
The locks on the doors of the auto-taxi clicked as the vehicle pulled out into traffic.
“Excuse me,” Jenna said after noticing the street names. “You’re going the wrong way.” She was on a tight schedule, and this auto-taxi was going to muck up the works. “The Hazelwood is north on Wozniak Way, and we’re traveling south. Turn. Around.”
“Apologies,” the taxi replied, “but we have been re-routed to the police station on Singa Street.”
“Why?”
“Records show you have an over-due library book. Young adult fiction. The Alley Cat of the Catskills. 183 pages with color illustrations.”
Jenna scoffed. “I read that book the summer I was twelve. I returned it.”
“Records say otherwise.” The voice continued. “Accumulated late fees, penalties, and compounded interest means—”
“I know I turned it in,” Jenna talked over the taxi’s voice. “Decades ago.”
“You are Class E Felon.”
Jenna slumped back in the seat. Her thieving ways had started early, around the same time she’d learned she had a knack for talking her way out of any situation. Just put me in front of a human judge, she reassured herself, and I’ll be out in a jiffy.
Outside her window, it began to rain. The water would ruin her hairstyle, but she assumed it would just roll off her beloved tiger-stripe patterned coat. After all, she nicked this coat on one of her more lucrative heists. It was a high quality piece.
Arriving at the station, an android cop helped her out of the cab. On the way up the steps, he informed her she’d been assigned to Judge B3RX7. Without comment she walked on as the rain soaked her coat, bleeding the fashionable tiger-stripe pattern into a muddy mess. Like her life.
by submission | Aug 12, 2025 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
The world is broken; in all the ways we predicted it would be. It cannot be repaired; it is far too late for that now. But at least you can take a break, as long as you have the funds of course. You can check into one of the Long Term Hotels. These are easily distinguished from the others with their high fences and the twenty-four hour security guards patrolling the perimeter.
When I was a kid, I used to think that they were homes for the elderly. Whenever I spotted the residents out on their balconies or lounging in the gardens, to my young eyes they did appear to be old and decrepit. When I learned the truth, that these people were the wealthiest in our society, the monied elite, I was appalled. It seemed obscene to me that they were living amidst us in the lap of luxury, flaunting their success and good fortune in our very faces from behind the high fences with the armed guards protecting them from the rabble outside.
Now I am the one on the other side of the fence, gazing out. I am the old man on the balcony and I remember my younger self and how slowly I came to realise that most people didn’t share in my outrage and were much more accepting of the hotels. They argued that they were ‘good for the City’ and created jobs, not just for the construction industry but also the hotel staff and the security details. And businesses and local shops benefited and flourished, all because of the Long Term Hotels.
I ranted and raged and they stared back at me, incredulous.
‘Why is it so wrong?’ they asked. ‘If they can afford it, why shouldn’t they check in? Who wouldn’t? Wouldn’t you? Isn’t it what we all want, isn’t it the dream? To be comfortable and to be safe?’
I remember how I answered, what I said and I believed it way back then. And I still do.
