Stories

The game’s not played to win but to see how long you can last. The Wit MacMahajan taught Morholt that, after his accident, while he was in Rexhame’s hospital and she was growing him a new arm from sculptwood. Only he didn’t realize the truth of her …

The sky was a thick nuclear gray over the parkade where Bo and Violet were scanning the streets for Bo’s othermother. Violet sat on the hood of a battered white Nissan, while Bo watched from the edge with his elbows hooked over the railing. via Pock…

In the cool of the morning, I walk between my rows of peppers, brushing my fingers against the glossy leaves of Anaheims, Brazilian Starfishes, and Carolina Reapers. I grow peppers the way my mother and grandmother before me did—I grow them for the …

He climbs the spiraling stairs. Bowtie dangling from his fist, he climbs and sits atop the castle wall, where the torch-dotted city folds to dark shapes. Below, vastness, empty, as he feels sitting here. His feet are heavy, pulling downward. He does…

A beautiful woman robed all in white, lips red as rubies, followed the young, pale-skinned priest as he walked though the forest. The priest knew she was a yakshi, a demon that tore men’s throats out and drank their blood to quench her thirst. She w…

Six months pregnant, and I should have been happy. Six words to fire me, and I should have been angry. Instead, I drifted in a fugue. Spring faded, summer swelled, and our lives were falling apart. So we went for ice cream. June heat, dirty pavement…

There is a silent war that is waging on every surface of the planet, in every droplet of water, and on the skin and within the bodies of everyone you know. It’s hypothesized by some that this war began near the dawn of life on Earth. via Pocket

Little fists, clenching: one of the cameras, set to motion-cap, zoomed on them automatically. Two others watched the adults, mother, father on opposite sides of the room. The machines watched the players: half a world away, Stavros watched the machi…

Earth began to rise over the lunar hills as the Mighty Slinger and the Rovers readied the Tycho stage for their performance. via Pocket

A Lei was a young worker at the 045 Meat Union factory on Continent Three in starship Rhea. When the dinosaur uprising overwhelmed the factory, he used a hunting rifle to drop two great beasts that got in his way. via Pocket

It was a century ago today that you found the spark of life in this freeze-dried valley of death. via Pocket

“You sent this good for nothing wimp to me?” Her pointed finger inched upwards in the air until it settled on my face. Meixiu pulled back her finger and formed her other hand into a cup, tracing her right finger along the inside of the palm of her l…

Halfway up the winding cliffside guideway, Zhang Lei turned his bike around. He was exhausted from three days of travel and nauseated, too, but that wasn’t the problem. He could always power through physical discomfort. via Pocket

Fill in the Blanks’ I’d had enough. And it was getting dark. And he was still talking. “They have no concern for our well-being. Why should we? After seeing that. You saw it, right? What are we supposed to do?” he said. via Pocket

It was the little things, really; lack of energy, clothes that didn’t fit anymore, excessive perspiration, the fact that I hadn’t seen my penis since 1973. via Pocket

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer Ninety-eight gazillion miles from anywhere I want to be and some teenage alley-captain and his squad manages to get the drop on me. That’ll teach me for daydreaming…

She didn’t walk every day. Only when she had time and they didn’t need her. Only when her weary body could force itself out the door to walk below the ridgeline. She told herself she walked for fitness. She knew she really walked for the fitness of …

The rabbits are government-issued. Shambolic bunnies. Bunnies with smeary eyes, with a faintly sulfurous smell about them. Bunnies splotched with white fur on brown. Bunnies full of gumption munch through buckets of grass and weeds. Don’t anthropomo…

The deer came back over and over to places it didn’t understand. The deer hated the lamp at the end of the pier. The deer wanted to die. via Pocket

Ammuya birthed five hundred gods, followed by a monster. That was her first mistake. The gods tormented the monster because they feared it. They bound it inside a black hole, and the monster’s hatred seethed. Eventually the monster raged so fiercely…

Welcome to Recommended Reading’s new Monday Commuter, our home for flash, graphic, and experimental narrative. This year we’ll save that drowning boy in the backyard pool. His arms are growing tired and his voice is hoarse from crying and chlorine. …

I sometimes visualize the tension within stories as a maze of elastic bands stretching from character to character. At any moment, someone might step backwards, pulling a band tighter, making everything more fraught. And at any moment, another might…

Art’s funeral is full of crying girls. Law thinks this should tip some of them off, but there it is. Crying girls everywhere. White flowers in their hair. Black dresses and the scent of clean underwear and Ivory soap. There’s a ghostly snake wrapped…

Edna Selwyn’s old house still hadn’t sold. It had been eight months since she died, and the house had been on the market for six. It’s true that the place was in bad shape, and Edna’s daughter had been too cheap (or too deep in mourning) to have it…

This could have been the opening to a spy thriller or a rollicking cyberpunk novel, full of chase scenes and neon lights. It certainly felt cyberpunk, being hustled back through the airport to a waiting taxi, surrounded by over-enthusiastic grifters…

An earlier version of this story, with a different title, was shortlisted in the Atlantis Short Story Contest (2013). So many solid bodies, too solid; so many murky lives. My aching lonely journey has lasted centuries. At last, I feel, the end appro…

Once upon a time, on a little island off the coast of the Korean city of Busan, there lived an old hunter in a house at the bottom of a mountain. via Pocket

This work first appeared in Bewildering Stories, Issue 636 (September 2015). Alexander Pines stamped into Louie’s Bar and Grill, shaking unseasonable snow from his Timberland boots, and exchanged a few quiet words with the bartender. via Pocket

This work first appeared in Voluted Tales, #15 (August-September 2014). The night descended on the river stealthily, transforming water into a dark mass of waves and misery. via Pocket