short fiction

Cast of Wonders 12/3/24 Strange Horizons 11/18/24, 12/9/24 Hexagon Winter ’24

Alexander Hewitt defies genre horror expecta­tions in “Emily” from the December Cast of Wonders. In it, a queer couple who are trying to adopt buy an old doll in anticipation of their new family member, only for the doll to begin to exhibit some… alarming behaviors. The narrator at first attributes these spooky goings-on to her partner ...Read More

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/14/24, 11/28/24 Small Wonders 11/24 Lightspeed 11/24

Beneath Ceaseless Skies opened November with an issue focused on revolution, including “Another Tide” by Will Greatwich, which finds the narrator leaving their home in a long-conquered area of a vast empire to visit and study its fringes, where resistance still lives embodied in a man named Goruna. The two meet, and the narrator joins Go­runa’s cause ...Read More

Flash Fiction Online 10/24 Cast of Wonders 10/20/24, 11/11/24 Strange Horizons 10/21/24, 11/4/24

Flash Fiction Online released an extra-large issue in honor of the spookiest month, which is capped off by Christine Lucas’s haunting “Final Harvest”, in which the daughter of a rather abusive and manipulative mother returns to perform said mother’s final rites – the harvest of nekrophyta that grows on the body of the dead. ...Read More

Escape Pod 10/31/24 Worlds of Possibility 10/24 Samovar 10/28/24

Escape Pod celebrated Halloween with Ad­dison Smith’s “Mother Death Learns a Trick”, which finds the narrator passing by an old AI robot named Mother Death, who normally predicts the demise of anyone she sees. She becomes part of the background, at least until she starts predicting her own death, which knocks the narrator out of their cycle of ...Read More

Lightspeed 10/24 Baffling 10/24 GigaNotoSaurus 10/24 Small Wonders 10/24

Philip Gelatt and JT Petty anchor the October Lightspeed with “Sully the God”, which imagines Sully as the Elon Musk of magic, the man who stole the discovery from a dead colleague and turned it into the most successful business the world has ever known. He’s become so rich that money has sort of lost meaning, and yet for ...Read More

Fiyah 10/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 10/3/24 Diabolical Plots 10/24

The October Fiyah is themed around spacefaring aunties, and it opens with a bang with Tatiana Obey’s “Fuck Them Kids”, which finds Jaz visit­ing her mom and sister (and her sister’s kids) for the spacer holiday celebrating the settlement of Europa. It’s something Jaz’s mom participated in personally as a botanist on the first settlement ship, and under ...Read More

Flash Fiction Online 9/24 Cast of Wonders 9/29/24 Escape Pod 9/19/24

September’s Flash Fiction Online starts strong with Stefan Alcalá Slater’s “Tornado Break­ers Don’t Cry”, which finds siblings Ethel and Edgar living in the shadow of their father, a famous tornado breaker, long after he’s gone from their lives. Ethel has taken up the mantel, but when she fails to break a tornado that comes through their ...Read More

GigaNotoSaurus 9/24 Diabolical Plots 9/24 Hexagon Fall ’24

September’s GigaNotoSaurus is Monte Lin’s “Here in the Glittering Black, There is Hope”, which introduces Kavita, the captain of a ship contracted out to the ultrarich to go out and bring back previous materials from the reaches of space, staying young thanks to cryo-sleep while generations pass on Earth. She’s part of a tradition, a movement to the stars ...Read More

Lightspeed 9/24 Small Wonders 9/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 9/5/24, 9/19/24

Gabriela Santiago returns to Lightspeed in September with the metatextual “Reconstruct­ing ‘The Goldenrod Conspiracy,’ Edina Room, Saturday 2:30-3:30”, which is framed as a pre­sentation at a fan convention dedicated to the Doctor Who–esque television show Backwards Man. The presentation is on a lost episode that has been remade by fans based on what people could remember ...Read More

Cast of Wonders 8/24/24 Strange Horizons 8/19/24, 8/26/24 Fusion Fragment 8/24

Cast of Wonders also closed out August strongly with J.M. Bueno’s haunted house story, “Double Yellow Lines”. Unlike many that use the ele­ment, this story’s haunted house isn’t nearly as malevolent as it could be. Instead, it seems to be a way for people metaphorically haunted by the past and their own grief to try and ...Read More

Zooscape 8/24 Flash Fiction Online 8/24 Escape Pod 8/22/24

The latest from Zooscape features a fresh twist on the Little Red Riding Hood story in Erin Brown’s intense “The Cloak”. Flipping the script in terms of heroes and vil­lains, the wolf narrates the action as he is stalked by a young hunter who has successfully turned the rest of his family into the warm clothes she wears ...Read More