Roots on Ya
Everyone else just stood there in their Sunday best looking on with their mouths open, their eyes wide. Some of the ladies hollered. One fainted dead away. Even the menfolk gasped and let loose an Oh Lord here and there.
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Category: Short Fiction
Genre Short Fiction Published in Apex Magazine
The Ace of Knives
They say that the manifestation of one’s magic is determined by the crucial events and influences—internal and external—surrounding one’s special time which happened during puberty. Signs and markers can help point out specifically when one’s special time will manifest; but the Ace of Knives was alone.
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Gray Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts
The thing about souls is that they don’t wander off. Not unless a body is so broken-down that there are too many cracks to hold even breath inside. The girl isn’t that far gone. She’s still strong, still has grit, and still believes in a future.
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Mr. Death
I’ve ferried two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death, and I can already tell my two-hundred-and-twenty-second is going to be a real shitkicker. I know by the lightness of the manila folder in my hand, the preemptive pity in the courier’s face as she gives it to me. I read the typewritten card paper-clipped to the front with my stomach tensed, braced for the sucker punch.
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Love, That Hungry Thing
We fled to the stars before Earth let out its last breath and drifted between galaxies for four hundred years, listening to the heartbeats of our ships. Fiction would have you think that such an enterprise would turn the species feral, but the truth is kinder. Humanity lost its fear of itself, shed its hate like a mouthful of rust. When you have nothing but each other, you learn to love your neighbour. You do that or you die.
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Your Own Undoing
It hurts that you don’t recognize me, your own familiar that you made from a part of your own soul, but there are more important things for us to deal with right now. I push through the hurt and speak to you, saying, “This is not a story you are reading. This is actually happening, and it’s actually happening to you.”
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The Niddah
A woman seeks her mother in a world decimated by Mutational Hemorrhaging Fever.
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All I Want for Christmas
The winner of our 2020 Holiday Horrors Flash Fiction contest!
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Small Hopes and Dreams
There are two kinds of people; those who go over the wall, and those who stay behind. No one who goes over the wall is heard from again.
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The Legacy of Alexandria
The gun-toting boys waved through a truck laden with supplies. Kerchiefs covered the faces of those who bothered to protect themselves at all. In a testament to their rugged image of manhood, most went without masks.
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Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good
Rosetta knelt to look at the stump in the corner of her client’s bedroom. It had the likeness of a ten-year-old boy, four feet tall, dressed in an oversized shirt and suspenders, and its features were flawless, from the newsboy’s cap cocked on its tight curls, to its pupil-less eyes fringed with long eyelashes.
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