Stories
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Crow, Crow, Crow, You Quote
The children in the valley grew up learning the song before they learned much else, taught by parents who’d learned it from their own parents, a simple call-and-response meant to be sung to the crows that gathered every morning on the fence line at the edge of the orchards. Crow, crow, crow, you quote,Tell us…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Dock-a-Bay Baby
The fishermen who worked the early hours told the story so often that it had stopped sounding like a story and started sounding like weather, something you mentioned in passing without expecting anyone to doubt it. Somewhere between three and four in the morning, the hour when the water goes flattest and quietest and even…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Blinkle, Blinkle, Brown Dwarf Star
The station had been broadcasting the same lullaby to the colony ships for three generations, a soft, warbling recording meant to soothe children through the long dark stretches between waypoints, and somewhere along the way the words had drifted from the original, worn smooth by distance and repetition until they became something the crew’s own.…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: The Wheels on the Hearse
The playgroup met on Tuesday mornings in the basement of the funeral home, a dozen small children sitting cross-legged on a rug patterned with clouds while their parents finished paperwork upstairs or caught a rare hour of sleep in the break room. It had started as a joke, a way to keep the kids occupied…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Old Zack Conal Did Some Harm
Everyone in town had a story about him, and none of the stories agreed on the details, which was maybe the truest thing about him, that he’d become less a person over the years and more a shape people poured their fears into. Some said he’d once burned down a barn out of spite. Some…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: When She Came Round the Mountain
The trail had been closed for repairs, technically, but the tape across the trailhead was old and sun-bleached and half torn down already, and she figured a warning that faded was a warning that didn’t count anymore. She’d hiked this range a dozen times. She knew the switchbacks, the place where the water ran clear…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Jimmy Crack Corn and the Corn Cracked Back
The field had been in the family for three generations, and every year the same song got sung at harvest, half-joking, half-ritual, the kind of thing nobody really believed but everybody did anyway because your grandfather did it and his grandfather before him. This year the harvest was late, the corn heavy and strange on…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Zero Sugar Katey Krueger
The vending machine showed up in the break room over a long weekend, wedged between the water cooler and the recycling bin like it had always been there. Nobody remembered ordering it, and the maintenance guy swore he’d never seen the model before, some off-brand unit painted the color of dried blood with a hand-lettered…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Whimsy Chills
The antique shop sold music boxes, porcelain birds, glass mushrooms, and tiny mechanical animals that moved when nobody touched them. Most customers found the place charming. Children begged to stay. Adults bought things they did not need and later described the purchases as irresistible. The owner called the sensation “whimsy chills.” It began as a…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: She Came Clutch
Nobody expected the woman from apartment 1F to save the building because nobody expected much from her at all. She missed tenant meetings, borrowed tools she forgot to return, and once set off the smoke alarm making toast. When the elevator trapped six people between floors during a blackout, she was downstairs arguing with the…