Tag Archives: Friday Fiction

Arts & Culture

FRIDAY FICTION: The Reclamation

by Reagan Jackson

It wasn’t unusual to awaken to a misty morning. After the ash of fire season and the yellow acid skies you had seen enough unprecedented celestial events that had made you wonder if you would live through the day. The gray rolled in, viscous and deep, but somehow also unnotable, even comforting in the way it clung tight and close, blanketing the house in wool socks-weather. This was a thing that happened most winter mornings and when the dawn broke it would burn off and dissipate into a slightly less oppressive gray. Except this time it didn’t.

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Arts & Culture

Friday Fiction: Crocus

by NEVE

In her favorite dancing grounds, beneath the wisteria tree so purple in the moonlight, a hole opened up in the earth. Out of it, a hand reached. One she recognized as easily as her own, for she once had held this hand in hers every day. Studying its lines, its rises and falls, its peaks and valleys, its shadows and swirls, the way this hand sumptuously softened in the light, how its veins ached verdantly as its pulse quickened beneath her gaze. 

Now, her ex-lover was before her, yellow haired and milky skinned, skirts and boots textured with dirt, cheeks aglow with need, teeth bared, tongue discolored purple with wine. 

“Come home with me,” Orcus said, in her grit-lined, silky sinister way. 

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Arts & Culture

Friday Fiction: Yesterday’s Meat

by Chelsey Richardson

“I still dream about it you know? The way the air clung to my hair on those …”

Champ, paused to inhale, soaking his chest with the hot steam from the stove.

“Those, what?” Tereasa said, raising her brows.

“Do you want one of these burgers?”

Grease splattered on the stove top like a tiny little rainstorm.  Champ flipped his burger concentrating on the pink gummy pool of fat creeping through the flesh of the patty.

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Arts & Culture

Friday Fiction: The New Life

by Troy Landrum Jr.

Maroon walls surround me as the cold air presses against me. The temperature is set to 63 degrees Fahrenheit. Twin sisters greet me as I walk toward the receptionist desk. “Welcome,” they say simultaneously. Their smiles are as warm as their greeting. As I stand at the desk, one of the twins tells me the deposit I need to pay. If you’re as anxious about money as I am, you may understand the feelings I had when I heard the amount, equal to a monthly student loan payment. 

The other twin directs me toward a man engulfed in the preparation of the ancient ritual he is to perform. He tells me to take off my jacket. He takes a look at my arm admiring the work that was previously done on my skin.

“This is very detailed,” he says as he touches my forearm. He rubs it and lifts it up to the light, like a banker might inspect a hundred-dollar bill, checking its authenticity. 

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Arts & Culture

Friday Fiction: Adela Reflected

by Donna Miscolta

Adela adjusted the brightness on her TV screen, dimming the picture until the whites turned to gray and the blues ran to black. Then she turned her head sideways, as if to provide the couple some privacy — a needless but civil concession. Still, Adela looked, stealing glances at their faces, their flared nostrils and wild eyebrows, their mouths pulled back like stretched rubber bands releasing again and again a noisy rush of complaints. Infidelity. Hopelessness. Abandonment. Psoriasis, hair loss, bunions. Adela shook her head, clucked softly in commiseration. Soon though, the shouts and insults, which grew in decibel but not variety, began to bore even Adela, who monitored the TV talk shows out of a sense of obligation, believing that the beam from her antenna that registered her channel choice with the Nielsen ratings somehow offered support to the aggrieved, the distraught, the fearful, the angry, the clandestinely lonely who aired their troubles to smooth-toned, large-gesturing talk show hosts and their audiences of ordinary people. 

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Arts & Culture

FRIDAY Fiction: The Perfect Girl

by Lola E. Peters

The drunk walked away unscathed. My father died instantly. My mother, true to form, clung to life. For seven days I sat by her hospital bed vacillating between “you’ve had a good life, mom, it’s OK to go” and “no, not yet, we’re not done.” On the last day, with the doctor standing over her, she suddenly opened her eyes, looked straight at me and said, “I’m so sorry Diana. My perfect girl. We’re so sorry. If only we’d known.” Then she closed her eyes, exhaled, and died. Now it was sure: there would never be a conversation between us that ended in certainty.

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Arts & Culture

FRIDAY FICTION: Pickney

by Sebrina Somers

I had tapped into the network and cloned my ID tracker to run the Great Wall Marathon. The point wasn’t to just get the fastest time, any hacker could do that. My goal was to run a race convincing enough to win the cash prize and add the gold medal to the trophy collection in my bedroom. That meant fooling the judges into believing I was actually there. No easy feat when I was sitting on my front porch on the other side of the planet.

I heard a tap on the screen door a few feet away and ignored it. The race was about to begin, and I still needed to tie up a few loose ends. I had uploaded my travel itinerary a week ago and coded my avatar to wander the streets of Beijing for the last two days. Now, I just needed to situate my tracker in the middle of the race pack at the Yin and Yang Square start line, sync it to the timing chips assigned to my race bibs, and run my biometric avoidance program so that I didn’t occupy the same geo-space as any of the physical runners, or other illicit virtual runners for that matter.

There was another tap on the door, a little louder this time. They could wait. The first wave of runners had just set off and I needed to be ready to start with the second wave.

“I…can…see…you…” A quiet voice stammered through the screen door.

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Arts & Culture

FRIDAY FICTION: From the Final Field Notes of a Future Cultural Worker

by Julie-C

The plan is working. Or maybe it’s backfiring. In either case, I have solidified a seat on the newest Citizen Participation Requisite Group (CPRG) of post-Secession Seattle.

This particular CPRG is being convened by a joint effort through the Post-Secession Office of Aesthetic Curation (PSOAC), aided by the Cultural Commodities Bureau (CCB) that operates under the Office of Economic Dominance (OED). Civic bureaucracy, am I right? Shit, I’m practically a walking glossary of municipal acronyms these days, so the systemic matrices aren’t new to me. This recent shift of my own positioning inside it, though, is interesting.

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