Fiction Archive

ECHOD

July 11, 2008

by Hugh Fox

Feeling Friday after noon begin to run down into holiness, aiming the laser beam on her cornea, goofy disease, presumably the reaction of the body to a fungus generated by leaves, earth, dog-stuff...so that the eye began to devour itself. She was lucky, if the lesion had ruptured and bled into the eye, at least at the present state of the art, she would have gone blind.

The King and His Leg

(A Parable)

by Zohar Atkins

April 23, 2008

THERE was a king who lived in a splendid castle far from the rest of the kingdom.  One day, the king’s toe became infected.  For a long time, the king did not notice the infection.  The king, as it happens, was a giant, and it took years for his toe’s sense receptor to send signals to his brain.  By the time the king looked down at his toe, the infection had moved all the way up his leg.

An Excerpt from the Novel Who by Fire, Who by Blood

April 21, 2008

by Jon Papernick

      The sun was setting as Stone and Gabby arrived at the Fulton Landing, just in time to see a tense wedding party dressed stiffly in full regalia, mock smile, and pose at the photographers insistent commands, shrilly barked with all the decorum of a middle-school gym teacher. The party looked miserable. Gabby quipped, “And they wonder why I’m not married.”

Chopped Liver

(Part 1 of 2)

by Alexander Edelman

I boarded the L two blocks from my apartment. It was a cold, January afternoon. Bitterly cold. The kind where when the wind gusts up it feels like the cold is coming from inside your bones. It doesn't blow, it cuts.

The Clearing

by Nina Schneider

Before the Aktion reached across Mittel Europa into the small village of Soleczniki, off the beaten track of civilization. Before it encircled 900 souls that hot and sleepy June afternoon in 1941, just before dinner, while Irina, the farm girl in pigtails tied with straw, picked blueberries growing along the edge of the clearing.