“Half Inside the Spirit Box” by Stephanie Feldman – 4.0
Asimov's, May/June 2026 The story opens on a pier in Atlantic City, where Winston Montecarlo — the famous “Handcuff King” — performs a shackled ocean plunge before a rapt crowd.…
“Tatterdemalion” by Michael Cisco – 3.5
Reactor, March 2026 Presented as a traditional folktale from the fictional Alak Empire, “Tatterdemalion” is framed by an introductory scholarly apparatus explaining its cultural context before the story proper begins.…
“Rope” by Michael Kelly – 3.0
Bourbon Penn #38, April 2026 On a gray, electric December beach, the narrator — a quietly isolated, self-described loner who visits the shore to manage dark moods — encounters a…
“Queen of Hell” by Jan Stinchcomb – 3.5
Bourbon Penn #38, April 2026 The story is narrated by an unnamed woman living in Los Angeles who observes, with skeptical detachment, the unraveling of her childhood friend Jenn Ryan.…
“The Bookpusher” by Cody Goodfellow – 3.4
Bourbon Penn #38, April 2026 Gary Wittkow, a teenager with a petty criminal record, wakes up in a sheriff’s holding cell babbling in what turns out to be Old English,…
“Rocky Mountain Gothic” by Ev Datsyk – 2.8
Augur Literary Society, #8.3 November 2025 In an unnamed mountain town bordered by dense forest, a class of second graders is supernaturally summoned into the woods during recess. The forest…
“Piglet Delivers” by Maria Haskins – 3.4
Apex, February 2026 In a dystopian reimagining of the Hundred Acre Wood, Piglet is a long-haul trucker employed by Kanga Corp, the corporate empire that Kanga has built in the…
“The Sea Child” by Justin Wesley Ferguson – 3.7
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2026 On the second anniversary of a storm that claimed her son Gunter, his wife Liesel, and their two young boys Rolf and Willi, elderly Gerda…
“Mother’s Hearth” by W.A. Hamilton – 3.7
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2026 In the aftermath of a world-altering catastrophe called the Sundering—a cataclysm that swallowed cities into the sea and scattered families across the northlands—Sigrun, a young…
“This Obituary Has Been Redacted” by P.C. Verrone – 2.8
Strange Horizons, March 2026 Told entirely through the pages of a fictional gay magazine called Ganymede’s Men, P.C. Verrone’s story unfolds across a series of obituaries, letters to the editor,…