Short Fiction

The vampire spokesman tells it all.

William Edwin Cherico is a writer and filmmaker from Stamford, Connecticut. He loves to relax by reading the most stressful stories he can get his hands on. In his free time, he is an avid reader and tabletop gamer.

Michael Braswell taught ethics, human relations and peacemaking at East Tennessee State University. Before that he was a prison psychologist. He has published books on justice issues and the spiritual journey as well as four short story collections and two novels.

Jill Williams is a versatile writer whose work spans literary realism, satire, and Southern Gothic, often exploring themes of identity and spiritual transformation. She returned to writing after a decades-long hiatus.

Is it always possible to have hope?

Andrew Westermann lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter and two too many cats. His fiction explores the edges of consciousness and identity, imagining the strange futures we build when we forget what we used to be.

Time to adopt a cat to sleep on the pillow?

What will come, will come...

A way that brothers should be...

What a celebration...!

There is more joy in living things...

Mark Nuzzi lives in New Jersey, enjoying middle age and everything that comes with it. When not in his own universe, he spends time as an aquarium hobbyist, an amateur astronomer, writing stories and feeding the wildlife in the backyard.

Music, they say, gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, love to the heart, flight to the imagination, and joy to life: Basundhara baulani, the wandering mystic minstrel's songs do just this and transform the people who listen to them. They are no longer the people they once were. And the baulani is no longer a wayfarer but one of their own.

Fungo, a specialized, lightweight, baseball bat used by coaches for training players -- some need it more than most...

Christine Benton Criswell is a writer and physician in San Antonio, Texas. Her hobbies include tai chi, reading, and watching 'Project Runway.'

It was --is-- a story needed to be told...

Think before you donate...

Really, don't mess with this janitor...

MJ Skinner lives in northeast Ohio. He is married with a three-year-old daughter, and another daughter on the way. His history in the helping professions (law enforcement, counseling, and social work) has provided valuable insight into pain, pleasure, and complexities of the human condition. He currently writes speculative fiction, with a particular focus on horror, dystopian, and science fiction stories.

Deborah Blenkhorn is a poet, essayist, and storyteller living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work fuses memoir and imagination, and has been featured in over three dozen literary magazines and anthologies.

"Balancing from moment to moment..."

The sweetest scents are compassion and wisdom...

If you've got good ones, be very, very glad...

Austin Arnold is the author of works no one has ever heard of, nor much care to. He spends his time manifesting an outlandish imagination that is overdue for therapeutic intervention. With any luck, one day his imagination will capture even just one reader’s heart the way countless others have captured his.

The fulfillment of a dream, the fulfillment of a hope...

Grief is complex, and must be given time...

Marc Watson is an author, educator, and father of two residing in Michigan. He spent most of his years in Texas before making a dramatic, life-changing move to Hawaii. There, he taught at an elementary school while simultaneously finding a passion for writing on secluded beaches and in the thick of tropical forests. He became a father and moved once more to Michigan with his growing family, where he now writes under the canopy of maple trees. When his two young children allow him to, of course.

Can you know what goes on behind closed doors?

Adam Stone muses gently on the human condition from Annapolis, Maryland.

Alex Grass was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He now writes and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three kids.