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brief + incorrect

@briefincorrect.bsky.social
111 followers 111 following 111 posts

A small online literary magazine for the strange, the hybrid, and the difficult to categorize. Prose that resists sense but maintains something else. Under 1,000 words.

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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 8h
Gerty the Great seems too kind a name for nausea. Miranda Jensen tries to write an uninvited companion into the margins.
briefincorrect.substack.com
A Writer’s Stomach
By Miranda Jensen // An Intrusion received at 9:17 am EDT
010
Reposted by brief + incorrect
Tadd Adcox @inauthenticity.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
And honored to learned that "A Movie," one of the first pieces published at @briefincorrect.bsky.social, has been nominated for a Best of the Net:
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The fox may have cracked the code. The squirrels dispute it. The owls would like a grant. Word is getting around, although no one has established which word. New work by mryoung
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Word Got Around
By mryoung
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Ndukwe goes to midnight service planning to steal the speakers. The pastor tries to push him down in prayer. Neither intends to give way. New fiction by Ekenedirichukwu
briefincorrect.substack.com
Speakers
By Ekenedirichukwu
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
brief + incorrect is booked through January and publishing M/W/F. Submissions are paused while I catch up; I plan to reopen in December or January. I’m also editing NO-WIN, with hopes of finishing it by late January. Thanks for making all of this possible.
briefincorrect.substack.com
An Editor’s Interruption: A Good Problem to Have
Booked through January, catching up with myself, and grateful for the company
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
“They pose in family photos, passed down through generations.” Something is wrong with the children. Susan R. Morritt gives us the troubling possibility that the family photograph knows more than the family does.
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Dirty Little Secrets
By Susan R. Morritt
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Existential accessories. Search party favors. A snow globe from Novo Nordisk. Son House’s Holy Bible. A horseshoe crab automaton. Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s medical diploma. Malvolio has come up for an express purpose.
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Das Kabinett; or, Pulverized by This Latest Thing
By Evan D. Williams // A Found Object relayed at 2:53 pm EST
010
brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
T-Rex can hold the taco. He cannot eat the taco. The algorithm sees potential.
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Taco Tuesday T-Rex
By Jennifer Weigel
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Amber sells flood insurance. Every year, the tide enters her home. This time, only six inches remain between the water and the ceiling when someone knocks on the door.
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The Tide That Takes
By M. J. Rose
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
A soldier threw a letter to his wife into the English Channel. He died two days later. Eighty-five years passed before a fisherman found the bottle and carried the letter to the same address, where the soldier’s daughter still lived.
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A Soldier Slipped Two Messages into a Ginger Beer Bottle
By Kate LaDew
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
A child searches the keychain rack for her name while ordinary girls hold proof that they have been seen. Years later, the sound of those metal names remains tangled with the jangle of a belt buckle.
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Keychains
By Ansley Haines // After Hours released at 11:00 pm EDT
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Hallucination or ghost, fictional creation or creator, Perdue leaves Zlotchew with a profoundly disturbing possibility: perhaps writers do not invent their characters. Perhaps the characters invent them. And then there is the brown leather-bound book dated 1835.
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Dead Man Talking
By Clark Zlotchew
020
brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
A rusty nail, a dead horse’s stolen bones, the Bell Witch, Waterloo, poisonous wallpaper, Oscar Wilde, syphilis, Baudelaire. One fact develops complications.
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Nailed
By Holly Woodward
120
brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Circles of language with no particular interest in letting you out.
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Pentagrams
By Richard Kostelanetz
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
A funeral director. A handsome widower. A dead wife who won’t keep quiet.
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Peaches
By Jennifer Lorne
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Brendan Clancy is reading about time. His audience is leaving in dribs and drabs. The narrator is disgusted by their impatience. Then Clancy announces a second reading. The audacity of the man.
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Readings
by Mark Keane
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
During lunch, an android criticizes a man’s eating habits. The man responds by reconsidering the proper role of AI in his life and writing.
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AI and Me
By Jeffrey Zable // A Found Object relayed at 10:47 am EDT
010
brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Dyuti and Indra disagree. Then the night, the bed, a reader, the words, a poet, the story, its title, time, the narrator, and the author all weigh in.
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Come, Let’s Read
By Suryendu Chaudhury
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
She wore the aqua dress because it circled her waist just right and made her red hair pop. All day at school, she leaned forward, smiling, hand raised, dying to be noticed. At home, she discovered that she had been.
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Bloodstain
By Marie Cloutier
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
John Lennon is dead. Dad is angry about Baxter at The Christian Book Emporium, Mum is flicking crumbs, and the cream of mushroom soup has been made with the “phoniness of milk instead of forthright water.”
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John Lennon is Dead, and Dad is Home For Lunch
By Karen Walker
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
E. G. Pearman turns class resentment into a banquet: the rich eat our attention, sweat, blood, and waking hours. Eventually, someone gets hungry enough to return the favor. Grotesque, funny, furious.
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Mmm Skin
By E. G. Pearman // After Hours released at 11:00 pm EDT
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
On the day jokes were no longer permitted in their town, Tiffany decided to cut her unwieldy toenails.
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Tiffany's Toenails
By Cheryl J. Fish
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
New York summer. Heartbreak. Sweat, memory, hatred, desire and the strange problem of finally escaping what was suffocating you. “What if I want to swelter?”
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Swelter
By Julia Rose Ziegler
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
She has one hour before returning to her usual self: happily married, fifty-two, a teacher, a mother of two.
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A Glass of Milk
By Isabelle Audiger
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
A paragraph that makes me appreciate the side hustle.
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
A motorcycle wobbles at sixty-six miles per hour on the Long Island Expressway. A crash is imminent, and then something impossible happens. Traffic slows. Time stretches. The Harley falls instead of crashes. The rider gets up unharmed. One person remembers it differently.
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The Loneliness of Miracles
By Philip Matcovsky // An Intrusion received at 10:53 am EST
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Twenty-seven flowers on the curtains. Six sides to the lampshade. A childhood fear born during the Cuban Missile Crisis becomes a lifelong ritual of trying to keep catastrophe at bay. Until, eventually, the counting stops.
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Fear of Three
By Paul Goodwin
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
His wife is having a heart attack. His phone would like him to know that his cloud storage is 99% full. A story about distraction, attention, and the increasingly difficult business of staying in the room. @zaryfekete.bsky.social
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Alert
By Zary Fekete
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Bartholomew Lamb investigates who is a the greater storyteller: James Joyce, whose 24-hour Ulysses takes roughly 14 hours to absorb, or David, who once took two hours to describe a car that burned for less than three minutes?
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Burning
By Bartholomew Lamb
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
brief + incorrect was almost acquired this morning. The word “almost” is doing some work here.
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An Editor's Interruption: A Statement Regarding Recent Negotiations
The parties remain far apart
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Hilda arrives at an empty cemetery on a rainy Monday morning carrying a small box. Her father has been dead seventeen years. Her mother has just died. There’s one last bit of family business to settle.
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Over His Dead Body
By Kenneth M. Kapp
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
The Titanic is sinking. Julian Grey is a comic, acrobat, thief, and celebrated foot-juggler who has no intention of going down with it. All he needs is a dress, a warm coat, ladies’ boots, and one final performance.
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1912
By DC Diamondopolous
010
brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
A beautifully restrained piece about memory, migration, family, and the alternate lives we continue carrying long after we’ve left a place behind.
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Wherever You Go, There You Are
By Beth Sherman // An Intrusion received at 10:23 am EST
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Love, grief, devotion, obsession—the distance between them is often measured in language. @dempseystrangeways.bsky.social
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I Love Your Bones
By Dempsey Strangeways
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
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Architect of Hours
By Daniel Christensen
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
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The Natural Man
By T. A. Young
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
You think your old friend died of colon cancer. Then you run into him at the mall, eating lunch. “A Fucked Up Encounter with a Guy I Thought Was Dead” by Salvatore Difalco is up After Hours.
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A Fucked Up Encounter With a Guy I Thought Was Dead
By Salvatore Difalco // After Hours released at 11:00 pm EST
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
A loose screen door. A motel room. A cabin in the rain. Dale Scherfling’s “The Necessary Thing” lets silence do the work.
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The Necessary Thing
By Dale Scherfling
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Some deliveries are better left unopened.
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Today's Delivery
by William Doreski
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
An unexpected package. A birthday song for the wrong person. A machine that walks into the marsh. William Doreski’s “Today’s Delivery” is today’s piece at brief + incorrect.
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Today's Delivery
by William Doreski
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Sometimes the funniest stories are the ones that never wink at the reader.
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Samuria Social Club
By Paul Lewellan
010
brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Everyone in this story thinks they’re having the same conversation. They are not. Paul Lewallen’s “Samurai Social Club” is a perfectly paced comedy built on implication, timing, and one remarkable phone call.
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Samuria Social Club
By Paul Lewellan
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
A man looks to the sky hoping for Superman. A crow has different plans. David Sydney (who writes fiction in and out of the EHR) brings us “Sunday Morning Sky.”
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Sunday Morning Sky
By David Sydney // A Found Object relayed at 1:33 pm EST
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Sometimes a fear isn’t something to overcome.
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Quoth the Raven
By Deb Blenkhorn
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
A childhood fear of birds becomes a meditation on memory, running, love, and the wisdom passed down by a grandmother. “Embrace your fears, you coward.”
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Quoth the Raven
By Deb Blenkhorn
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
The ordinary routines of care continue while something terrible and unnamed, gathers just beyond the kitchen door. “Night Terrors” by Jack Lennon
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Night Terrors
By Jack Lennon
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Jack Lennon’s “Night Terrors” may look unfamiliar at first—it’s written in Scots—but after the first paragraph, the dialect disappears, leaving only a grandmother, a kitchen, bacon rolls, and the quiet terror of realizing someone you love may already be slipping away.
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Night Terrors
By Jack Lennon
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
A man—or perhaps a woman—robs a bank using a fish. No one agrees whether the fish was a weapon or a hostage. Read “Deception” by Ken Poyner, now at brief + incorrect. @kenpoyner.bsky.social
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Deception
By Ken Poyner // A Found Object relayed at 2:09 pm EST
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Canvassing the neighborhood
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brief + incorrect @briefincorrect.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
I think I’ve finally figured out what I’m looking for as an editor.
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An Editor's Interruption: An Empty City
On reading to recognize yourself
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