“Are you a participant in a battle of wills with a roommate over who will be the first to give in and do the dishes?”

The Smart Search List of the Day is: Paying Novelettes feat. @analogsf.bsky.social @clarkesworldmagazine.com @charliefish.bsky.social @lemonwoodquarterly.bsky.social @doricliterary.bsky.social et al. https://duotrope.com/search/smart/fiction/paying-novelettes-1lc0O9FS

He moved when no one expected it, from complete stillness to violence. He swiped over the table of glass figures. The actress stepped back, tripped, and ended up on the floor. Eddie stared down at …

Someday someone will ask me if my grandparents were illegals, and I won’t honestly know because his family migrated at a time when borders didn’t mean what they mean now.

Government pension files were always thinner than the years they were meant to represent, Nsikan thought, as though the paper itself understood that most of a working life left no trace anyone both…

Join moderator Barbara Westwood Diehl, Senior Editor at the Baltimore Review, for an engaging conversation with six Baltimore Review contributors. Hear them read from their work…

Jane’s words felt shy, and yet she wanted to introduce herself to the new neighbor. He appeared unassuming with dark glasses and a pink bald head. She wondered, for a second, if he was an app…

Looking out the big picture window, she squints at the summer stars that glow like pearls on black velvet. Deneb, Vega, Altair stare back like wise old souls that will never die.

Jane’s words felt shy, and yet she wanted to introduce herself to the new neighbor. He appeared unassuming with dark glasses and a pink bald head. She wondered, for a second, if he was an app…

Jane’s words felt shy, and yet she wanted to introduce herself to the new neighbor. He appeared unassuming with dark glasses and a pink bald head. She wondered, for a second, if he was an app…

by Daniela Flores-Rodriguez Flash Fiction   The first day was by accident. The young woman strolled the museum galleries, avoiding the spreadsheets back at her desk. Looking, but not seeing. Not bored, but unattached. Most people found it easy to connect to other human beings. This woman didn’t really have it in her. Things were… Continue reading Tangled Up in Blue →

Finally, another manned mission to Mars. How he’d glowed with excitement.

I told him silently that the voice always comes back. It tells me I will keep losing, that love is a trick life plays before people disappear.

Fiction by Dave Gregory. Our yellow school bus inched back and forth, trapped between the arched stone gateway of the cemetery...

I’d never heard the phrase before—nostalgia tour—but I knew what he meant. I’d been on a few myself.

It’s silly but I think it’s important we make up lore for our own lives. Our own mythologies, folk tales, origin stories, what have you. If you don’t romanticize your own life, who the hell will?…

Grief Algebra We sit in silence around a table of four. We’re only three, because someone is missing. His chair is empty and will remain silent until someone visits and sits there, unaware of the v…

I’d never heard the phrase before—nostalgia tour—but I knew what he meant. I’d been on a few myself.