Monday is for vacuum cleaners, tubes clogged with hair and paperclips. Tuesdays (two-days) people remember that they only had one copy of the will.

My first, great crime took place in my grandmother’s living room; all swirling patterns and light thrown through lace curtains like the scatter of a disco ball, it gave the place a certain drama which...

ALT: Fiction

ALT: Colorful Neon Number 2

Every Sunday my father carried my mother's head to the front porch and set it on the table to enjoy the sunshine.

Every Sunday my father carried my mother's head to the front porch and set it on the table to enjoy the sunshine.

Once there was a boy who fell off a mountain. An accident, or not-accident; a leap into air. Did he wait for someone to catch him?

As her mother primps for a night out, Margaret watches, waiting for the moment she knows is coming, the moment when her mother will say, “Time to put my face on!” Like it’s a game.

Winter had been brutal and we didn’t venture outside, but now the cherry trees were blossoming and the air was soft and hopeful, and the heads appearing above garden gates and mailboxes were smiling u...

Your hand on my chair, nudging it back and forth ever so slowly while you peer over my shoulder to examine the chart on my computer.

When Alfie asked where I wanted to go on honeymoon I told him Winnipeg, said I wanted to French kiss in front of Manitoba Museum’s plesiosaur fossil. I lied.

Winter had been brutal and we didn’t venture outside, but now the cherry trees were blossoming and the air was soft and hopeful, and the heads appearing above garden gates and mailboxes were smiling u...

and after and after and nothing changes, just the names of the children. This one drew birds wearing hats. That one had an orange juice popsicle for an imaginary friend.

New literary speculative fiction magazine Alchemical is current open to submissions for their inaugural issue set to debut in Spring 2027.

Your hand on my chair, nudging it back and forth ever so slowly while you peer over my shoulder to examine the chart on my computer.

Night Shades is a short speculative fiction magazine.

They came for us on a goddamn Tuesday. Our streets were underwater. An epic flood that led them to us on black boats, lights flashing sirens silent to respect the dead.

Featuring new flash fiction from Anika Carpenter, Karen Crawford, S.A. Greene, Jessica Klimesh, Kathryn Kulpa, Ali McLafferty, Blake Pierpoint, Sophie Purchase, and Brent Waggoner.

An online journal of very short fictions -- under 1000 words.

Alice lives in the in-between spaces, a mouse of a mousy woman the size of a breath mint or a breath, hiding herself at the moment before dramatic music echoes a few notes on a name that song game sho...

The window shakes when bus number 71 rumbles by. The floor creaks, the pancake slides to the side on the pan. Ah Ma’s face lightens up when she sees a box of pill roll from behind a cabinet. “That’s your Ba helping me!” I roll my eyes.  Misplaced reading glasses on a top shelf, a lost tooth under a chair, a sock wedged between two suitcases. Things she’s lost reappearing suddenly. “Why doesn’t he help you win your scratch games then?” “That’s too big of an ask!” Ah Ba is a pile of ash inside a plastic bag in a wooden box on her mantel. In life, he was blind. In death, he sees everything, she says. She whispers thanks and asks him to make her indoor tomato plant to give her big juicy ones. I don’t tell Ah Ma I see Ah Ba everywhere too. On the stairs as I’m heading out, I see Ah Ba in my mind’s eyes, seated near the window, listening for my steps fading away. Inside the mailbox as I’m pulling out magazines, Ah Ba asking me to read the news for him. In the side mirror as I’m pulling out of the driveway, Ah Ba’s words resonating “be safe.” On the computer screen, as I write an email, Ah Ba standing next to the Remington one summer, decades ago, listening to the loud click-clacks of the keys when I was practicing typing. In the movies as I crunch popcorn tasting the salt of tears when another father dies before his daughter comes home.    --- Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared in CRAFT, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time and Space Magazine, and anthologized in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions and other collections and journals. www.christinehchen.com