Fiction Archives - Page 4 of 6 - Solstice Literary Magazine

(Novel Excerpt):
Some Peculiar Errand

By Jessica Lipnack

Old familiars, the milky sconces and glass lanterns dangling from blue-and-yellow plaster buildings, greeted me when I came up to the street from the Métro. Can buildings greet a person? They’re inanimate, I thought, but also behave as mirrors for memory, now projecting mind-shots of the last time I was here, him reading the paper

Night Vision

By Kim Suhr

Brad hadn’t slept more than three hours at a stretch since he’d dropped his duffle in the entryway of his grandfather’s house and started his period of “reintegration.” With the old man in rehab for a broken hip, Brad could sit in the plaid recliner for hours at a time, watching war coverage on TV,… Read more »

Stripper Pants

By Jonathan Escoffery

My brother has a prostitute living with us. She came home with him one night and never left. I don’t know her name, but there are a number of her traits I have picked up on. First off, she steals. She sneaks into my bathroom at night to steal toilet paper—uses the whole damn roll.… Read more »

Flight

By Douglas Cole

I drove east, northeast, heading for my father’s house. In the Cascades my poor vehicle labored and slowed to a crawl, but I kept moving through the waves of midmorning and the crickets buzz and the smell of pine needles baking on the ground. A warning light on the dashboard came on. The engine was… Read more »

THE GLASS GIRL

By Laurie Foos

Last night the glass girl came again to my door. For three nights I’d heard her outside, the scrape and clink of her footsteps. At first I’d thought some of the neighborhood teenagers had been playing a game of ring-and-run when I’d gone to the door and found no one there. They played all kinds… Read more »

The Sudden Change In Weather

By Ian Randall Wilson

On Friday, following a cold night, the thermometer outside the Theatre District branch of Peoples Bank read 90° at 9:03 A.M. Mayor Bloomberg was on time for the taping of his weekly address. Zwakker awoke in his hotel with the radio tuned to a Christian station demonizing Islam; he changed the time before he located… Read more »

NOVEL EXCERPT from
At the Center of it All

By Marjan Kamali

“At The Center Of It All” “I would like it,” Baba said at breakfast, as they ate fresh naan with feta cheese and homemade sour cherry jam, “for you girls to be the next Madame Curies of this world. I would like that. Or even writers,” he smiled at Roya. “Like that American woman:

NOVEL EXCERPT from EINSTEIN TIME

By J. Spru

1967 The voices were like yeast. They pervaded my whole universe the way yeast pervades a loaf of bread. Sometimes God spoke to me directly, sometimes it was Satan, Lucifer, the Devil. If they told me there’d be a plane crash there was, an earthquake, yes, and if they told me to cut myself,… Read more »

THE SMELL

By Ruth Mukwana

Dark clouds gathered and metamorphosed the sky from bright blue to dark gray, almost black. I feared the prison guards would herd us into the rusted trucks and ferry us back to the prison, foiling my plan to escape. We had just arrived at the farm, a two-hour drive from the prison facility in Masaka… Read more »

Meyer’s Falls

By Michele Cacho-Negrete

Jan rummages through her purse, actually a crammed tote bag, for her wallet with her driver’s license, vowing she’ll never try to cash a check at a strange branch again, but this one was next to the car parts place that had insisted “cash only” once she got there. She’s banked at the branch across… Read more »

Horror Movies

By Donna Gordon

The mother and daughter are sitting in the darkened theater, the blue light of madness around them. They are watching a horror movie. Blood-curdling cries escape from the monster faces, a good makeup job. The opening scene is always the same–perfect–all-American, someone mowing the lawn or sunbathing in the backyard–till something sinister happens. When the… Read more »

From My Time in the Language School

By Tom Whalen

I notice I have not spoken much if at all about the administration of the language school or its director. This is not because I am in utter fear of her, but because to me she seems in a sense, how shall I put it, airy, inconsequential, almost trivial, a factotum in the administrative chain… Read more »

Nettles

By Sarah Colwill-Brown

Kel had been waiting for Ando for half an hour, sat outside the chippie on the kerb. School bus had been and gone and Kel hid behind the wheelie bins while it went past. She spat on the tarmac and inhaled again. Spit, smoke, blow, spit, smoke. You always have to spit after you tek… Read more »

What Lies in Ambush

By Brett Riley

2nd Lieutenant Woody Bullock sat with his back to the wall, watching two old soldiers converse near the picked-over catering table. To his nine o’clock, a set of double doors led to the hallway and its bank of elevators. Near the doors, Bullock’s old friend, 1st Lieutenant Dan Johnson, greeted new arrivals with the same… Read more »

Satisfaction

By William Petersen

I’ve always been a superstitious man. Even the horoscope in the Tribune or the fortune cookies at Wong’s Happiness Cafe can give me pause, and God knows how hungry I was for change that night at the Zebra Lounge when Bobby Smythe got shot. Bobby was in town for two weeks. And every night, I… Read more »

The Negro Claim

By Kim McLarin

Chapter One (Massachusetts, December, 1850) He couldn’t read well, that was the problem. Sure, he knew his letters well enough, thanks to Harriet. He could make out each and every one from the first to the last if he tried hard, could even wrestle into sense the bitty-bit words like “all” and “the” and “so.”… Read more »

From The Theater of the Invisible Guests

By Alan Davis

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of. | Michel De Montaigne When Ben murdered Evelyn, only a few blocks from where I lived, and I went out of my mind to figure out why, I came to understand that anything lived but not written down… Read more »

Calligraphy

By Shanyn Fiske

Sometimes, when the children are especially troublesome, Meilin tells them about the Red Guard who sliced open a girl’s neck and poured salt in the wound.

The House Wren

By Jennie Rathbun

It was a Sunday morning in late May, toward the end of the warbler migration. We had just come in from a bird walk at the cemetery in Cambridge. We hadn’t seen many birds, because I was unable to get Maeve out of bed early enough, but I have learned to hold my tongue when… Read more »

Full-Service Fat Girl

By Richard Downing

— Columbus, Mississippi,1973 For a long time now she has referred to herself in the third person, almost as if she were being interviewed by Barbara Walters. Except that she will never be interviewed by Barbara Walters, because she – not Barbara – pumps gas for a living. And because she –… Read more »

Once We Were Young

By Vanessa Nirode

Part 1: Satan Drives a Tow Truck My tomato red 1980 Ford Pinto hatchback speeds north on the QEW toward Toronto. The year is 1991, before Google Maps, MapQuest, iPods and cell phones. I am driving because I am the only one who can operate a manual transmission with ease. And the car belongs… Read more »

Wild Things

By Jaimee Wriston Colbert

Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable Loulie peeks out at the old woman from her position on the floor, her head between her knees, her legs scrunched up between… Read more »

SHORT SHORT<br/>Hallways

SHORT SHORT
Hallways

By Bryan Carvalho

I remember being in a hallway, at the end of that hallway was a corridor, with the option to go left or right. If I went left down the corridor at the end of the hallway, at the end of that corridor, was an elevator. If I went right down the corridor at the end

ESCAPE ARTIST

By Valerie Miner

You glance out the window at the tranquil spring evening. Three stories down to the glorious almond blossoms and purple magnolias dazzling the campus after long dreary rains. Northern California heaven.

The Secret Eater

By Laurie Foos

At first the blue girl was nothing but a rumor, a whisper.

Maga

By Estela González

Magali and I crossed the street to the Richardson’s. Nine o’clock in the morning: a good time to get rid of things.

A Psalm

By Jerry Whitus

He would put in just south of Jacque Rosier Baygall, where she’d put in, and paddle downstream one-and-a-quarter creek miles to the sandbar

Gabrielle

By Gary Percesepe

Gabrielle pulls up to a Conoco gas station. “I need to use the restroom. You need anything?”

ON THE BLACK SEA, WE FLOAT

By Amrit Chima

The daughter waves a hand in front of her mother’s face, fascinated—and alarmed—by the half visible irises

Pass/Fail

By Sean Conway

Not that it mattered now,
but the kid had this coming a long time.

Rehabilitation Wing

By Sean Gandert

The Tech didn’t notice new patients any more.
This hadn’t always been the case

My Mother’s Daughter

By Patricia Ann McNair

My mother was a toucher. She tapped her fingers on my wrist, and even though I was sixteen, not really a girl anymore, I loved it, the feel of her pink touch. Such small hands. You couldn’t help but notice.

Mister Lucas’ Punishment

By Jim Meirose

Guts and glory too; at the trial in the box he said No, no, no. But, he lost.

You stole that truckload of sombreros, Mister Lucas! cried the Judge.

The Fall

By Susan Muaddi Darraj

Hell, yes, it was a bad winter: first, Riham’s father gets sick with pneumonia. Two weeks at Greater Memorial, and they’re talking about putting him on a ventilator before he finally looked at a bowl of grey oatmeal and said, “I’m hungry.”