fiction ⁽⁵⁾

(approx 1800 words, less than 10 minute's read) ‘The Boy Who Loved’. Henry hated the epithet – his classmates seemed to think it made him a hero. He wasn’t. If he was a real hero, then the world wouldn’t be full of hate, and his…

‘Did it ever occur to you that the communist dictators – Stalin, Mao – adopted communism not out of an ideological love of communism, but out of a recognition that it provided a reasonable framework the working classes could trust, and that by leveraging that…

The gun wasn’t anything special. Schaltin had seen dozens of them for sale in Ecuador’s high Sierra. Little towns with centuries of history up in the mountains, places that should have been ski resorts, not black market arms markets. He turned the gun over. The…

She hadn’t broken up with Troy. Just a two week break. That’s why this was different. Why the day one pain, the knife in her heart, the thing cutting from the warmth under her belly to the cold in her throat, wasn’t pulling her to…

The fox kid in the suit ate like there was a hole in his neck, like it was impossible to fill his stomach. “Nobody cares,” the fox said, waving around a leg of chicken. “You run around here, you tell people that a Siberian gang…