An Excerpt from “A Fading” by Aspen Audley

NEW FICTION!

It was the first day. I was new to the school, knew no one, and hoped that, with this fresh start, I could shed my usual shy personality and make real friends. 

The girl on my right had hair as short as a boy’s. She was petite in stature, small-boned, with rosy cheeks, glossy lips, and heavily-lashed, ice blue eyes.

She noticed me looking at her. “Hey, are you new?”

We weren’t supposed to be talking, and I’d never broken a classroom rule, but I decided to answer her.

“Yes.”

She smiled. “I was new last year. Do you have Recess A or B?”

I told her I had A. 

“Me too,” she said. “My name’s Megan.” 

A bubble of happiness rose in my chest. “I’m Camila.”

She leaned forward as though she were going to say something else, but Mrs. Donavan interjected.

“Megan and Camila, no talking. That’s one mark for each of you. Remember: three marks, and you must stay inside at recess.” 

Her voice hurled out like a cannonball, and I slid down into my chair, trying to avoid my classmates’ stares. I gazed at the floor, letting my vision go blurry for a moment. When I refocused, I saw a tiny ant scampering about under my desk. It meandered in circles a few times then darted off into space, out of view. I grew jealous. Ants can run away whenever they want. Sure would be nice.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

An Excerpt from “Opting Out” by Evan Brown

NEW FICTION

It started just outside a decrepit strip mall in Jackson, Tennessee. Back in the 1970s, my dad told me it was a great place to shop and eat. I can still see him listing off all the places that disappeared, one for each gnarled arthritic finger: a Walden’s Bookstore, a K-Mart, a shoe store, and at the center, Robert Morris Cafeteria. He went there every Friday, ordering either liver and onions or trout amandine.

It was also next to the People’s Protective Building—the name of a regional insurance company before they all got swallowed up. Dad raged about everything being swallowed up. He no longer wanted to live in a place where technocrats and kleptocrats pushed global over local and sold his memories back to him as Boomer nostalgia bait on Facebook. He resented his past being warped, the erosion of simple traditions, and the feeling of being forced to live in a world he no longer recognized.

He wasn’t the only one who felt this way.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

“Sir Peter Buys the Literary World”

NEW FICTION BY KARL WENCLAS

(image c/o mansionglobal)

ONE MORNING financier Sir Peter Plutocrat, waking up in his 57-room mansion west of London, in the United Kingdom, decided he hadn’t enjoyed the article he’d read in Britain’s faux-conservative newspaper last night– it was not conservative enough— and decided to buy the publication.

“It’s those ‘creative’ writers,” he muttered to himself as a robot maid brought him tea and biscuits on a silver tray. “Bloody wankers!”

The robot opened drapes in the room so Sir Peter, a ruddy-complexioned man never lacking in arrogance and privilege, could look out on the enormous lawn where robot groundskeepers were already at work. At that moment Sir Peter decided to buy up every pretentious “literary” periodical in the U.K.

A few weeks later he stopped in at one of them, Overheard Magazine, in their posh London offices in an historic building in a 17th century tavern. Accompanied by three robots who moved impassively behind him. To Sir Peter’s surprise, staffers were typing furiously on desktops.

“What are you doing?” he exclaimed. “You’re figureheads. You’re not supposed to write anything! We have AI chatbots for that. You’re supposed to look snooty and privileged. Like persons who attended Eton and Oxford, as you did. Do you understand? Pose is all.”

He looked at the staffers parked at historic dark wood desks.

“And don’t pout! On second thought, do pout. It looks properly aristocratic. But throw in a sneer or two on occasion. Be above it all. Tell yourself: writing is drudge work, fit only for proles and robots.”

The line of motorized robots followed Sir Peter out the door.

Sir Peter transferred Overheard‘s success to America. He bought up a host of trust-fund-founded intellectual, cultural and literary journals on the “left” and “right”: Me-Plus-Two; Carnival Affairs; The Baffled; Pseudo-Marxist Reviews; and Kompackt Rag, among others. Sir Peter merged several of them. The editors, “the best and brightest” that could be purchased, had known one another at Yale and Brown and not got along.

“Quiet!” he said to the lot of them in their pricey new Manhattan skyscraper office, and like the obedient forever-students they’d always been, they immediately shut up.

(photo c/o loving new york)

(To be continued?)

“Generous Terms” by John Zedolik

NEW POETRY

Should I have expected to get

the Andrew Jacksons back from those

requesting my generosity on dark

Saturday nights upon unpeopled streets

and perhaps danger too lightly noted

in pride of bodily strength and city smarts

not smart enough to sense the scam

so still not seeing those twenties even

giving my address and a decade and more

for the repayment and confirmation

of good faith on the parts of those blank

middle-agers mostly likely in opiate need

greater than mine for the bills

long transmuted to magic killing pills

no longer possible, anyway, to collect

on the debt, so I settle for everlasting I.O.U.s.

John Zedolik is an adjunct English professor at Chatham University and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and has published poems in such journals as Abbey, The Bangalore Review (IND), Commonweal, FreeXpresSion (AUS), Orbis (UK), Paperplates (CAN), Poem, Poetry Salzburg Review (AUT), Transom, Writer’s Block (NED), and in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His full-length collections include Salient Points and Sharp Angles (WordTech Editions), When the Spirit Moves Me (Wipf & Stock), Mother Mourning, The Ramifications (Wipf & Stock), Lovers’ Progress (Wipf & Stock), and Triple Muse (Wipf & Stock). All these collections are available on Amazon.

An Excerpt from “A Portrait of a Lady in Gold” by Elizabeth Ohga

NEW FICTION

Penny knows she should tell her husband. She wants to tell him. Maybe if she tells him, he’ll say, “That doesn’t sound terrible, and who cares? I love you and the kids love you and we know you’re a great mom and that’s all that matters.”

What he actually says is a couple minutes of nothing, which Penny feels compelled to fill in with an apology. Then he says, “Listen, Penny, I know it’s been hard for you lately. Why don’t you try to find a babysitter to help you out, maybe you can go to the spa or something and treat yourself?”

Penny loved her husband. Really, she did. You can love someone, know they are your soulmate, and still hate them every once in a while. Love was a choice, and Penny and Gabe chose to love each other every time the choice presented itself. The thing Penny was trying to figure out was at what point did the choice present itself too often? At what point did the moments of searing contempt arise with a frequency as to inform her, this is probably not the right choice. She is sick of explaining parenting to him. She is sick of explaining being poor to him. She is sick of explaining that they are pretend rich people, which is the same thing as being poor.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

“The Forbidden Fruit Bites Back” by John Haymaker

A Quirky Take on Data Overload, Entropy, and AI


When a Microsoft 1990s advertising campaign asked, “Where do you want to go today?” Our minds raced. Possibilities seemed limitless. I just never thought anyone’s answer would be batshit crazy, but that seems to be our final destination. Cognitive-load research clocks the average adult processing nearly 34 GB of information daily, outpacing our neural architecture’s capacity.

From a frontier for discovery, the web transformed into a massive online data dump, burdening the human mind with too much information everywhere all at once. We got sidetracked, and Silicon Valley capitalized, turning every click, scroll, pause and search into a commodity sold to marketing firms. Humans became subordinate to profit. To maximize their bounty of data, they’ve addicted us to an Internet of Things, no household gadget too trivial to wire up and shadow. If we look away, clickbait sucks us back in.

As a result, many of us have surrendered to endless scrolling, binge-watching and algorithmic echo chambers. I worry that entropy, the curse of the universe that trends toward chaos and disorder, has tripped the circuit breaker of rational thinking. When even Elon has gone all crackbrained, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Fortunately, humanity has a fallback: artificial intelligence. All mankind’s knowledge sits in microprocessor warehouses, ready to perform in seconds calculations that would confound our feeble “lizard brains” for eons. AI might shoulder the heavy lifting for us while we Twitter, troll and follow.

Despite warnings from scholars that AI poses existential risks to humanity, tech gurus seem giddy for a post-human world, willing to risk AI wiping out humanity. Before that worst-case scenario unfolds, however, entropy may still have the final say. If Eve’s “forbidden fruit” has left us choking, the inherent volume of data stored in AI may well trip its circuit breakers exponentially faster than ours did.

Hey, ChatGPT, what is the probability for that? 

John Haymaker currently surfs the web from New Hampshire. A former educator and programmer, his essays and fiction appear in print and online in various journals, including Hawaii Pacific Review, The Bookends Review, The Hooghly Review, Quibble Lit, Cosmic Double and New Pop Lit. Find out more at https://johnhaymaker.com/. 

(main page portfolio image c/o richard rogers partnership)

An Excerpt from “Casanova Must Die” by Dan Shapiro

NEW FICTION

He sensed a heightened tension in her voice. What did she expect? Being grilled, especially first thing in the morning, was not his thing.  He was not a morning person. 

That damn vinyl siding company again! He’d already told them to stop calling. “Vinyl siding is great if you’re a homeowner, but I live in a six-story apartment building. So, take me off your list and stop calling!” he said and disconnected. 

A minute later the phone rang again. Before he could even say hello, she was reading him the riot act. “You do that again, I’m going to take your fucking wallet and throw it in the river!” 

He was surprised she would call. He’d pretty much given up on recovering his wallet. 

“How’d you get my number?”

“Your name and address are right on your driver’s license, Einstein. Just called directory assistance. Six lousy bucks! And your credit cards are expired.” 

“Are you going to return it or what?” 

“You bet I am. For insufficient funds. I also have a proposition for you.” 

“What kind of proposition?” His labored breathing caused by a deviated septum gave her the wrong impression.

“Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Margo.”

He remembered her now. Wild brown eyes. A beauty mark under her right eye. White capris and red Nikes. The type of woman that normally wouldn’t give him the time of day.

    

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

“Cold” by Holly Day

NEW POETRY

I walk down the street putting rocks into my pockets
because they’re pretty and I want them, I whistle at the birds fluttering overhead
talk to squirrels, tell everything how much it’s loved, I want everything to know
how much I love them, everything around me I don’t know why.

My husband tells me I don’t pay enough attention to him, and I
wallow in guilt as I make his sandwiches and cookies for work
my daughter shouts that having me for a mother is like being raised
by an angry wolf, I curl up inside, imagine my heart is a fireplace.

Out in the garden, I set the rocks from my walk in a neat pile
imagine how much the frogs hiding in the greenery will enjoy these rocks
tell the invisible frogs how I got these rocks just for them
fuss over the pile until everything is balanced in such a way that they will not fall.

My husband tells me I talk to the dog more than I talk to him, my daughter
tells me how happy she’ll be to move out in a couple of years
I close my eyes and imagine a house of silence and warmth
imagine that I can get these noisy things to love me as much as I love them.

Holly Day‘s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, Talking River, and New Plains Review, and her published books include Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, Huge House in Washington, and the Indiana Writers Center.

Three Possible New Paths for Fiction Writing

HOW TO SAVE LITERATURE: NEW IDEAS

1.) NATURALISTIC WRITING

Reality. Hyper-reality. Crimes, passion, tragedy.

2.) MULTIDIMENSIONAL WRITING

Fast-changing viewpoints as exhibited in this short story, as experimental as anything by Lance Olsen and the officially designated “avant-garde” experimental crowd. But more fun.

3.) POP FICTION

The peak pop writer, at least in his widely popular Saturday Evening Post stories, was F.Scott Fitzgerald. Fun stories and fun settings with stylish clear writing and the occasional sparkling insight. Always a playful undercurrent of sex. The pop story was quintessentially American.

WHAT WE HAVE

Artistic dead ends.

-K. Wenclas

“Optional Nourishment” by John Zedolik

NEW POETRY

Foolish to be consuming a huge juicy pear

at seventeen degrees of a mid-January day

while the wind whipped so froze my fingers

flushed with the fruit’s water

as the naked skin burned then numbed

in the stripping air young in this year

and even an iota more foolish to be toting

a bilingual book of Borges’ verse

exposed then receiving a drop of dripping

pulp upon the pages’ upright edge, whose stain

no flicker or rub of now warmed finger

could remove, so soaked into the fiber,

now an irregular umbra and penumbra

spreading almost cover to cover, an elongated

oval russet just drying to aged and average

brown, with my volume now maculate with evidence

of experience and error, yet not marring the print,

poetry in either tongue upon the pure white below

so the consequence minor, just a reminder

to consider and be humble at the juncture

of choices as the near future ripens

in atmospheres, measured seasons of promised

heat and the fair recompense of stinging cold.

John Zedolik is an adjunct English professor at Chatham University and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and has published poems in such journals as Abbey, The Bangalore Review (IND), Commonweal, FreeXpresSion (AUS), Orbis (UK), Paperplates (CAN), Poem, Poetry Salzburg Review (AUT), Transom, Writer’s Block (NED), and in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His full-length collections include Salient Points and Sharp Angles (WordTech Editions), When the Spirit Moves Me (Wipf & Stock), Mother Mourning, The Ramifications (Wipf & Stock), Lovers’ Progress (Wipf & Stock), and Triple Muse (Wipf & Stock). All these collections are available on Amazon.