best American short story writers

An Excerpt from “The Ghost of Camp Hero” by Shelby Raebeck

NEW FICTION

Basketball basketball basketball. We sit in class all day thinking about it, then practice for two hours or maybe have a game, and drive home talking shit about who busted who, and I drop ’em both, Higgins and Sonny, in a fucking trailer park. And though my father’s life insurance got us a house—split level ranch in the center of Freetown—the place was too big for us to heat, half the rooms sealed closed with plastic. Every day same as the one before, until Coach comes up to me after practice and asks if everything’s okay and I say Sure, why wouldn’t it be? And he says, You’re not playing like yourself, keep it up and you won’t get a scholarship, and I shrug my shoulders, thinking, Fuck a scholarship, and take Higgins and Sonny home to the trailer park and go driving.

It’s another of those cold gray East End days when I pull up to the first beach, Maidstone, only half mile or so from home, and see this figure standing out at the end of the jetty that sticks into the harbor, wearing this purple hat and scarf. On days like that everything blurs into gray – water, land, sky—except now there’s these two soft spots of color. Then the figure holds its hands out to the side and turns slowly in a circle, and I realize it’s Joany. She spins again and I can barely make out her mouth is moving. I roll down my window but the wind is whipping in off the water too loud to hear anything, yet I see the headphones poking out beneath her hat and her mouth opening and closing like she’s singing. Hasn’t said a word to anybody in almost a year and she’s standing out there on the jetty singing.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

An Excerpt from “Millennia After Millennia After Millennia” by Zach Smith

April 6, 8744 BC

Dhakk and his tribe had been tracking a herd of woolly mammoths across the frozen plains and onto a thin muddy strip of land with vast cold ocean on either side. 

It was Dhakk’s first hunt. His father had spoken of frozen oceans before, vast snow-covered, just a little too perfectly flat, that you could feel the rise and fall of the water beneath the ice as though it were breathing land. 

Those stories never mentioned how muddy the land was.

The hunt was a success until they tried to return west to the Far East.

As the first loaves of bread were being broken with friends, and the virginal soil of other new farms was being broken by farmers in the fertile crescent, and the Jomon were breaking the wilds of Honshu, Dhakk watched as the land bridge from Russia to Alaska was broken into a hundred islands by the warm rising waters.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!