new fiction

An Excerpt from “Big Lagoon” by Thomas Thonson

NEW FICTION!

Oscar scared me in every way, and I was always terrified when Marcel would talk back to him––talk to him with scathing contempt. How could he get away with it? But he did. His father’s bluster was all intellectual. He’d bludgeon you, but it was verbal, a brutal mind game that was vicious and wounding. If something like that had happened in my household, the world would cease to exist, or someone would be dead. Cross this threshold and it was routine. 

They were also savage drinkers and prodigious fuckers, which went hand in hand (ha!). No sooner had a fight ended, when Marcel, his younger sister and I would be sent running from the house so we wouldn’t have to hear their screams and moans. The Big Lagoon house was supposed to be a sylvian setting where the great man could write poetry in relative peace, after a semester of guiding young poets past their masturbatory first verses and into a bit of mature artistry. It was never thus. Three summers in a row and their marriage just got stranger and more volatile. To work off the tension, and after a few gin and tonics, Oscar took to body surfing in the brutal waves along the ocean side of the Big Lagoon shore. Nobody swam in those, chiefly because the beach was so steep that the waves simply came rolling in and then broke right on the sand. A perfect back breaker. Oscar had a unique approach. He didn’t even bother sticking out his arms, he just leaped into the wall of water,  just beneath the cresting lip, with his head. He’d pierce it momentarily only to be dragged back and slammed to the sand. He’d stagger up, shake the water from his shaggy head, and then with the sand running off his beard in rivulets, and a demented look, try another one. It was a wonder he survived.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

An Excerpt from “Ghost In the Machine” by Andie Weber

UPCOMING FICTION

C. Ryan: AfterLife is truly groundbreaking, not just on a technological level, but on a philosophical one too. Individuals can set up profiles at any time in advance of their passing, the earlier the better. By feeding in text logs, emails, and even phone recordings, we can replicate the conversation patterns of the user such that, after death, they can continue to communicate with loved ones—at least as long as there’s a valid card on file. Now, you don’t have to say goodbye.

When she heard about AfterLife, Holly signed up immediately. It was almost a year since Steven died, and her life still felt as unmoored as it had in those first days. But the program promised connection, support, and most importantly, closure. She signed onto the computer that Steven had left—the only one they’d had in the house since she’d never really felt the need for one before—and made an AfterLife account. She checked off approval of the terms and conditions without reviewing the attached 60-page file. The portal prompted her to provide texts, emails, chat logs, phone recordings, voicemails. She didn’t have the password to Steven’s email, and she’d gotten rid of his phone, unable to look at it without thinking of the horrible messages he’d gotten from his classmates. So she provided what little she retained—a couple of essays he’d written for school gathering digital dust in the computer’s file folders, and some texts that she had saved to her phone, and she proceeded with a certain amount of hope that the program could still work the kind of miracle she’d been promised.

She quickly realized it was not to be. Her first message, delivered to her phone an hour after the algorithm had the opportunity to work over the data and establish a persona, left her cold, jaw agape at a text that had to be some kind of cruel joke.

Steven Petersen: sup bitch

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!