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Fiction Stories

Happy Meal

by Mark de Rond   when I told my mum and dad that one of the boys at school liked boys more than girls my father scoffed and let one wrist go limp  from the armrest on the chair from…

The Clochard

by Erik Dane For an American like me – a born-and-bred East Coaster, a headstrong, pensive brand manager, a heartbreak-escaping, late night jogger – you’d think the hardest part of living in Paris would be the language. Until today, I…

Dead Man Can’t Even Blink

by Mark de Rond As the dog days of summer elongated, and with school out and everyone who is someone having been moved on, and with nothing to do and nothing whatsoever to look forward to, two teenagers killed a…

Sweet Tooth

by Ruth Newman Bert the porter was telling off some tourists for walking on the perfect lawn as Lesley passed through the gates to Goodesford College. The unnerved sightseers were having a hard time understanding Bert’s thick fenland accent, and…

Grey-Man

by Markus Hällgren One motherfucker. Grey-man takes his keys from his right pocket and moves them to his left hand. His mind is set on one thing only. Two motherfuckers. The man with grey hair on his temples takes two…

Big Uli

by Philip Stiles Everyone’s piling in on me, but it’s not my fault. And if you want to know the truth, I’m the only one who seems to be trying to rectify the situation. I’ve cycled as far as the…

This Then, the End

by Mark de Rond As a child and for as long as I can remember there hung above my bed a sign that said ‘Lord, let my prayer come before Thee.’ I have no memory of how I came to…

Sundays Are Boring

by Mark de Rond (EXPLICIT) Too much thinking made him feel delirious like about how come he was here at all when he had never been one to draw attention to himself and when by all accounts he had a…

The Self, Life in Transition

by Sam (Samuele) Murtinu Year 3334. Artificial intelligence had total control of the planet. Consciousness, once an emergent property solely of biological life, had also emerged in digital, artificial life. Machines were not only capable of analysing, calculating, and processing…

The Thing She Did

by Mark de Rond  A third of a bottle of claret from Berry Bros on St James’, sour glasses and the farty pong of an Epoisses were what was left of the evening. Most had left by nine with their…

Sociomateriality

by Brian Pentland Since the dawn of time we’ve used the axe        People use tools to do tasks Now people use digital artifacts        People use tools to do tasks So-ci-o-ma-ter-i-al        People…

Of Alps And Maps

by Yiannis Gabriel You have heard the one about the soldiers who got lost during a snow blizzard in the Alps but eventually managed to find their way back to base camp, thanks to a map in one of the…

My Ted Talk

by Brian Pentland Thank you all for coming You’re lucky to be here Welcome to my TED talk Enlightenment is near Don’t wanna overstate my case But the facts are very clear The science will persuade you To make my…

Even Animals

by Mark de Rond This exhibit has been (mostly) removed for maintenance.

NonFiction Stories

Yellow Sky

by Mark de Rond A yellow sky pressed on a crowd gathered in Munsterplatz to watch matters being put to rest. A bibarhund wandered the perimeter in search of scraps. It stopped to sniff the hand of a prisoner boy.…

Stories From Ukraine

by Ostap Slyvynsky; translated by Taras Malkovych Here is a selection of short stories — anecdotes more like, or memories — recorded by Ostap Slyvynsky, a Ukrainian poet, essayist, translator and lecturer at the University of Lviv. Taras Malkovych translated them into English…

More Stories From Ukraine

by Ostap Slyvynsky; translated by Taras Malkovych FISH, Halyna, Mariupol I have never taken anything that was not mine. And then this man in uniform passes by saying, “They’ve just opened a grocery store. Take something for yourself.” So I did. All…

Dispatch from the West Bank

by Wisam Salsaa, Manager of the Walled Off Hotel, Bethlehem Growing up and living under military occupation is not something you ever get used to. I wake up each day wondering if there is water in the tap so I…

Fast Boat Real Boat Thunder Buffalo

by Chase La Rosa THE TEAM Nav had a first name, John, but no one would ever call him that. Eng could be Eng, and you could maybe sneak in a Gary over beers. Weps could be Weps or Weps…

Day Breaking In Apple Valley

(for Odie, who went for us, and William, who inspired me to tell of it) by Richard O’Quinn Things were already underway by the time I arrived. Word had made it back of the explosion, injuries, and deaths and the…

An Academic’s Guide to the Apocalypse

(Somewhat Practical Advice from a Very Impractical Source) by Trish Ruebottom What you have here is not your typical apocalypse survival guide. Typical apocalypse survival guides promise to teach you to “grasp the essentials of wilderness survival… strategies to protect…

Return to Sender

A rap by Madeline Toubiana I’m a little woman you sayWorthless in every which way Mentally ill, deranged, lacking a spinemy blood is a weakness ruining your line. I fail as Jew, as a mother, as a wifeMy paycheque too…

Becoming-Rendered: On being Caught in-between Thresholds

by Joanna Latimer I report on an incident in which a companion species in a rural site in Crete creates a threshold through which I was not meant to pass, a threshold which comes into collision with the passage created…

Just One Of ’Em Things

 by Loïc Wacquant A dark-skinned, broad-shouldered, African American with searching eyes and a slight stutter, Jake “the Snake” Torrance resides in a depressed neighborhood of the depressed industrial town of East Chicago, Indiana. He rents an unfinished basement in the house…

The Scholarship of Police Brutality

A Spoken Word by Daniel Armanios “Write your member of Congress”, “Write your mayor”, “Write your state representative” Police in five countries have racially profiled me, even during my Honeymoon I am just glad when I was, it ended with…

Grandpa’s Song

by Megan Manley The lake is calm this evening. Sweet corn on the barbeque and cheeseburgers are the centrepiece of our patio table. It’s cool here at the cottage, a sign we will soon return to the city for our…

Social Enterprise

by Nicole Helwig (The excerpts that follow are taken from a PLAY written as part of an autoethnographic process. The end result was my doctoral thesis entitled From Ballet Studio to Business School: Dancing in the Social Enterprise In-Betweens.) DRAMATIS PERSONAE…

Dad’s Hands

by Madeline Toubiana Fingernails jagged, tanned and thick Aged, well worn like rough leather Spotted with white, from cortisol’s touch His hands, they swallow me up Those hands, they kept me held me tight In their comfort, everything was safe…

On That Final Weekend

by Innan Sasaki The first wild rose of the summer has bloomed. It is early May. The wild pink roses are resilient if fragile, modest but charming and, like the people here, tough. I arrive early in the morning. The…

The Assassination Of The Terracotta Emperor

by Randall Collins Most famous of all the Emperors of China was Ying Cheng, King of the state of Ch’in, who united the Warring States and took the title Ch’in Shih-Huang-ti, the First Emperor.  The thousands of life-sized terracotta warriors…

Depressing Is Hardly The Word

by Henry Mintzberg “I hope your visit to the refugee camp is not too depressing.” This was just an innocent comment in a message that arrived on my final day. Yet that last word leaped off the page, indeed coalesced my…

Mark de Rond Ate My Hamster: How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Love Plagiarism

by Neil Stott Not many people know that. With the ten-yard stare of an academic who had delivered the same material to an MBA class since 1922 he yelled; “hamsters to the Southwest, thousands of em!” Some people just want…

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