1 The last unenriched food on Earth is a tin of dog meat. Like the chew toys that decay too slowly, this tin long outlasts its purpose. No more dogs in the world to call back to their dinner bowls. Few creatures survived the heat of those summers. It is a rich man who buys…
Tag: Short Story
Literary Lists: Sci-Fi Short Stories
The short story is the perfect form for sci-fi. It allows a writer to explore a big idea in a very small space. Each of the stories listed here imagines a world that’s different from our own in some brilliant or terrible way – with few aliens or spaceships in sight…
Literary Lists: Literary Short Stories
Here’s our literary list of short stories that are freely available to be read or listened to online. Great short stories are miniature miracles. When done well, they’re certainly a thing worth celebrating…
Sunflower Heart
They say I have to write a story. It’s what I wanted when my back was breaking. You should be careful what you wish for. At least there’s a window and I can watch the evening primroses opening while I think. I lift the lid on my tea mug and smell the green tea. This…
Cascading Failures of the Heart
They will never know they are perfect for each other. Theoretically. Algorithmically. A solved equation of two strangers. Objectively a cosmic match. As objects moving through the universe are drawn toward each other by their natures. They’ll never know they should have found each other and been as beautiful and strange and full of fire…
Slow TV
Gareth Durasow grew up in Castleford, West Yorkshire. He has been a teacher, a tailor, a soldier, and a spy. As well as Neon, his short stories and poetry have been published by The Fiction Desk, Dead Ink, The Rialto, Shearsman, STORGY and Ad Hoc Fiction. His poetry collection Endless Running Games is available from…
The Audience May Want to Look Away
Ground floor flats mean easy access to the street. There is no lugging your shopping up flights of stairs, no lugging your bins down them. Large windows on ground floor flats let in a lot of light. You really feel in the middle of the action. Selling points. He didn’t mention that ground floor flats…
Petrichor
That summer they added fluoride to the water. Our parents did not question that the commies who ran New York City wanted us to glow green in the dark. A decade earlier, our fathers had stopped the stain of evil spreading over the Pacific and Europe. They had no patience for the distinction between fluoride…
Social Science
“Social Science” was first published in Tuesday Magazine It is the early morning. A man, dressed in a suit, walks alone to the bus. He feels a pleasant and uplifting sense of solitude, but slowly becomes aware of a matched sense of desolation. He sighs, his feet feeling heavier than before. A researcher, hidden in…
Steam Dragons
They breed them in factories now, of course, hatch them in incubators in the rolling mills, and our young people would be shocked to ever come across one that could use its wings, or that was any bigger than, say, the house of a foundry manager or civil engineer along one of the tree-lined streets…