Short fiction recs! Sept-Oct 2025

 

This reading round-up is shorter than usual, as I admit that my short fiction reading fell off a cliff these last two months, due to travel and various distractions. Nevertheless, here are seven stories I did read and love.

 

“The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home” by Renan Bernardo in Reactor

 Let me be straight: I’m Adelaide, a space traveler, and I’m a ghost. It took me a while to whisper those words to my ectoplasmic self in the mirror and convince myself of that, so take your time. I wouldn’t believe it easily, were I you. I’m dead and forced to fluster about in the Sopinha de Feijão, my lovely freighter, previously bound for a moon in the Kepler-32 system but now going back to Earth.

 

This story is fully as fun as its title suggests. Adelaide is the captain of a space cargo ship. Her dream, after saving up from numerous cargo runs, is to build a street market on a moon in honor of her beloved grandmother. But that dream seems to have come to an abrupt end when Adelaide finds herself dead. Or is it? This is both a rollicking adventure of space gods and a battle for the fate of the universe, and a tender tribute to a grandmother who’s given everything for the safety and wellbeing of her granddaughter. A wonderfully entertaining and heartwarming piece, which is also poignant in the end.  

 

“Human Voices” by Isabel Kim in Lightspeed

Kos is the thing that drowns people.

Or it was, until Irina dredged Kos up in her net made of alchemical silver and towed Kos to shore. It was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to Kos. First the burn of the alchemical silver against its skin and scales, then the yank upwards into the light, punctuated by its frantic banging against the hull of the fragile dinghy that Irina had been sailing. 

 

Kos is a siren, a thing of scales and magic who steals the voices and faces of humans. Until a human girl captures Kos and puts it in a bathtub. Now Kos is trapped, watched/guarded by a pair of young sisters. What do they want with Kos? What is Kos to them? The answers unspool slowly in this darkly aching story, which weaves fairy tale/myth with the story of a very human family and the pressures facing a young man. Gorgeously written and moving.

 

“Phantom View” by John Wiswell in Reactor

The blur doesn’t have shoulders. I pinch to zoom. It is all oranges and browns with flecks of black, like an iodine stain over reality.

 

A disabled man cares for his disabled, ailing father alone.  One day the son realizes that a blur—a blurry streak of orange and brown—is present in every digital photo of his father. He realizes that this same blur is present in every painting his artist father has done. And then he realizes the blur isn’t just some artifact of photography or art; the Blur is a thing present in real-time, watching and present with father and son, right now. Wiswell’s story starts off with wonderfully creepy, quiet unease. . . but then takes an unexpected turn, as the Blur becomes something neither narrator nor reader expects. What starts out as a maybe-horror story becomes, in a completely different manner, quietly heartbreaking. Yet warmth, resilience, and hope are also present. Wiswell’s invokes all this--a complicated knot of feelings--with impressive skill. 

 

“Hamaka, Leave Me Alone” by Testimony Odey in The Deadlands

The Idibia had said to your mother the second time you were born: “Even our personal gods respect destiny.” The third time you were born, your father’s nostrils twitched as he inhaled the snuff on the back of his left palm in one swift motion. He was weary of spending so much on naming ceremonies that ended up inconsequential. Truly, why invite the whole village to celebrate the coming of a child who shared the same destiny with the sunset?

 

A baby is born into the world but quickly leaves. The same spirit is born again, and leaves again. And again, each time to the great grief of its parents. Is there anything the parents—or anyone—can do to make the spirit of this child stay? A stunner of a little flash piece, strange and moving. A story about life and death, about earthly bounds and freedom, and the decision to live.

  

“Bunny Ears” by Kristina Ten in Nightmare

“So what?” MJ’s visibly annoyed. “When we do it, we’re, what, summoning them? You said yourself they chose to leave camp. I know it’s a shithole”—she gestures broadly toward the lake they can’t swim in, the craft room without air-conditioning, the sheds full of rusting and hole-filled gear—“but at least there’s shelter. If they left then, why would they come back now?”

 

Thirteen-year old Hannah has been dropped off by her parents at Colden Hills, a sleep-away summer camp. It’s a classic, all-American summer camp—arts-and crafts, bonfires, ice cream socials, hikes and mosquitos and swim tests in a lake. And, of course, spooky stories passed quietly among the campers. One such story is that of the “bunny-ear kids” who supposedly lurk feral in the surrounding woods. Hannah, insecure and awkward at thirteen (who isn’t?) is just trying to get through the week. But amid the pranks and social anxieties of camp life, Hannah also finds herself becoming more and more fascinated with the “bunny-ear” kids. Kristina Ten absolutely hits the mark with her portrayal—both snarky and affectionate—of a classic American sleepaway camp. She also hits the mark with her portrayal of a lonely, awkward teenage girl looking desperately to belong. There’s fun and humor in these portrayals, but a real sense of loneliness as well, which ramps up to a shocking but inevitable, emotionally-earned ending. If you like this tale, you can find it and other dark, strange delights in Ten’s debut collection of horror short stories which has just come out, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine  (I’m making my way through it right now, and it’s very good!)

 

“Autogas Ferryman” by Champ Wongsatayanont in Nightmare

Krungthep means “The City of Gods.” A much more charming name than the bawdy Bangkok that foreigners joke about. But to Somsak, it is the city of ghosts.

 

A darkly delightful ghost-and-crime noir story. The tale of a hard-up taxi driver who ferries the dead to their final release. . . until he meets the ghost of a crime victim who wants more from him than he’s willing to give. At least, at first. . . I love the way everything in this story eventually pulls together. I love its cynical but essentially good-hearted protagonist. And as a Thai-American, I’m delighted to see Thailand and Thai culture represented in contemporary English-language horror/speculative fiction like this. A wildly fun, dark, moody, tightly-plotted, noirish tale that takes in ghosts, government corruption, the streets of Bangkok, a guilty conscience, and a moving character arc. Wongsatayanont is a writer to watch.

  

“Wheret the Hell is Nirvana?” by Champ Wongsatayanont in Reactor

Alone in the gleaming gold office of the Karma Calculation Department (Thailand Division), Garmuti collapsed onto his crystal desk, his necklace and chest chains jingling, his gold-spired headdress clanging. He was going to die. No deva or devi had it worse than him in the Six Heavens. Truly, no humans, no animals, no pretas, no hell-beasts, no condemned sufferers in hell were having a worse time than him at this moment.

 

He still had one thousand and forty-six profiles to fill. And it was today, out of all days, when the Visakha Puja party was raging in the Himmapan Forest. Big players would be there, including Lord Vishnu, Lord Indra, and the Four Heavenly Kings too, according to Jarvi. That betrayer, dropping that news as she was flying out of the office to leave Garmuti alone.

  

Another wildly fun, imaginative story from Wongsatayanont. I knew from the first story I read of his that he was a writer to watch; this second story doubly proves it. Garmuti is a minor deva (a kind of god-like, heavenly being) laboring away in the Heavenly bureaucracy, toting up the karma points of human beings on Earth. The job is as tedious as any desk job in the mortal realm, and worse, Garmuti has to keep track of his own karma points as well, lest he lose enough karma points (through slacking off and other sins) that he gets kicked out of Heaven and reborn as an ordinary human on Earth. But then he meets a beautiful devi who has a plan to outsmart the Karma Machine. . .  A wonderfully fun, rollicking, clever ride that asks the question: can a deva attain Nirvana? This story points out that, considering the extreme sensual pleasures of Heaven, a deva faces even stronger temptations and attachments to pleasure than a human being does. A story that’s witty, thought-provoking, and sheer fun.