Short fiction recs! November-December 2025

 

Very late, but here are some stories I read and loved in the last months of 2025—a mix of older stories and new.

 

“Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” by A.C. Wise in Reactor (published in January 2025)

Wolves have always ranged on the outside of the town, snapping jaws at its ragged edges. Sometimes they kill to cull. Sometimes they kill to eat. Sometimes they protect the town from worse things, older things, and newer ones as well. But the town would rather look away from the wolves, because the doe-girls’ radiant magic is so much prettier.

Was.

Now the doe-girls are gone.

 

A small town governed by a balance of unspoken powers. Wolves in the hills, and doe-girls in the form of high school students—beautiful and shining. But there are also human hunters, disrupting the balance of power with their greed. And there is Merrow, a high school girl who is a different kind of protector, inheritor to her grandmother’s power. What is Merrow—a semi-outcast, always on the edges of the crowd—willing to do to protect her town? A.C. Wise unspools a dark, epic story, shivery and mysterious, in which more is hinted at than fully explained. A strange, compelling story that taps into primal myths and fairy tales of darkness. This story was published early in January 2025, and I missed it when it first came out. I was glad to stumble upon it before the end of that year.

 

“The Angel Azrael Encounters the Revelation Pilgrims and Other Curiosities” by Peter Darbyshire in Beneath Ceaseless Skies (published in March 2022)

The angel Azrael rode across the badlands on the dead horse for so many days and nights that he became lost, until a dying woman’s bloody bible set him on a path back to the world.

 

A wonderfully strange tale of angels, nephilim, humans, and more in an apocalyptic Weird West as I’ve never seen it before. Riding across the badlands, the lost angel Azrael comes upon a wagon of slaughtered humans and a dying woman who asks him to take her bible to her daughter in Jerusalem’s Sorrow. Azrael agrees. But in his quest to fulfill that woman’s dying wish, he becomes caught up in plots and counter-plots: in a fight between “revelation pilgrims” who are trying to collect and protect all the powerful holy texts of the world, and a gang of amoral nephilim who steal and murder travelers across the desert. Along the way there are gargoyles, revenants, a lost city in a desert, and more. An utterly absorbing tale of adventure, a classic Western tale of a reluctant gunslinging hero (who happens to be a fallen angel) in a decidedly non-classic world. Atmospheric and darkly enthralling. This is my first encounter with this author, who has an entire series of Angel Azrael stories at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I look forward to reading more of them (the latest came out in October 2025, and it’s on my TBR list).

 

“Auguries” by Jennifer Donohue in Podcastle (first published in Gamut in 2024)

She screamed the first time, so loud that the old man who lived in the next apartment arrived at her door with surprising speed, cardigan thrown hastily over his untucked white undershirt, light scent of an evening beer while watching baseball on his breath. The neighbor held her hands and said things to her in a language she didn’t know, even though they’d had accentless conversations before, in the daylight. When she wasn’t suddenly being torn apart, when there wasn’t a sudden gush of blood onto the rag rugs she’d gotten at a garage sale, when there wasn’t a dark bundle on the floor, a wild-eyed hare, full grown, linked to her by a disgusting, fleshy cord that the neighbor cut with a folding knife from his pocket, the blade rippled with honing over the years.

 

With that first shocking, visceral paragraph, Donohue pulls you right into this short tale of a lonely, seemingly isolated woman who begins giving birth to hares. Each time, the birth is accompanied by visions that come true. Visions that are initially terrifying. But the story takes a turn; the visions change. The hare-births are awful and painful, but they are also life-saving. Donohue spins a fascinating tale of violence, horror, and growth, that eventually warms into something more.

 

“Tragedia dell’Arte” by TJ Cimfell at The Dark (published in 2025)

I know it’s him. He tumbles in slow motion. There is a soft jingling as he shifts and rearranges himself, replaces himself. He is mis-angled and mangled. I cannot tell if he is moving closer or further away.

 

The narrator of this story is a former actor, one of a number of highly competitive theatre students all jostling for the top roles. The top students dismiss one of their classmates, Sean, as a wooden, untalented actor who is no threat at all. Until Sean reveals a remarkable talent for movement, for being able to contort and stretch and fold his body into almost any shape. A talent which is recognized in their fourth year by a theatre professor who casts Sean for the lead role in a commedia dell’arte play. What follows is a dark, compelling tale of rivalry, jealousy, and haunting guilt. The imagery in this piece—of the tumbling Harlequin of the commedia dell’arte—is striking.

 

“The Window at My Mother’s Back, the Door in My Belly” by AW Prihandita in The Dark (first published in Ghoulish Tales in 2024)

Before the first word I uttered, before my lips even bloomed, before my brain was anything more than a collection of cells the size of a fingernail, I remember dangling from the hole at my mother’s back, sweeping left and right, left and right, my umbilical cord a flesh-and-blood swing. Mother would sing me a nursery rhyme, and when fingers sprouted from the stumps that became my palms, I learned to grasp her hair and hold on, swaying to her tempo as she danced a circle around her grave. We had the best home: right under a kemboja tree and by a huddle of jasmine shrubs, so fragrant I never knew the smell of blood or rotting flesh.

 

A story about a sundelbolng, a figure of Indonesian legend, the ghost of a woman who has died in childbirth. But this sundelbolong has a living child who she sees as her only hope: hope to be a good person by raising a good girl. This is a dark, moving tale of a mother and daughter, of love and sacrifice, of a desperate desire to be human and good in a world where it may be easier to live as a monster. Darkly lovely and heartbreaking.    

“And On Their Graves a Fall of Angels” by Natalia Theodoridou at Uncanny Magazine (published in 2025)

He was ten when he shot his first angel. He remembers its stupid dark eyes staring at him from the foliage above, its two sets of wings flapping, the sound of something breaking.

 

A wholly strange, broken world in which angels have fallen to earth but are treated as pests, as pigeon-like nuisances who fly about and trouble funerals. A world in which people are nailed into coffins and buried while still alive. In which people’s own families do this to them when the government decrees that it’s someone’s turn to die. In this world, a transman named Stefan is just trying to get by: shooting angels for money and grieving a lost love. Until he meets someone tied to his past, who brings him into a community and awakens tenderness and love. . . A story that takes its time, slowly unpeeling layers to world and character, aching and tender and heavy. A world that’s foreign but that also reveals shocking resonances with our own. A story that turns, in its final scene, abruptly into a vision of beauty and hope.

 

“Head of the Household” by Kristina Ten in F(r)iction (published in 2025)

In preparation for her marriage to Koschei the Deathless, the mortal Ira is eating. She is reading about dental procedures that sharpen the patients’ teeth to vampiric points. She is studying videos of pythons in the Florida Everglades unhinging their jaws. She is imagining how the smooth shell of a Great Blue Heron egg would feel against the concave of her tongue.

 

Wedding planning is almost always stressful and busy. But Ira is under special pressure, for she is engaged to Koschei the Deathless, the evil sorcerer of Slavic legend. Everyone in her life seems pleased by the upcoming nuptials: her father is working on the ceremonial arch, and her mother is shopping for the perfect mother-of-the-bride dress. But Ira’s wedding planning contains a secret. She knows that the ceremony will include the traditional custom of khleb y sol, in which the married couple is offered a bite of bread and salt. And whoever takes the biggest bite is declared the head of household. Ira is secretly determined to take that bigger bite, and wrest control of the household from her evil groom. This is an absolute delight of a story, sly and funny and utterly winning. Moreover, it comes with wonderful descriptions and illustrations of various types of Slavic bread.  An enormously fun, satisfying spin on old legends.

 

“My Mother is the Water” by Lyndsie Manusos in F(r)iction (published in 2025)

I don’t remember much about my mother—she left when I was barely walking—but I know of her gills. Because my aunt looks in my eyes each day and her gaze drips down to my throat and holds. Ah, there. Sees the skin arc away, revealing red flesh beneath. My gills work like an itch, sting when they are too dry, and gulp down raw air. As such, they don’t work as they should, not unless I am submerged in a tub of water.

 

The narrator has grown up among the Dinah Lakes, a seemingly endless chain of lakes dotted with islands. Some people of the lakes are born with gills, and these people are considered blessed, touched by old legends. The narrator’s mother was one such person, and she swam away years ago. The narrator dreams of swimming away, too, but dreads hurting the aunt who raised her. Until violence and tragedy comes to her island, and changes everything forever. . . An absolutely gorgeous, quietly aching story of family and love, devotion and lakes, with a secondary-world so beautifully described that it made me long to see for myself this peaceful chain of endless lakes, linking to rivers and creeks and bays and channels, and island after island.

 

“The Teleporting Disaster Fairy” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny (published in 2025)

The first time Kittu teleported was into the lavatory of a plane bound for London, fifteen seconds before it crashed in a field south of Gatwick. 

 

Kittu works as a grocery store cashier in Toronto and would love to have a real vacation. She’d love to see the world. But when she starts teleporting around the world, she always pops into existence appears mere moments before disaster, and security and immigration authorities are always too busy interrogating her and then locking her up/deporting her to let her do any sightseeing at all. It’s like they don’t even appreciate her efforts at saving people from disaster! From the first sentence on, Mehrotra unrolls a wildly rollicking adventure: funny, fast-paced, and hugely entertaining. But there’s also tragedy and poignancy here, as Kittu wrestles with the meaning of her new-found “gift,” and with what her gift, arriving too late, might have been able to avert. A story with a wonderful mix of humor, warmth, whimsy, and poignancy, that ends on just the right note.