Short fiction recs! January--March 2026

 

Well, I fell way behind on my short fiction reading over the last few months, for a number of reasons.

 But here are a few stories that I did manage to get to--a mix of old and new-- that I loved.

 

Stories of Love and Darkness

 

Last Flesh Ice-Skaters by Claire Jia-Wen in Khoreo 

The first time I saw you, you laced up your skates, adjusted your knee mods, and I was just another unremarkable face as you fluttered to the ice. My mother snapped at me to watch you, but it was like asking a mallard to observe a flamingo. Our legs didn’t work the same. You’d been competing across the national circuit, in Boston and Orlando and Frisco, and this was my first competition. 

 

A near-future science-fiction tale about two figure skaters—both Chinese-American, both from Southern California, and both using the latest in sports body modifications.  A propulsive sports rivalry story about competition, obsession, attraction, and love for the sport (and art!) of figure skating. It’s also about technology, about the ways technology can be used to support human achievement and art. . .  and the ways in which some want to use technology to supplant human achievement and art. It’s a story that grabbed me from the first sentence, that captures the excitement of figure skating competition. And it has a wholly satisfying ending. Beautifully written.  

 

“Love Story in Colored Glass” by Phoenix Alexander in Uncharted Magazine

 

The planet itself offers only confusion, and seems lifeless; it is hard to tell what is animal or vegetable, what is sentient and moving with agency, and what is merely wind-blown mineral. The flowers spotting the terrain are not flowers at all but delicately arranged pieces that move as one on brittle stems that can be picked off, just like petals, whereupon they lose their jewel tone and become clear as polished glass. One of the youths tries to nibble a tip of one and, to their shock, his teeth pass straight through it. “It doesn’t taste of anything,” he says gummily, incisors bright with a kind of gloss. “But I like it. S’like fudge.”

 

A spaceship full of young military recruits crashes onto a planet of glittering, colored glass. On this ship are a newly married couple: a young man and a young woman, both barely twenty-one, who joined the army to escape the poverty of their own ravaged world. This is a strange, beautiful story, told in looping iterations: a story of multiverses, of multiples lives and realities; of a shining glass planet, and of love that holds constant across multiple worlds and time.

 

“Empire State of Mind” by Angela Liu in Frivolous Comma

Every time I hear the song, I think of killing birds. An explosion of blood and guts, shrapnel tearing through feather-flesh, staining windows and walls.

 

You’ve heard the song too, right?

 

“State of Mind” has been #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the past eight months. It blares from every corner of Times Square, every spinning selfie station, every neon pedicab and smoky summer street fair. The lyrics have weaseled their way into every ear canal in the city.

 

There is something both maddening and eerie—almost sinister—about the way certain songs can “earworm” their way into your mind. Liu’s story captures that maddening feeling in this wonderfully disquieting story of dread, of music and fandom and a mother and daughter.

 

“What We Mean When We Talk About the Hole in the Bathroom” by Angela Liu in

 Uncanny Magazine

After dinner, the woman and her husband argue about the hole in their bathroom.

It’s not such a big hole. Two feet by two feet, the kind you might drop your garbage into every Thursday night and never think about where it goes. The kind just large enough for an adult to climb into and never be seen again.

 

“Are you going to touch it?” the husband asks as the woman leans in across the bathtub. They can hear the neighbors’ television on the other side of the wall, the canned studio laughter, but the hole sits flat on that same wall, a perfect circular black painting—except for the damp wind blowing out of it that smells of wet soil and river water.

 

Another surreal story by Angela Liu, though with a tone that is more of melancholy than dread. An unnamed couple discovers a mysterious hole in their bathroom wall. Their disagreement over what to do about it is merely the latest in a long list of disagreements between them—misunderstandings, disappointments, and distance. A story that probes deftly at the cracks in a marriage, at the way longing and distance can coexist.

 

Weird Horror Magazine (Issue 12)

This magazine is new to me, and I was only able to get to two of its stories last month, both of which I’ve recommended below. I hope to get to the rest of the issue in the next few weeks. Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is a wonderful journal for fans of weird horror.

“You Scream Ice Cream” by Russell Nichols in Weird Horror

Down a forsaken road in the sun-dried heart of West Texas, I came to a deserted town where

 the only sign of life was an ice cream parlor.

 

It was unsettling, to say the least. Like a mirage I couldn’t blink away. Like whoever used to reside here just up and left it to burn. YOU SCREAM ICE CREAM, read the sign over the window. My dying phone claimed the place was “permanently closed.”

 

“Does that look ‘permanently closed’ to you?” I said.

 

A mother with her young son on a road trip. A hot summer’s day, and a very strange ice cream parlor. There’s a multitude of flavors on offer, but the protagonist finds that getting the flavor she wants is more difficult than expected. At least, the flavor that she thinks she wants. . . A marvelously strange, disquieting piece about ice cream, Hollywood scream queens, and the ambiguities and sometimes painful feelings that accompany being a parent.

 

“Moksha” by Rajiv Moté in Weird Horror

The Return To Office mandate pulls you back, but the office is empty and you desperately want to rest, in spite of the words on your coffee mug: “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.” Is it the weekend already? Have you come here by mistake? The days run together. Your team is offshore.

 

A wonderfully weird little piece of workplace horror, evoking the dystopia of endless cubicles under office lighting, of the off-kilter feeling of an empty office space. The pressure of workplace surveillance and the responsibility of upholding the Economy. There’s a mission to find coffee, and a coffee mug with ever-changing slogans. And in the end—perhaps?—a glimpse of escape.

 

A Trio of Flash Stories

"The Skull of Francisco Xalbec" by Alan M Fisher in The Deadlands

Every time I died, I received another coin to place in the skull of Francisco Xalbec. The skull was ornate, layered in gold with silver rimming the eye sockets, in which sat multifaceted black gems. Whenever I dropped another coin in the skull, it reflected a thousandfold in those dark eyes, as did the face that I knew was mine yet couldn’t recognize.

 

An enigmatic flash about a man trapped wandering a labyrinth in his death, dying over and over for the sake of coins which he knows (without knowing quite why) that he must place into the skull of a person once named Francisco Xalbec. Rich and strange, a gorgeous little piece of darkness.

 

"The Bed-Time Emptying of Our World" by Joel Hans in Flash Frog

At bedtime, our daughter asks for two handfuls of Crayons and a ream of computer paper. She asks for the tiny blanket we crocheted for her when she was six months old. For the doll with fidget-knotted plastic hair. For the plushy puppy she named after the dog who died years ago. For the toy muffin torpored in a plastic egg. For Lambie, who we had already packed away in a cardboard box destined for Goodwill. For her last acrylic painting, her strokes already peeling away from the cheap printer paper. Her easel. Her trampoline. Her sandbox, bricks and sand and black widows all.

 

The familiar routine of tucking a child into bed becomes a gorgeous song of love in this beautiful little piece.

 

“The Tide Folk” by Jennifer Hudak Tide Folk in Lightspeed

 

It is not for us to know what the Tide Folk do with their spoils. It is enough for us to see them at all, in that liminal space between sea and land, between day and night. Draped in green fringe, rough with barnacles, they trail the scent of salt water behind them. They move like the tide moves: slightly forward, then slightly back, making incremental progress across the rocks. When the wind blows, they pause, swaying back and forth.

 

 The Tide Folk emerge at dusk to scavenge the detritus of the beach—shells, feathers, bones, a soda can tab. For them, these are things of beauty. And this story is also a thing of beauty--an ode to the dusk, to the place between land and sea, to the liminal, ephemeral nature of beauty.