Short fiction recs! April--May 2026

 

Some stories I read and loved from this spring.

Selections from Weird Horror Magazine Issue 12

My last round-up featured two stories from this issue of Weird Horror. For this current round-up, I finished reading the issue and have selected three more. Weird Horror lives up to its name with extremely weird, unsettling stories.

 

“A View from the Window” by Rory Say

Laughter from outside sends Mona up from her desk and across the room. She feels the blood in her face grow warm. How often has she told Caleb he’s not to go out to the yard by himself? She has her hand on the window, ready to shout, when all at once her thoughts go blank.

 

Two boys stand in the yard below, her son and someone else.

 

A tiny, just-over flash length piece about the fears of motherhood, of losing one’s child. The horror of not knowing if one’s child has actually been lost or not. Primal fears and horror are packed into this strange, unsettling piece.

 

 

“Horncrowns” by D. Matthew Urban

“Jimmy wore his…horns to school?”

Tristan dances with impatience. “All the kids from Jimmy’s party did! It’s part of the game! No one wanted to play with us at recess because they said we lost our crowns.”

 

Another story that taps into the fears and conflicts of motherhood. A family has just settled into a new neighborhood. The kids are invited to a local birthday party, and come home with party favors that look like crowns with horns. But there’s something strange about the way they—and all the other kids—become obsessed with these “horncrowns.” And their mother—stretched by the demands of parenting and work and life—finds herself increasingly pushed to the edge by the horncrowns. . . and by everything else in her life, too. A wonderfully strange, discomfiting tale of motherhood, of masks and surfaces; of odd neighbors, and of a woman trying to keep control, who keeps telling herself, Show them the person you want them to see.

 

“You Were Just Here” by Chloe N. Clark

When I was a kid, I remember cutting my arm on a barbed wire fence. My mom fainted when she saw it, and the sight of her falling made me forget about the pain, about the warmth of the blood as it ran down my skin. I’d never seen my mom, my strong mom, weak in the face of anything. In the doctor’s office while the doctor cleaned my cut and stitched it up, I asked him if my mom was alright. He said, she’ll be fine, it was just a response some people have when they get triggered by certain things, shocks to the system. Vasovagal syncope, he called it. I still remember the phrase, years later. Thought of it, thought of my mom falling when the world was ending. It’s funny how you remember things like that.

 

An ex-Marine returns to his hometown to spend some time with his sister. He stays in his childhood home, goes out for pie with his sister, reminisces about the mother they lost. Chloe Clark captures the rhythms of small-town life beautifully. And yet, in the midst of this quiet story, a scene of shocking violence erupts, followed by mounting unease. Clark threads strangeness and shock with the mundane and melancholy, with the narrator’s memories of childhood and tender scenes with his sister. Something terrible is happening, and events build to a devastating end that call back to the first scene. An exquisite piece of literary horror, weird and unsettling and heartbreaking.

 

More Tales of Strangeness

“The Glass City” by Anamarie Curtis in Uncanny Magazine

The wall of the city is made of glass, smooth and clear, slippery and strong. The stranger and his dog wear a path outside it every day, watching, listening, waiting to be ready.

 

A stranger comes to a city walled with glass, and he walks around its borders for years, wearing down a smooth path. He yearns to enter the city, to connect with the people inside, but the shocking price of entry is too much for him to pay. Yet he cannot bring himself to leave. This is a haunting, surreal story of longing and fear, vulnerability and loneliness. It’s about wanting to connect, and being afraid to do so. A weirdly beautiful tale, dark and grief-laden, yet with a glimmer of hope.  

 

“The Snatchers” by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Uncanny Magazine

The clones all wear slate-colored suits and green ties. They buy one can of soda each, their faces frozen in a mockery of a smile. In fact, they look like they are in pain from the effort. Their teeth shine, bright white squares of the same size arranged in a straight line. There are rumors going around that the clones are replacing people. Mostly in high-paying government jobs, but bad news keeps coming every single day. Some people believe it, but most of them don’t. This would never happen here, they say.

 

The Leader of the country duplicates himself on live television. And now his clones are everywhere, spreading throughout the nation. Most people seem surprisingly blasé about it, even accepting or approving. Marina and her small group of friends are not accepting, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to escape being turned into clones themselves. Horror and humor and sharp satire are all entwined in this wild, wonderful story by Eugenia Triantafyllou, which had me nearly scream-laughing at one point. The last lines strike painfully home.

 

“The Moon Carver” by Ken Liu in The Sunday Morning Transport (first published the Audible Originals anthology, The Other Animals) 

I give my tail a test curl: the stinger is primed and ready. I wave my pincers in silent greeting to Scorpius, our ancestor in the sky, before placing them on the rough ground to rest. My eyes gradually adjust to the light—the two on top of my cephalothorax can’t help but drink in the stars. It’s much cooler here at the surface, and I already miss my bedchamber.

 

But I do not crawl back. I settle down just inside the crescent-shaped mouth of the burrow and wait.

 

The familiar becomes new when seen through strange eyes. This is the enchanting tale of an old scorpion who in in love with the moon, to the bafflement of all the other scorpions of Twin Dunes. It’s a lovely tale of yearning, of being different and daring to accept that difference, to follow one’s heart. And in Liu’s writing, the world seen through scorpion-eyes is as marvelous and strange as any secondary fantasy world.

 

 A Trio of Flash Stories

“Ten and Out” by Myna Chang in Flash Fiction Online

“Oh, Maggie,” is all Harrad says.

 

He’s standing there with the ink gun slack in his hand, sexy as ever, even though the color has drained from his face. Do I look that bad? Yeah, probably. My left eye is swollen half shut, and that cracked molar is seeping blood.

 

Maggie Magnum, legendary assassin, has just finished her last job for the Guild. Or has she? An entire universe of world-building is packed into this tiny cyberpunk thriller. I’d love to see more in this fascinating world, even as the bits that I’m shown feel just right for this propulsive flash tale.  

 

“Assimilation,Through the Ocean Taking Bites from the Moon” by Claire Wen-Jia in Baffling Magazine

When Chin leaves for America, he takes an assortment of my body with him. My heart. My womb. My feet, which I am most sad about. Chin’s brother Lam watches over me in his absence, making sure the wife stays inside while her husband is away. 

 

An aching, gorgeous story of assimilation, survival, and loss. When the narrator’s husband leaves China for America, he takes pieces of his first wife’s body with him. Years later, his second wife, Orchid, finds these pieces and takes them for her own. The stories of both wives are intertwined: the new wife in America taking what she must from the Old Country to survive, even as the first wife cries out at her loss. But what is the first wife also losing—and gaining? Beautifully, beautifully done.

 

“But Depart into the Wild Mountains” by Caro Jansen in Baffling Magazine

“Kristen,” the exterminator says. “I am here to help you. You can stay below the bed if that is what feels safe to you right now. I brought something to eat; I think the foods you used to like probably don’t taste as good anymore.”

 

An atmospheric little horror, in which women are mysteriously turning into person-sized insects. A frazzled husband calls an exterminator for help. But this exterminator is not quite what the husband—or reader—expects. There’s a building pulse of dread in this story, and then a satisfying release. Who is the real monster in this tale?

 

Selections from Otherside Magazine, Issue 1

Otherside Magazine is a new, professional-paying magazine which publishes speculative fiction, poetry, art, and essays by queer creators. It debuted with its first issue this past March, and every story was strong. Below are three of my favorites, but I highly recommend reading through the entire issue, and I look forward to seeing more.

 

“The Claywife” by Tanadrin

I am bringing a rind of bread to the daughter in the lamp-house again. This is the third time. In the path along the garth-wall a hortulan stops me and demands to know my errand. I hesitate and he demands again. I am bringing scraps to the master’s hounds, the master’s hounds, I say. Doddering old claywife he says, and sends me along. I am bringing scraps to the master’s hounds. That is how I remember my errands. But that is not my errand.

 

The narrator of this tale is a “claywife,” an automaton created of clay. An unthinking slave, a creature made to work, a thing that has no thoughts or will of its own. A claywife is given commands, and then mutters those commands out loud to itself until its errand is finished. A claywife is not a person. At least, this is what the claywife’s masters think. And it’s what the claywife thinks of herself, until she discovers a hurt young woman beyond a hedge. Then the claywife discovers her own will and wits and courage, as she saves the hurt stranger and the two become close. This is a powerful, heartrending story of servitude and freedom, of becoming more than you ever thought you could be. Few stories actually make me cry—this one did. 

 

“Mother Mansrot in the Glass Mountain” by Sarah Pauling (originally published in Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: An Anthology of Hysteria Fiction)

There were walls within the glass mountain, just as clear as its sheer cliffsides. There were floors within the glass mountain—and ceilings, too—but they left just as little to the imagination. A shining citadel of rooms; a pyramid stripped of secrets.

 

Even the palace, fit snugly at the mountain’s heart, sat bare to the rest of us. The princess shed light like dandruff from the glinting gemstones of her dress. Four rooms below, my back aching and my hands cracked from the washing water, I would clutch my broom’s handle and watch her petticoats trail.

 

A retelling of the European fairy tale of the Glass Mountain, where suitors try desperately to climb a mountain of glass in order to rescue the beautiful princess trapped at the top. A retelling in which generations of suitors have attempted and failed, and the survivors have found themselves trapped within the mountain, building their own society there yet still unable to reach the princess at the mountain’s heart. Mother Mansrot is an old woman of the mountain. But once she was young and in love with the princess. Now she dreams mostly of escape. Yet even as she schemes for freedom, she can’t stop thinking of her unattainable princess. Pauling has created a claustrophobic glass-world where all walls are transparent, and every neighbor can clearly see what the others are doing. A vivid story of mirrors and glass, a story of desperation and obsession that asks: What’s real? What isn’t?

 

“Curriculum for Girls Who Will Survive” by Nadia Radovich

You stumble out the gates of Southern Green, three girls on one horse. Two horses, really. Your mom told you it was safe to ride a pregnant horse. She laughed when you asked and said, “After all, I was pregnant with you when I first escaped the infected.”

 

A quirky and heartbreaking plague-survivalist tale. In a post-apocalyptic future, three teenage girls have been raised by their mothers on the communal farm of Southern Green. The girls have learned how to farm, how to keep chickens and horses, how to ride and make fires and shoot guns. These are all lessons their mothers taught them, and lessons the girls will need to survive. A poignant story about mothers and daughters, survival, and love.