Micro - The Offing Magazine

Shaving his neck to impress all his exes at the high school reunion, Jim nicked his jugular and died.

Yes, I hate my sister Neoma. She’s always coming over and leaving coffee rings on my table —a particular decaf I have to special-order. She wears $45 lipstick called Heart’s…

“There’s days I think I’ll burn a year in Hell for every night Maria woke her momma and me, wanting to sleep with us, and I told her no, took her back to her room.” Acclaimed novelist C…

I watch the closet door. I watch around them as they pray above me, their eyes closed and their hands clasped in ecstasy. Their voices drown out all other sounds---like, for instance, the creak of a...

I was fourteen and at a sleepover when the cult drank poison. The sleepover mom turned on the TV and said “Oh my lord, Mary, would you look at this? It’s the feds is what, and a bomb, right out there...

The first time it happened I could forgive myself. Cutting across the hall from my office and glimpsing a man—pale, wearing metal-rimmed glasses, a thin man in a light-colored rolled-sleeve shirt and...

“There are few tales as tragic as that of the denizens of Ratnabar Island. When a British expedition made landfall on its shores in 1891, they did so armed to the teeth, braced for the same hostile...

Fiction - The Offing Magazine

Like the time you put the shoes on you hadn’t worn for maybe two years but you just saw there in the corner of the closet and you wondered why you’d stopped wearing them since you kind of liked who...

In the damp bedroom Victor Ripon sat hunched over his desk, making last-minute corrections on the ninth or tenth draft, he couldn’t remember which, of a letter to the one person in the world who...

Of the first six postcards from Natalie, I only have three. Mom was able to intercept the other three while I was at school or, after June, working a shift at the Tractor Supply Store. I wouldn’t...

The highway to the campground cuts through the granite Laurentian Plateau like a desiccated wound. It’s been twenty five years since I’ve retraced this road and, though the comfort stops along the...

On a barren hiking trail this past summer, I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a young person just off the path, half-hiding, peering quizzically at me. The sun was blinding. I blinked and the...

4.200 – Reuniting with Departed Lovers, Pets, and/or Network-enabled Electronic Devices, Alternate Methods for In some rare cases, the methods laid out by section 4.100 (Classic Necromantic R…

Existential horror by Alicia Hilton.

Short story about a young Anishinaabeg man and his family. The narrator recalls the legend of a woman named Aanakwad who bore a child for a man other than …

long-live-the-girl-detective-by-megan-pillow