latest fiction
When the Evening Reaches Here
I stared down into the toilet bowl and the thick yellow ring inside. I’d noticed it before, but never so close. I thought about the Dutch girl.
Town of Strangers
The last thing I remember from that night was dancing on a table with a pitcher in each hand, singing “Sonuva gun, gonna’ have some fun, in the bayou.” Inside, I could hear the bloodhounds coming.
Lividity
Without my heart the world seems very quiet, hushed, like when a storm knocks the electricity out. I hadn’t realized how loud it had been, the steady beating, the rush of blood in my ears, until it was gone.
A Design History of Icebergs and Their Applications
Engineers of the Little Ice Age agonized over every move and countermove. Decisions were achieved cautiously, as each detail, no matter how subtle, met with a feat of scrutiny. Lining a gutter with icicles required a week’s effort by a team of three.
Fat People Fat Camp
Fat People Fat Camp convened in June with sixteen overweight campers, all in dire need of direction and rehabilitation. The camp was held on the campus of the Wuxi School for Exceptional Students.
Break Through Whatever Happens to You
I am compelled, my dearest Adaugo, to tailor this letter to free your lovesick mind from silliness, for the likes of Obinna have loosened in your head that which makes us fools, keeping your sturdy soul in mental torture.
Third Lesson
I don't have any important memories. I have a bunch of stupid memories.
Life of the Mind
Days went by as I stood in the woods waiting for a tree to fall, and when none did, I determined the universe is cold and indifferent and that man’s only hope is to buy wood chippers.
First to Go
The symmetrical rows of Nazi-planted pine forests click by like the tines of a giant hairbrush. The forest for the trees—a saying that means missing the big picture. Guilty, she thinks. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
Zeitgeist Fitzgibbons, Marketing Maverick, Talks Tactics
I have a need to be liked not just by strangers but by people who will never meet me, know me, or consider me as an individual. This is synecdochic, crucially. I am a part of the whole. I am that part of the whole who does not wear blue jeans.
The Vinegar Tasters
MuRaList: Yesterday you weren’t claiming to have killed someone in your closet.
FEEL_gd: Do you feel scared?
Last Suppers
Not long ago, consumption was something you caught rather than did. That was also before summer became a verb and there was no one to haul freshly cut chard up four flights to your door.
The Last Gasp Hotel
Somewhere in the inaccessible reaches of my brain a control panel was lighting up, buttons were flashing, bells were ringing, but my feet were nailed to the floorboards of the Last Gasp Hotel.
How I Picked My First Communist In America
Though I am definitely myopic, I’m not naïve. I’ve met Communists in America before today. But not the real ones.
California Über Alles
After this, you will leave the chocolate factory for a job on the Kölner-Düsseldorfer Linie bringing American tourists to see castles along the banks of the Rhine.
Curve
Jack and Sheila went to the Laidlaw Grill every Friday night for fried perch and Manhattans. They always sat in the Shingle Room, right next to the bar, and especially liked the third booth on the left...
The Crow
I was handed over to a boy called Glen, who I didn't know. Glen had stayed behind last year when the other boys in his class had come to Sydney. I winced at him. He had hair like wheat, and he wore a checked shirt instead of a school uniform. I felt duped.
A Hole in the Wall
I live in the basement underneath a house where everything has changed. Bugs crawl in through the open window, and on the carpet. Once I found a slug making its way up the wall; I put him in a cup and set him free in the backyard where the dogs do their business.
In the Eye of the Beholder
The ramshackle farmhouse on Taggart Road held two Witts, three LeClairs, and one Belmont. Kyle, Hannah, Jessie, Monique, Darren, and Sadie, ages 16, 14, 11, 10, 6, and 2.
Project
I remember the day he was conceived. The day Lily said, "Today's the day." She actually said that, "Today's the day." We hadn't heard about your organization yet, what you do.
The Voyeur's Reflection
"We both know how to manipulate the public. Let's play the game."
A Tangled Web
Jim leaned across the dark cherry desk, accepting the prescription like it was a snotty tissue. He struggled up from the leather chair, a bitter taste flooding his mouth. He was still reeling from the shock. His tests had all come back negative. They hadn't found a single thing wrong.
Dinner at La Grenouille
I knew if I ever got my act together, I could write poetry about Renee. I knew I could feel the heightened energy and will of that skin and put it all into words. She made me think of Byron's Don Juan and Henry Miller at his raunchiest. Who couldn't live with a healthy combination of both?
A Field Guide to New England Fathers
Sanger's Grocery Store sold binoculars, bows and arrows, canoe paddles, and whittling knives. I pulled down one of each and shoved them at my mom. This was our new rule: she always had to check the price.
How We Made A Difference
On Halloween, the neighborhood children dress up like neo-conservatives and go door to door spreading lies.
Under Water Eyes
"His eyes, my Andere Vater's eyes, they would hurt so much, but he kept smiling, never frowning, never complaining."
The Spectacle
Reece parked in front of the store, which read Squadrito and Son's in rusty neon across the façade. He'd bought the place after the old man died, but never bothered to change the name. At least once a day, someone walked in, "You Squadrito?"
Pat and Mike
Pat walked into the specialist's office with a worried mind. Just last week, in for his yearly check-up with Feingold, he'd been given a clean bill of health. So why had this other doctor's secretary called to set up an appointment?
The Floor Champion of Foosball
"And you, I love you!" the prom queen said to Sylvia, who sat quietly, never looking up from the television. Sylvia was watching "The Price is Right" and she didn't like to be disturbed. Every now and again, she'd yell out, "Four hundred and fifty-one dollars, idiot number two! Goddamn you, you're losing, loser!" but mostly, she just sat slack-jawed until one of the nurses came by to give her another plate of mush or a cup of pills. I heard she was in for trying to stab her mom, which was probably true. With all the side effects and lawsuits, they hardly gave anyone Thorazine anymore, but they handed them to Sylvia like jellybeans on Easter.
Mammals
Ben Sobel tests cosmetic products on small, restrained mammals for a living. He puts makeup in their eyes and records how long it takes to destroy the corneas. He shaves them and applies nail polish to skin. He puts hand lotion into orifices. This is a real thing he does, for money. The money is good; he will soon be free of med school debt. Ben is a young man, healthy but not happy. A lot of people don't know that rabbits, like humans, scream.
Motor Repair
As the sun falls behind the trees across the lake, Dave and his wife Tanya and Bob D. and his wife sit in lawn chairs, the husbands drinking non-alcoholic Sharp's beers and the wives drinking Miller Lites, and they're looking at the glassy, calm lake when Bob says, "Can you hear that?"
Dinosaur House
I make it to the Julianne's Mom's old mosquitoed house in the dead part of the night, half past midnight, crickets and neighbors' televisions masking what could have been silence a hundred years earlier, back when there was no TV and the crickets stayed on the other side of downtown.
As I Lay Wired
I was the Drew Barrymore of the science project. I rose up quickly, winning my first science fair in 3rd grade by constructing a flawless Pascal Vase and then again the next year for making a gyroscopic hard-boiled egg using the properties of friction and slippage.
Dumb Lumbering Beasts
Three men stood statue-like in an isolated corner of the otherwise bustling loft, gazing in mock adoration and secret scorn at the outlandish clay sculpture blocking their view of the rooftops, church steeples and crumbling smokestacks of Ohio City.
An Evening on Peaceful Quiet Street
The hawkers' cries herald the beginning or the winding down of any given day here. Now it's half past five o'clock p.m., and the sound of their sonorous voices as they walk up and down Peaceful Quiet Street stretches into its forte.
Interpellation Made Simple
The question she didn't mind, because questions, especially polite ones, are innocent enough. No, what Charette Cadet took offense to was his use of vous.
Frank Bollinger Day
I gathered after five interviews that John was a people magnet and his personal habits were impeccable, but not one person could give me a definitive, sexual-harassment or work-not-up-to-par kind of reason for his being let go.
The Sleeping Shags
It was sometime during the summer that Billy and Patty realized their father was finally going crazy, and that there was nothing they could do about it.
New Amsterdam
The last show of Kevin’s tour is in a small club north of Canal Street. The owner doesn’t like indie rock, but Kevin and the manager went to school together and she offered him a spot, a welcome-home show. The place is packed with friends and as many of his regular fans as could fit in the door.
Without Biting the Fruit of Knowledge
Adam, the First Man, sat on Eve's floor in a pair of blue briefs. "Hold this for me."
best short stories of 2006
Thread
This unknown man can be seen in probably the most dramatic scenes of heroism ever captured on film.
A Hard Truth About Waste Management
The family liked so much to flush their trash down the toilet that they sold their TV and used the money to buy three chairs to arrange in their upstairs bathroom.
Amphibian
Dad's presence had shed a sort of good light on everything, but with him gone we could all see each other better: My brother was good and deserved a lot, my mother was weak and needed care, and I was not a good person.
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related info
- The fiction section of Identity Theory is edited by Andrew Whitacre with assistance from Drew McNaughton, Sarah Presite, John Madera, and James Warner.
- For conversations with well-known fiction writers, see our author interviews.
- To learn more about getting published, visit our Magic Bullet Q&A for writers.
- View our complete fiction archive.
fiction links
- 2River: On-line since 1996
- 3ammagazine.com
- AGNI
- Atlantic Unbound
- Blithe House Quarterly
- Burning Word
- Caffeine Destiny
- Eleven Bulls
- Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters and Life
- Glimmer Train
- Jack Magazine
- Land-Grant College Review
- The Oyster Boy Review
- Pindeldyboz
- Ploughshares, a literary journal
- storySouth
- Thieves Jargon
- Zoetrope: All-Story
Identity Theory is an online magazine that publishes author interviews, music interviews, original fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, film reviews, a social justice blog, and whatever else seems like a good idea at the time. Learn more, contact us, get our 
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