Short fiction thread

Mikey · December 23, 2015, 11:37pm

Talk about short fiction you’ve read, talk about short fiction in general. I just re-read this because it was mentioned in an article:

Mikey · December 24, 2015, 12:35am

http://strangehorizons.com/2015/20151221/kingfisherbees-f.shtml

Tulpa · December 24, 2015, 12:45pm

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/tourist.htm

I loved this one. It reads like if a Kelly Link short story remotely lived up to the hype surrounding her work.

Mikey · December 24, 2015, 10:13pm

Man I really like Kelly Link! Her stories are weird, and I guess that’s enough for me these days.

jahoolopy · January 11, 2016, 10:17pm

I read this a while ago and it’s really stuck with me.

Greg Egan’s “Learning to Be Me”

Mikey · January 14, 2016, 2:59am

Mikey · February 3, 2016, 2:02am

wourme · February 25, 2016, 1:34am

Altmann's Tongue

by Brian Evenson

After I had killed Altmann, I stood near Altmann’s corpse watching the steam of the mud rising around it, obscuring what had once been Altmann. Horst was whispering to me, “You must eat his tongue. If you eat his tongue, it will make you wise,” Horst was whispering. “If you eat his tongue, it will make you speak the language of birds!” I knocked Horst down and pointed the rifle, and then, as if by accident, squeezed the trigger. One moment I was listening to Horst’s voice, his eyes brilliant–“the language of birds”–and the next I had killed him. I stared at the corpse next to Altmann’s corpse. It had been right to kill Altmann, I thought. Given the choice to kill or not to kill Altmann, I had chosen the former and had, in fact, made the correct choice. We go through life at every moment making choices. There are people, Altmann among them, who, when you have sent a bullet through their skull, you know you have done the right thing. It is people like Altmann who make the rest of it worthwhile, I thought, while people like Horst, when killed, confuse life further. The world is populated by Altmanns and Horsts, the former of which one should riddle with bullets on the first possible occasion, the latter of which one should perhaps kill, perhaps not: Who can say? I felt remarkably calm. I prided myself that moment on my self-composure, taking a minute to sit down next to the two corpses, Altmann and Horst, and to feel the calm to its greatest extent. This calm, I supposed, was not the result of killing Horst but, as one might expect, of killing Altmann. There are two types of people, I thought–type Horst and type Altmann. All people are either Horst or Altmann. I am the sole exception. I repeated the phrase sole exception, alternating it with unique exception, trying to decide which was the better, unable to decide. I flew blackly about, smelling my foul feathers and flesh. I stuttered, spattered a path through the branches of trees, sprung fluttering into blank sky.

Mikey · June 15, 2016, 8:37pm

http://ichorfalls.chainsawsuit.com/

Mikey · June 16, 2016, 5:26pm

tibyz · July 11, 2016, 11:02pm

ray bradbury’s “the fog horn”

Mikey · September 9, 2017, 1:03pm

http://maryrobinettekowal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/evilrobotmonkeyMRK.pdf

Mikey · September 9, 2017, 1:43pm

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/yu_04_11/

rasterradio · December 29, 2017, 7:58pm

Mikey · December 30, 2017, 5:25pm

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5875

Mikey · January 30, 2018, 3:12pm

gary · January 30, 2018, 5:57pm

Not the best read during lunch, but wow

Mikey · January 30, 2018, 9:34pm

Body horror, web 2.0 horror, existential dread - the works!

Mikey · March 16, 2018, 4:57pm

File under: short fiction that could make a pretty good game

Alyx · March 18, 2018, 12:41pm

Are there any other Borges fans here? I find him to be memorable in a subtle way, his stories just seem to drift back into mind from time to time. La biblioteca de Babel more then others. https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabel

I’m curious how y’all find and consume your short fiction.
I got on a short horror stories kick a while back and was printing PDFs to read:
I love the story Far Below by Robert Barbour Johnson
The Shambler from the Stars by Robert Bloch is also a really good tale.
Burial of the Rats by Bram Stoker, plays to his usual strengths as a writer, and is worth checking out.

More recently I started listening to Levar Burton Reads

I’ve been looking up the authors of the pieces I like. Which is how I found this lovely piece;
https://www.tor.com/2013/02/20/the-water-that-falls-on-you-from-nowhere/