Fantasy

1. People are generally unfamiliar with our guild’s history. The early founders were literalists. Stole into homes to pilfer grocery lists from scullery maids; broke into college dormitories to swipe…

This is an excerpted chapter from Jim Cheff’s novella Phantom Limb Radio, the first book to be published by 96th of October. The title here is linked to the Amazon…

1. My Brother, Fire When he was a baby, my brother, Fire, was uncontrollable. He’d incinerate his diapers and make his formula boil in the bottle. By age three, he’d…

1Since I am now old and no longer performing any productive labor, you may well wonder how I am able to afford such a beautiful, rare, and valuable object as…

Aricook hurried through the expansive kitchens of his father’s restaurant, but the gleaming tile, mirror shine of copper-bottomed pots, and heady mix of aromas barely registered. He slipped through the crowd of bustling food builders and their assistants and entered the main eatery. The familiar sights and sounds of one hundred and ninety-eight customers chattering like mag-chickens while assaulting the day’s feast failed to ease his worries.

The room in which I found myself was suffocated in decay. Its corners were blurred with concretions of dust and broken shards, or filthy black cobwebs saturated with

In late February, snowdrops slowly lifted their sleepy heads from their cold wet blankets. These flowered alone, waiting patiently for March and the great melting. When the weather began to…