Fiction of the Day

Trial Run

Issue 239, Spring 2022

I pitched through the lobby door and then, as I caught my breath, stood looking back at the storm. It was bad out there. The city had been reduced to dim outlines and floating lights; snow moved down Nineteenth Street in waves. I beat it from my hat and coat, knocked my boots together. Under those high ceilings, each sound reverberated. Only the emergency lights were on, there was no one at the front desk, all the elevators in the bank sat open and waiting. And in a fit of hope, I thought there might not be, in all the building, even one other soul.

Though I hadn’t hit that button, the elevator stopped on nine: silence, nothing but cubicles in the faint light of an alarm panel. When the doors slid open again on fourteen I saw Manny Mintauro, our security guard, like a stone slab behind his podium. Half his face was in shadow. My heart fell at the sight of him.

“Sup, bro,” he said, deep and grave.

The elevator doors closed behind me. “Hey, Manny.” Snow dropped from my jeans onto the carpet. “Thought it might just be me today.

The Ceremony

By Sam Pink

It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing.

Chandelier

By Andy Plattner

I was standing on the slick concrete floor of the barn hall, smoking a cigarette, waiting for Clement. It was four-thirty in the morning, and the dew on the roadside grass leading to the barn sparkled in the moonlight.

The Old Woman

By Sarah Plimpton

On the edge of the leaf a line of light, of yellow light born over the green escaped over the side catch it with a finger and then a hand he brought it up to his eye and put it through, bouncing on the ground the uneven road cracked the direction and he followed into the garden transparent and shiny to the sun.

Was That the Moon?

By R. D. Pohl

Was that the moon? None of my business. And anyway I’m myopic. Third grade. I remember. Things growing dim. Chalk lines fading like runic characters. The fluorescence. My classmates’ faces glowing,

A Silent Movie

By David Polk

As she enters, it all but caresses her, the oval mirror, the luminous, tightly drawn curtains, and her shadow, an anonymous lady-in-waiting who brushes the snow from her heartshaped fur collar.

Decor

By Murray Pomerance

“Listen,” Trudy Kay had Ettie Savage on the telephone and she was breathing somewhat more forcefully than normal. “About your living room. You’ll remember I was talking to you the other day. I want you to know

The Ninth Life

By Murray Pomerance

For what our friend Madame de Rocattefours, herself gaining all simplicities with age, calculated to be almost a month, the cat had been languishing; as the days flooded with spring and nervously passed it took pleasure in sitting to watch the light stream through the bank of laced windows, its nostrils flaring and acquiescing.

Four Short Texts

By Francis Ponge

There is much to say about soap. Precisely every thing that it tells about itself until the complete disappearance, the exhaustion of the subject. This is just the object suited to me.

Soap