Stories
Short Fiction by Brent Atkinson
“He didn’t know if souls existed, but if they did, he wondered if the souls of those people had been trapped down there in the reservoir on the other side. He wondered if his own lost and rearranged memories were submerged in his brain in a similar way. Maybe they still existed, floating around just outside his ability to consciously recall them, trapped behind a wall of stardust.
Or, maybe they never really existed in the first place, not in a way that a person can actually hold onto. Maybe memories were just former versions of ourselves that were endlessly, simultaneously, being born and killed in each instant. Maybe the separation between life and death was not a binary, but the two states danced on the same plane, divided by nothing more than illusory veils.
In other words, maybe a soul had nothing to do with any of it. Maybe it was all just energy and matter, matter and energy in a constant state of transition, transformation, a secular, spontaneously-occurring form of transubstantiation. ”
Published in Wild Roof Journal, January 2024
Cover art by Sara Baker Michalak
“Do you ever get so lonely that your stomach hurts?”
…
“Santa Claus always gets the credit for delivering Christmas gifts, but it was tired, overworked bastards like me making sure everything got there on time. It wasn’t reindeer getting us there either; it was a 13-speed, 500-horsepower white Freightliner pulling a dry van, and rather than shouting ho-ho-ho and whipping reins, we were throwing gears and blowing our horns at assholes in beemers cutting us off at every exit.”
Published in BULL, November 20, 2023
Photo of truck by Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash
“I wondered if, while in that zombie-like state, she did have memories from the night before. Not memories she’d remember when sober, but memories from the last time she was high. Kind of like some fully-immersive video game. I wondered if things would pick up where she’d left off the previous night, as if the pills and the booze were a portal to another world, another dimension where she lived a completely separate existence, the two states of consciousness both distinct and complete, the memories from each never to cross over with the other.” Click to keep reading >>>
“Dead bouquets of Russian thistle were stacked up against it. Fucking tumbleweeds. I’d burn them all tomorrow. The wind held a steady breeze, somehow both cool and warm at the same time. A dusty haze on the horizon made the sunset a concoction of pink, orange, and yellow, the hue softening and enlarging the sun that looked almost red in the center, making it seem enormous, violent, and beautiful.”
“He turned around, still caught in his own embrace, and stumbled his way back to the warmth of the cabin. When he got there he wrapped himself in blankets and went to the fireplace. He stared at the journal for a moment, picked it up, and tossed it in. When the pages caught they burned brightly, streamers of smoke simultaneously lifting from the binding, sinewy and black. He felt a fleeting urge to reach in and pull it from the flames. Instead, he laid down on the hearth, a couple feet from the fire, and watched the pages burn.”