Trigger Warning

Bourgeois Blues

By Andrea Castillo

Is it just me, or has the dystopia felt like a bit of a letdown so far? We’ve been promised nuclear winters and bossy robotic takeovers for some time now. Sleek, fascist stimuli. Who could have anticipated that humanity doesn’t scale?

The Sacred Whore

By Rachel Haywire

The year was 2065. The Sex Workers Collective of America ran the nation. We weren’t allowed to talk to anyone without charging them first. If someone were to compliment us, we had to show them the bill. Allowing someone to be nice to us without asking for payment was a capital offense.

Lyfe

By Ann Sterzinger

In the City of Heaven it was illegal to park on the street’s surface. The City was a moon of Earth Two, and it was too small to waste space on wide roads with side parking. Miranda was only three-eighths Immortal by birth, though her marriage to a full God seemed to have agreed with her.

John Walks Into a Bar

By Ben Arzate

John leaves the private viewing booth that he lives in. He has to walk four miles to leave the booth area and enter the magazine section. He walks past aisles dedicated to amputees in diapers, vintage kiddy porn, car crashes, and horses in Nazi uniforms.

God Burns

By Natasha Maria Phoenix

The march of soldiers and the sadistic joy of inflicting pain on prisoners; the red flood of genocides, the agonizing starvation of a dying child, the disease that spread through lesser nations; I was both the epidemic and the flesh, both the sadist and the victim.

Last Man: The Upgrading

By James LaFond

When mandatory smartphone upgrades came through, Dwayne had dropped off the grid. When the National Chipping Initiative and the Federal Ban on Homelessness came through, Dwayne had gone feral.

Anti-Fragile

By Nick Mamatas

These thoughts are my own, but their origin is not of this body, or to be more precise not wholly of this body; there are other bodies out there in the ætheric Wi-Fi, bodies in states very similar to my own, experiencing side effects identical to my own, and among those bodies are people very much like myself.

Chthonic Escape

By Eian Orange

The door to the bar entrance opened up into a luxurious cannibal suite. These elite cannibals feasted upon the recently deceased as though they were caviar. They had live prize specimens reserved for special display cages, as props if you will.

The Pathos of Proximity

By Mark Dyal

I am still governable: a mild-mannered citizen incapable of surviving without capitalist consumption; after all the books, workouts, and range time; cleared of State sovereignty and freed of any concern for what the masses of people in this country do or think.

Over the Borderline

By Roxxi Wallace

Borderline Personality Disorder had become the norm. Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted had become the new Marilyn Monroe. School shooters were assigned to be our neighbors, just to keep us on our feet.

The Node

By Tito Perdue

Each story had a row of windows, all of them rendered opaque with soot or some other accumulation that effectively formed “mirrors,” as it were, reflecting what was left of the washed-out moon. The usher stood back, giving entrance to both the animal and man.