ALT: a cartoon duck is writing in a notebook with a pencil

ALT: a dog is standing on its hind legs in a room with the words cant wait written on the floor .

Broadly defined, the type of fiction we are looking for is “fun”. [Go to Submissions]

They saw the men when they were close to reaching Elmesak; they rode two by two and all six of them were decked in crimson. Yalxi set the bedroll and the pack with their supplies down by the side of t...

A gathering of recent speculative flash & micro fiction, each presenting a tiny-yet-powerful universe. How tiny? About one-thousand words for flash; four-hundred words for micro. The word count…

DELUXE EDITION—a gorgeous hardcover edition featuring bright green sprayed edges, a foil stamp on the casing, and custom endpapers illustrated by the autho...

A piece of birthday cake in Dublin. A red party hat with a snapped elastic band. Limp balloon rags with the number 5 printed on the plastic. A bountiful harvest of wrapping paper. Two aunts, doubled o...

Radiant mice tell me they want to live in my house. It’s night and I’m trying to sleep and I don’t think I want any roommates, not even when they glow and sing a cappella at midnight. You can’t stay here, I say. This is the wrong place for you. The mice show me their feet. Look, they say. We have clever mice feet. We will build temples for you. A wave of frothy mud fills my floor and the mice use their clever little feet to sculpt it into miniature Roman structures; a replica Colosseum, a small-scale Pantheon, a petite aqueduct. They hum ballads while they work and I wonder where they studied architecture. The mice pat the frothy mud into a bust of a scowling emperor. Not Caracalla, I say. He looks so angry. They re-sculpt him into a waterfall that tastes like sanctuary and cotton candy; and they create rosebud roads and starshine bridges and parks filled with velvet pillows; and they sing me disco songs that make my not-so-clever feet tap light, so I tell them it’s not the wrong place for them after all, they can live in my desk drawer, if they want, forever, if they want, as long as they don’t mind the stray paper clips.   --- Myna Chang is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books). Her writing has been selected for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and WW Norton’s Flash Fiction America. Find her at MynaChang.com or on Bluesky at @MynaChang. 'Paperclip Empire' was first published in Gone Lawn, Issue 40 in Spring 2021.