The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
“Thieves” by Len Kuntz
Ohmygodilovethisstory. Seriously. I realized while reading it that good online writing fights the browsing consciousness. It gives you something in every phrase, every four or five words there has to be a word that keeps my eyes in that tab. Prevents me from reading my email. Prevents me from checking Facebook. Prevents me from attending to a Gchat. These are the good online writers. The wheat, not that chaff. The ones we should aspire to be like (if we aspire to online writing). Another thing: good online writers publish everywhere. They write a lot. In this way they shan’t be ignored. You’ll find them under every rock, beneath every tree, turning the corner on every avenue of the Internet. Len Kuntz is a good online writer and this story is a good online story. –David Backer
“The Eighth Minute” by Cindy Rosmus
It’s not easy to be disturbing without being vulgar, but it’s stories that upset us that often leave the most lingering images. THE EIGHTH MINUTE is all about those lingering images, both in the themes of the story and in its effect on the reader. This is a story that will sear itself into the audience, reflected by memory onto the world around. Once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to stop seeing it. That’s a story worth taking a look at. –Matt Funk
“This Red Truck” by Sarah Rose Etter
Dogzplot publishes some of the flashiest flash fiction. Its fare is stories of no more than 200 words, and the stuff is typically a little (and sometimes a lot) warped. With so little runway afforded them, the stories barely take off, but there’s a lot of colored smoke and, yes, flashy maneuvering before they run aground in a storm of sparks. From an editorial perspective, they can also be viewed, at their best, as the end-results of serial refinements, meticulously, obsessively reduced to their vitalmost pith. Take “This Red Truck,” for example. Notice what’s left when Ms. Sarah Rose Etter trims away all of the bloody fat, has the needless orts and offal hauled away and hoses off the 103 words that remain. –Ryan Nelson
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