It was hard keeping anything alive that summer. The heat wave was making the whole town feel like the inside of my uncle’s greenhouse. Air so humid and thick with the smell of Miracle-Gro you felt you might start exhaling begonias any minute. The day had started out 50 degrees but by noon had hit 110...

It was more than she could bear. Being trapped in this place, trapped inside these sanitized walls. Seeing his small, white body lie still was something that every mother of a toddler knows is of the rarest possibility. There he was though, on the couch, directly in front of her eyes, jumping from one...

An oblique bar of light invaded the room. Cassie leaned out of her window and looked toward the sun-polished trees across the road. Clumps of leaves were beginning to burst onto their branches, shining raw and baby green in the sun. On the street below, a man elegantly swung his leg to and fro as if...

Burnside Fiction Editor, Susie Finkbeiner is set to release her debut novel “Paint Chips” as an e-book on January 15 through WhiteFire Publishing. The paperback edition will release on April 15 and is available for pre-order. Today, she shares an excerpt from the first few chapters of the...

(Artwork by Henrietta Paine)   “So what’s in it for you?”   He’s looking right at her, but it feels like through her. The contempt in his tone is almost tangible, as though if she had reached out just as those words left his mouth, she could have dipped her fingers in the venom clinging...

  Espy was born in a far away place called Typhlotic cave. She was born with her eyes closed an no one told her to open them. There was no need to open blind eyes all the bats assumed,  so they didn’t. Espy learned her way around the cave the same way that all of the other bats did, at...

1- We went to the prom together. We ended up in the hospital. In the decade between, we somehow managed to form a family without ever making much of a life. We were normal people, pretending everything was okay. Maria blames the doctors. I blame God. Secretly, we both blame Hailey for dying on us. When...

A Girl, Unknown by Emory Skwara It was dim. She sat on a stool with a beat up acoustic firmly on her lap. Red, blue, and white lights blended on top of her as she pulled out her leather bound journal from her messenger bag. She wore a green and black striped dress, black stockings and a brown jacket....

My Granddad planted a tree when my mom was born. He transplanted the sapling from his childhood home across the state. It was just a normal, average oak tree. But he loved that tree. “When I get to feeling hopeless, I just take a look outside at that old tree,” Granddad would say. “And...

1 They began quite similarly, pulling apart from themselves, dividing rapidly. Both slithered in their respective environs and thrived on the substances surrounding them. Within a very short time they had multiplied to fifty times their size yet they gave no sign of existence to their separate hosts. ~ She...