Fiction

If Holly put a penny in a gum ball machine, gum and a gold plastic ring would come out. At the Holy Names carnival, she’d lay a poker chip on a number, watch the wheel spin, and collect a stuffed animal.“I swear, you are the luckiest kid,” her mom...

When Jinx Rutledge returned to the cell that evening, he sported new state-issue glasses, pencil-point gray with lenses as wide and tall as a child’s fists. The cons called them toucher glasses or Chesters because they fit some image of a pedophile...

Jack has a job.  It’s the sort of job where he doesn’t get to tell many people what to do or what not to do. Say he’s a travel agent or an insurance claim adjuster or a legal clerk, and he’s probably quite good at whatever this job is. Presume that...

“Don’t look now.” I turned to the window and saw a Mercedes parked in the lot. My heart sank. “I told you not to look.” My roommate Romina rolled her eyes—at what, it was always hard to tell. “That thing’s probably worth two years of tuition. So...

Our convoy got back to COP Bowri Tana around 6 pm. The sun was falling and seemed to light the horizon on fire. As we marched from the flight line, I spotted six local nationals, Afghans, praying under the canopy next to the TOC. They were kneeling...

The day the wind came down and brought rain, we were hanging on a guava tree along the hospital road. Our backpacks were filled with fruits. The wind was strong and pushed a cow herd our way. In the distance, the hot steam mixed with dust, and the...

In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s third anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our third annual Editors’ Choice Awards, selected from among the works we published in 2019. Jordan Dotson’s “Chiarascuro” is the...

No child wanted to be sent to The Shredder. It hid in a concrete, windowless structure several blocks from the car towing company, the chicken factory farms, and the E-waste recycling centers. That was where the unwanted kids went: the kids who...

Early in the morning the hallways of the Cancer Institute were so empty and quiet, they seemed nowhere near the crowded city of Belgrade, but in another world. While Slavka cleaned the gray linoleum floor, she felt she was navigating a giant...

I waited for the bus. The first bus didn’t arrive for a while. I waited beneath a blood-red sun, sweating and exhausted. It was the first time in twenty years that I’d stood at a bus stop; the last time was on the last day of October in 2019. Brexit...

I don’t hear the shots anymore , but I can still feel them. I feel them in every movement; each thought and perception is formed by them. I feel quite a lot, at the most dangerous times. Walking into school today, I noticed how the green and...

Minutes on trains are longer than rivers. This, Chiara knows. It’s only two hours from Naples to Rome, but gazing at the grasses and soft vanilla clouds, it feels as if years have passed. Chiara sighs at the glass.“Are you sure we can’t go swimming...

Take a look at this doll, said the puppeteer, indicating one of the many homunculi scattered onstage. Take a look at this doll and try to mistake it for someone you know, anyone made of flesh and blood, perhaps a friend or a relative. Take a look at...

When the knock sounds, she knows she’s not to open the door. Her father has warned about these woods and their inhabitants. The expedience with which the knock travels through the little house reminds her that she is alone in a box made of wood. She...

Becka stretched out flat on the warm driveway, her arms and legs moving up and down on the asphalt, as if making an angel. She wondered what it would be like to have her friends over, make Jiffy Pop, and watch TV. Some of the other families in the...

  1. Hello, this is June Finley of the Internal Revenue Service calling for Dawn and Bill Cramer. I am calling because we have discovered a significant problem with your federal income tax return.  To correct this problem, you must call us back...

Fernanda put her phone down. She was sick of Instagram, Facebook, endless stories of satiated over-the-top opinions; if she saw one more #elenão or #foraPT she would silently lose her mind. It was early on Saturday, one day before the first round of...

For my Ali İsmail, Berkin, and other protestor boys who were killed during Gezi protests during the summer of 2013, in Istanbul. These were peaceful demonstrations protesting the government’s plan to remove Gezi Park, which is one of the few...

The pair of chopsticks had gone underground. So had the teacups and bowls, duck spoons and condiment dishes, teapots and plates. Long came home and did not want them around. “They are trash,” he said. “They are barbaric,” he said over the head of...

When I was nine years old, a woman came to our house. I was alone. My parents were at work, or on some obscure mission concerning allotments or storage units. Our house was piled with junk, which they described as temporary, just until the building...

The bananas were rotting on the factory floor outside of St. Petersburg. In early October, the temperature inside the nearly abandoned building held at just above freezing, too cold for the tropical fruit. Banana skins were greying, developing dark...

In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s second anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our second annual Editors’ Choice Awards. Lorraine Rice’s “Allegiance” is the award-winner in fiction. Here is what Fiction Editor...

Joe Bishop’s high school English teacher posts on Facebook that the body cam footage of his death is no better than a snuff film, and the cop responsible should go to prison for murder. This post ends her relationship with her sister and several of...

They had the number, Lalita divined. Now, sitting with her father and mother at the restaurant, looking at her father’s face, its flat surface smugly composed for once, instead of explosive with rage, Lalita was sure of it. Her parents, having never...

We had been standing in line for hours. Days. Months. It felt like we had been standing since the beginning of thought or reason, for centuries. Some of us had been waiting, every hour, every minute, for two years. The waiting, the desire to vote...

By the time I made it to the school bus, there was one seat left, the one next to Candy. I scanned each row again until Freddy the bus driver, pink and patchy face fuzz, yelled “Take a seat!” Then, a little lower, “Next time you better hustle, girl...

A lonely trout swam in circles among the pebbles in the shallows of the lake, murmuring about fillets. She knew it was unhealthy and pointless to dwell on morbid fantasy. Yet she could not forget. Her nightmare recurred. True, it was a happy fact...

It was July and James, my husband of four months, and I had just driven straight through from Oregon to Chicago. I had lined up a second-year summer internship at a cat hospital in Chicago so that when I graduated from Oregon State’s veterinary...

This story was inspired by a Chinese news report. For decades, the town on the Yangtze River in southern China had been known for its two kinds of clouds. There were the black clouds billowing out of five big chimneys of a cement factory on the...

He knelt on the ice and watched his brother Craig skate the wide oval they had cleared off the flood. On the straights, Craig crouched and stretched and pulled with one arm then the other, his crocheted scarf trailing out behind, then glided into...

Geniuses The boys always planned to be geniuses. Papers spread over the tabletops, numbers on screens. Their gaze has missed something. The girl in a box in the darkness of the closet, hands folded, trinkets worn round her neck motionless. Once...

We think he is somewhere in the White House, but we cannot find him. He was last seen wearing his robe, watching television in the presidential sitting room, flipping through news channels, pausing occasionally upon seeing his likeness. Many of us...

We were so young, my sister and I, both of us still wearing dresses that showed our grubby knees. I don’t know why we joined the crowd that followed our father, who was acting again on one of his “feelings” when he led us to the abandoned...

  Not long after the Loma Prieta earthquake, our collective decided to stage an Invisible Theater performance in the atrium restaurant of a grand hotel in San Francisco’s Financial District. When Eva and I walked in, she nodded to our brother...

In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s first anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our first annual Editors’ Choice Awards. Maria Saba’s story “My First Friend” is the award-winner in Fiction. Here...

  I woke up one morning and my country was gone. It was strange. It had been there the night before, sparking and hissing, but now it was gone. I could feel its absence in the air, which is a feeling like no other. The garden was still there...

  The saddest man in the world lived in a little town at the base of a mountain. It was a pretty town, but nothing much happened there. The townsfolk went about their lives. Sometimes they discussed the saddest man, and shook their heads in sympathy...

—After Italo Calvino and Dorianne Laux When I’m inconsolable, I like to go to The Blanket Room™. A new one just opened at the Maple Heights Mall. They wrap you in a blanket and turn out the lights. Then someone comes in, brushes the hair from your...

I remember very little of my childhood, and less as I grow older, each memory lingering like drops of dew on a mirror dropped, forgotten, in a garden. What do I remember? I remember my brother’s feet beside my face as they pumped up and down against...

Tom had built up some sort of callus so the leg shackle didn’t bother him as much as it used to. Also, the Team had been very accommodating when he asked for the chain to be lengthened. Those few inches meant he could reach the bathroom, so he felt...

The Professor rushes into a small university classroom. Twenty students sit around a large wooden table. The professor is ten minutes late; she appears rattled and as though she has not slept. Professor: Class. So. Hello. I know we have many...

It was her last day, the last hours she’d spend a full night in that box. The gel on her chapped hands, the roar of traffic from the E-ZPass lanes. Was she ever really here? In a matter of time even the memory of the tollbooth would lose the smell...

Around the time of the election, I started writing mostly square fictions about the president-elect. It began with one a day, then went to two, then three, then more. They were short because he has (we are told by many who know him) a small...

There was a time where I was breaking a lot of things I’d fixed, which is to say I was wasting second chances. I smoked myself right out of a position when the regional manager caught me puffing in the stockroom. Then when I found a job at a...

They have not arrived. You are waiting for them. The parking lot is dark and it is November, so your arms feel hard and fragile in the cold. It is nine o’clock, and you are all gathering here to send your children off on a field trip. The bus is...

Earlier, in a bar on La Brea, some kid had stared him down. Six-thirty on a Wednesday, not quite (not yet) the dinner hour, and rain flecked the small square windows of the place in dots of light. He’d been with an old friend, small mercy of the...