RSS 2.0 Feed of the 100 Most Recent Short Stories Featured on PortlandFiction.Net, The Online Literary Journal of The Portland Fiction Project

The Portland Fiction Project:

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:01:55 MST

Fourteen and things are violent; at school, with friends, in life.

At large.

Just not at home.

Only not at home.

Things are violent to me.

Thoughts are violent to me.

People. Thoughts. I’m drinking…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Had I known it was going to be The End of Things I would have tried to put more of the afternoon’s specifics to memory.

I don’t remember, for example, what you were wearing. A dress I’d guess, because I’m almost certain of…

The Portland Fiction Project:

A stone woman on a park bench, with sad eyes and an almost-smile, impassively watched the ducks swim by. I stopped, thinking she looked like decent company for an overcast day with a chance of rain, and because I was alone, and because she…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I wear my sad shoes to work when I feel like jumping off cliffs. They are brown, and flat, with boxy toes. What they mean is that I am a liar and they are like tiny cages, somehow keeping me from being me, who…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Brian felt a sting when he shook her hand. It was nothing more than static electricity.

“Welcome aboard,” she said as she closed the latch behind him. “I’ll be your pilot. My name is Taylor Rubard. Let me know if you need anything.”

Taking…

The Portland Fiction Project:

That bright blue scarf. It was almost cornflower blue and looked bold and confident. The middle aged woman I sit beside in biology class had it. It was one of those ones that feel soft and feminine and cost about forty dollars because maybe…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Just ask me. Please. Whatever it is I’ll do it if that’s what’s stopping you from asking, wondering whether or not I’ll do it, because I will, whatever it is I will. I tell people when they ask and even sometimes when they don’t…

The Portland Fiction Project:

They always liked her hair the best. Fine, white-blonde curls that corkscrewed from her head and circled her face like a halo. Hannah never saw anything admirable about those curls, not even when she stood in her pajamas in front of the bathroom mirror…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It is another night, just like the night before, and just like tomorrow night will be. When it comes. When it came; summer sticking in the air, and night hanging on the edges of light turning red. Deep and still and waiting. While we…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Peter didn’t end up going to his ten-year high school reunion. He had received a letter detailing the event, a month in advance, from a former classmate who had been kind enough to add a brief hand-written note at the bottom of the page—It…

The Portland Fiction Project:

When we break up you give me a book and say, “Read this. I’m going to read it too,” you say. “We’ll read it together, by which I mean at the same time, and when we’re finished reading it’ll be time for us to…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I have completely forgotten that it is Christmas Eve, but the dinnertime decor they’ve got going in the hotel lobby clues me in. For a Muslim populace they’ve got the right spirit, even if they show an odd regional understanding of some Christmas standards:…

The Portland Fiction Project:

People call. The people who call ask me how I’m doing, if I’m still operative. They say, “We just want you to know we’re thinking of you,” and “Let us know if there’s anything we can do.” They’re amazed by how well I’m doing.…

The Portland Fiction Project:

“Every good thing takes time,” grandma echoed like an ancient, and I felt like slapping her in the face with my twelve year old hand. Grandma smiled at me and patted me on the shoulder. I then forgot how to keep time. The…

The Portland Fiction Project:

When we broke up you gave me a book and said, “Read this.” You gave it to me with one hand and another of the same book in the other hand and said, “I’m going to read it too. We’ll read it together, by…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I chug down the last little bit of a glass of Yellow Tail Cabernet with my feet up on the coffee table and the credits to All In The Family rolling down the television. Ricky is sitting next to me.

“Guess what I’ve got,” Ricky…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I had inherited a small sum of money—enough to live off of reasonably for a couple months or recklessly for a couple weeks, and because I was young and desperate, chose the latter. I wanted beaches, reasonably priced luxury accommodations, and not too many…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Haydn Jones held a group interview. The candidates all shook hands and eyed each other like they were about to fight to the death. So Haydn Jones instructed them to fight to the death, offering the job to the last man or woman standing.…

The Portland Fiction Project:

A long while back, twenty years if you must know, this bustling little city was just a trading post in a clearing by the river that got flooded every spring. No one actually lived down there, by the river. We would walk down (or…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The events surrounding the tsunami that hit the main ARO campus along the Oregon Coast in early December of last year have caused a great deal of controversy. Dr. Skinner’s sudden departure from our staff and the scientific community in general and his refusal…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Some liked prismacolors best, for their smooth vibrancy, but Jake preferred the colored pencils. They were old and precise and when they malfunctioned, they didn’t leak colors in unexpected blobs, they just ceased to work and he respected that.

He spent two hours of…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Samson’s father is in the passenger seat because he’s just in town visiting, doesn’t know this town like he knows this town, and with the way he looks sitting there in the rental compact, a very large man in a very small seat, Samson’s…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Driving down Burnside that time of night had become a part of my routine. It had gotten so she didn’t have to call. I just went there. Right around when I passed the Doug Fir, I always expected to see neon lights or…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I stood outside of my home looking at the sky, unable to go in. Brown houses and gray streets and head down, because when I look up long enough I feel like I will just ever so lightly and then ever so violently…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She was a pretty girl, all in red, except for her jeans which were still blue, and so I said, “I think you’re the kind of girl I could marry.” She didn’t say anything, but turned and looked out the window, so I figured…

The Portland Fiction Project:

We could see him moving around in the dark, lit only by the churning light of the television. He was bald, and his naked gut hung over his pajamas as he reached down and picked up what was probably a remote, because he held…

The Portland Fiction Project:

That day, Betsy and John were both home from work because it was a Sunday. Betsy scrubbed a casserole dish from the night before in the kitchen sink. John sat in the living room reading the Classifieds, looking for work. I was in the…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It’s not like it’s the first time she’s left him in the car, not like it was a hot day and she didn’t roll down the windows or anything. For one thing, if it’d been a hot day she would have rolled down…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Reconnaissance Report 001

10/18/2009 1945hrs

Task Organization: Eliminate target, ~~Marguerite~~, with minimal damage to target and operative and drawing minimal attention from the subject, ~~Ryan~~, of the overall mission.

OPERATIVE: Colleen

LOCATION: Long -122.62943 Lat 45.51087

ACTIVITY: Reconnoiter terrain surrounding target, assess risks, hazards, options,…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I never knew you, but I cannot bear the thought of you languishing in the dark, doomed to stare forever at rotting things and the dust of what you were. Down in that stale place, beneath the clink of my shovel, you shed your cocoon…

The Portland Fiction Project:

We had decided to break up but to go on living together because we both still loved the apartment and the rent was more than either of us could afford alone; thinking the love we shared for the apartment would be enough to get us…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth installment of “These Are The Stories.” Click here to read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV or even Part V.

The narrator dug through a cardboard box. He…

The Portland Fiction Project:

In the future, there will be an epidemic sickness unlike any other disease to afflict humankind. The medical community will not recognize it as a sickness according to any definition. The pathology will not be associated with vomiting, fatigue, headaches, impairment to senses, cognitive disorientation,…

The Portland Fiction Project:

John was a tiny little boy of 5 and every time I saw him at his foster home he had snot running from his nose to his chin. His limbs were thin from early malnutrition, his hair spotty. He was inexplicably behind developmentally, with tiny…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Here we are in the same place we always end up: your living room, with the back door open to let the smoke out and a bottle of wine on the table between us. I can’t tell what time it is because the clock…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I hear the phone ring as I’m heading out the door to pick up my son from school and I think at first it can’t be that important and I’m going to be late if I answer it, but then I think it might…

The Portland Fiction Project:

-inhale-

I was tired but not sleepy so I bought a bottle of iced coffee from the corner store drank it while walking down Xena Avenue threw back my head to let the last drop ping off my throat then I was…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It was foggy now, but the rain had let up, which was nice, since even under the large red cedar with its thick and closely layered branches, fat wet drops had fallen. On his shoulders, down his collar, on his legs and in his…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The room was sage green, in order to calm, and he sat there on the couch weeping. This was the box that was designated for emotions that were elsewhere inappropriate and I breathed and looked at him. Letting the crying sit in the room. There…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I thought of you today. I pictured how you would look now, all grown up, with your hair cut short now that you’ve outgrown your butt-rock phase, but still moppish on top because there was never anything anyone could do about those curls. You’ve…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth installment of “These Are The Stories.” Click here to read Part I, Part II, Part III or even Part IV.

The narrator leaned with both elbows on the counter, staring at…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The women have numbered cards, one to forty-five, pinned to their chests and parade in a loosely spaced single file through the dimly lit ballroom. Most of them are wearing form-fitting low-slung short-skirted business suits and high heels. To this number add thirteen men including me…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The wind careening off the back bumper of Lisa’s pickup truck knocks on my face with the brim of my baseball cap—the one I borrowed from Leonard when we went camping last summer and wore ever since, to keep my hair out of my…

The Portland Fiction Project:

If you could talk, you might say that my vision is somewhat limited. Your mother never did, but you might someday. I would use the word simple. I watch you lying there, perfectly simple. Perfect and simple, at once. And I think there…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I heard them say it, my name, mixed in a conversation,“Rebecca is ilk,” and my ears listened to them while still maintaining my own conversation with the girl sitting next to me. I looked into my meal, the food somehow now an object sitting on…

The Portland Fiction Project:

He knows the address from the repetition of filling out envelopes: ninety-six monthly checks, seven birthday and Christmas cards, and a few more here and there, out of the blue, checking in, still thinking about you cards. But he has never seen the building…

The Portland Fiction Project:

On the way from my desk to the bathroom I hear four conversations. On my way from the bathroom to the parking lot, I hear those same four conversations, and if I try I could easily convince myself that those conversations would refresh and…

The Portland Fiction Project:

We’re sitting in the basement watching the light flicker across the floor; from the window to the cement tiles, cold on my feet, grey under my feet, casting shadows of weeds from the window. My favorite time of day not to be alone. I’m sitting…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Look at her. All wet and wicked green, trembling in her glass, waiting for my lips to open and my tongue to lick at her, softly at first and then more hungrily, until I toss her back and she slides down my throat, thick…

The Portland Fiction Project:

“Darling, you can be sure I meant dipshit as a term of endearment.”

Like hell she did. She meant it like she meant everything else she said.

So for the rest of the day, I sat back and tried not to be there. One hundred…

The Portland Fiction Project:

If I had a nickel for every time someone said I love you I’d be the richest man in the world, I think, but if I had a nickel for every time someone said I love you to me, I don’t think I’d have…

The Portland Fiction Project:

When I throw the old gifts people have given me and the things I bought for myself that I don’t actually like into garbage bags and take them to Goodwill, I imagine nice people buying them. Single moms looking for something nice to wear…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She let him kiss her, outside of the restaurant where they had met for dinner, but only as a courtesy. She had decided, even before deciding on her order—Pad Kee Mao, with tofu, nothing to drink—that there would be no second date. Consequently, she…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She twists her hair around her finger and then sticks the end in her mouth. She realizes what she’s doing and drops her hair and looks around the restaurant to see if anyone is watching her. A man by the window eating with his son…

The Portland Fiction Project:

They had an arrangement of sleeping together each night that was comfortable and yet also misleading. She would come into his room without knocking, partially undress by the door, and then slip under the covers beside him in bed. They would exchange a few words…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I have decided to marry her, despite obvious faults[1].

Although I am not the handsomest of men, it should be made known that in certain settings[2] I have been known to seduce a…

The Portland Fiction Project:

When my mother stepped through the door of The Green Man, I thought I might lose my temper completely, but fortunately when I followed her into the gloom of my favorite haunt, no one from the college was there. I should have known. It was…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I was thinking about Yolanda when the smartass with the giant teardrop shaped clown face painted on the back windshield merged into my lane. The yellow face was composed of enough negative space to adequately see the road behind. The smile, accounting for two thirds…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She’d had the last word, ultimately. Now there was no arguing, no opportunities to score a point, to make her concede, to get her to admit that he’d been right all along. It was intolerable.

Mike had been arguing with his twin sister, Maddy, on…

The Portland Fiction Project:

On and off, that whole day, I thought about how I would kill the wasps.

She hadn’t paid me. I had worked hard for her. I was behind on my bills. A check written to my therapist would bounce any day. We unloaded the truck…

The Portland Fiction Project:

After the eighth doctor’s appointment I started getting desperate. The rash on my leg was getting bigger; its redness pulsing. They kept saying allergy, it’s an allergy to something in your environment. But the prescription strength Benadryl didn’t shake it and I couldn’t keep my hand…

The Portland Fiction Project:

“I don’t give a good goddamn what you said I said,” I say. “I didn’t say that.” This is what I say. You don’t say anything with your mouth. Maybe because your mouth is too pretty to say bad things to me,…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of “These Are The Stories.” Click here to read Part I or Part II or even Part III.

The narrator frowned. He held the phone to his ear in one hand and…

The Portland Fiction Project:

When her husband Bill died (suddenly, in an accident), Maggie was left in a big house that she alone could not keep. At the funeral, clutching hands and seated side-by-side in black dresses, it had been her sister’s idea for her to move in. It…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Dominic, born at midnight in a snowstorm eight days before Christmas, didn’t take prisoners, wouldn’t think of taking prisoners, and might be insulted—both on your behalf and his, if you were to surrender and expect to be taken prisoner. Dominic had learned a lesson early on…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The telephone rings. I’m in my underwear at my desk and the phone’s right there next to me even though I’m not expecting anyone to call nor can I imagine especially wanting to talk to anyone, except maybe Virginia or Beatrice or Josephine or one of…

The Portland Fiction Project:

We agreed on the train.

Travel across a continent by plane makes you miss too much of the in-betweens; slams wherever you’ve left from directly into wherever you’re headed to and doesn’t give you a true sense of distance, or of the particular brand of…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I liked the mornings, early still, with light like a handful of bees buzzing to the East—the beginnings of a kindly and crucial daily pollination that found me hopeful. Which is as good an answer as any other to the question of…

The Portland Fiction Project:

We arrive late the morning of Brian’s burial. Dave is disgustingly cheerful, and I repeatedly have to remind him to stand back from the mourners as we watched the earth receive our friend. I envy Brian a little; real death seemed a kindness, now that…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Well that explains why Josh has been walking around giving me the “shit eye” for the past couple of weeks. I had no idea that this is why I haven’t seen him around.

I’m shocked that my words have been twisted like this.…

The Portland Fiction Project:

See, I wasn’t sure if anyone would speak to me at this joint considering the recent rumors. I figure everyone knows that Julie and I broke up and I guess I’m a little sketchy about this place since it’s her damn posse home. It…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The store clerk said, “Are you enjoying your day?” Mary stuffed the two bottles of spring water compactly into her purse as she said, “No. But I will be in an hour or so.” Mary was incorrect. In her car, she repeated to herself…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I sat on the sidewalk, two days later, waiting for a stranger to pass. I didn’t have anyone particular in mind, but was hoping for a woman that looked like a grandmother, who, upon seeing me with my head to my knees, my face…

The Portland Fiction Project:

So I went out with Chrissy two nights ago and had a couple of drinks—we had a really good time. We took shrooms and ended up in this underground village and I felt like I didn’t want to leave. Like there were a thousand…

The Portland Fiction Project:

For a while there you were the king of a lot of shit that was cool in the underground scene we all wanted to be a part of. Under your bands’ Myspace “who you want to meet” profile subheading you wrote, “a thousand people…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Last year, Dave arranged for us to spend our annual trip on the private island of a rich client. Not this year. Times are tough. This year we’re backpacking through the desert. I backpack a lot anyway, but it’s hard on Dave. Every time…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It’s nine o’clock and I’m not wearing any pants and I can’t remember taking off my pants though of course I did because clearly I’m not wearing pants now, or else maybe she took them off, which is entirely possible since she’s not wearing…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The black flies didn’t deter the tourists. This was the coast and they wanted coast food. It was part of the show. Women with sweaty babies and their uninterested men waved to wait staff, trying to get their attention, to be seated. A family…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Hugh held on to the tree branch with his elbows as the lava singed the trail, erasing it one shrub, one rock, one leaf at a time. He would stay there until it hardened, and then he would find a way back to…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The business of lies requires work and I work best in my underwear. At my desk, pen in hand, lines below me, I think, reflect, today I’m going to fall in love, I say, and then outside the window I see a young woman…

The Portland Fiction Project:

“You better get that baby to the tan man,” Jenny’s sister said in response to her first viewing of Jenny’s vampiresque baby. It was at that moment that something snapped in Jenny’s head and made her think about why we tan babies. It wasn’t the…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of “These Are The Stories.” Click here to read Part I or Part II.

A toilet flushed and the narrator emerged from the lavatory, wiped his brow with a red towel and…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The sign said PLEASE PREPARE TO STOP in black letters over orange. Nell noticed it. She squeezed her sunglasses even tighter against her face and said nothing.

Caleb muttered upwind, “Please prepare to suck my balls.” He spoke inaudibly when he desired to say something…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Our hero, Nightfiend, paced through his dark lair like a restless animal, throwing the silent computers along one wall a deadly glance. His feet brushed the floor soundlessly toward his vehicles and the automated door. He ran a hand over the…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I am in E G Y P T—that land with a name like one row of an eye chart—as a tourist.

In line at the customs checkpoint I watch as they rifle through a young man’s music collection. They want a quarter for every…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It was a typical grey day, mild and slightly damp, when he crossed the street and made his way through the archway of the entry plaza and up to the ticket counter. He flashed his member card to the tired lady in the booth and…

The Portland Fiction Project:

One day she found a purple playground ball sitting on her balcony. Clouds and pale purple swirls. It was labeled so it could be returned, apartment 304. She picked up it and pushed the vinyl to her cheek.

“The only thing that anyone ever really wants…

The Portland Fiction Project:

If you boil an earlobe in broth, baste it with melted butter and then bake it at low heat, it takes on a consistency not unlike sticky rice. Except not as sweet. Which brings me to the point; a fork and knife is insufficient to…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Optoperspiphilia: An addiction to the sting of sweat in my eye. I say ‘my’ rather than the all-inclusive because I made up the word, and if you’ve got similar proclivities, come up with your own damned word. I should qualify that; it gives me pleasure when…

The Portland Fiction Project:

This is the second installment of “These Are The Stories” If you haven't read part one, you can do so here.

The narrator stepped back. He wiped his brow, reached for one of the bottles of water, gulped from it, and…

The Portland Fiction Project:

My mom calls every day to check up on me. Usually in the morning. I always answer, just because I know she’d freak out if I didn’t. She asks me how I’m feeling and what I’m doing and whether I ate something yet. She worries…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Perhaps the story starts slowly.

Perhaps at a window pane sits an author, head on hand, hand on arm, arm on table. Perhaps there is rain falling down, and she looks at it, gray faced; gray room; gray matter. Nothing is light…

The Portland Fiction Project:

A giant insect scuttled against my thigh, its abdomen rumbling, probably trying to give birth. It was stuck, and did not make any progress up or down my thigh. I was gripping Papa Smurf’s handlebars for dear life, tearing down Northwest Lovejoy at what felt…

The Portland Fiction Project:

A master of the universe does not use an appliance until they can conceive in their mind what that appliance might have looked like on paper before being released for manufacturing. Surer still is she who can look further back and imagine the failed designs…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She drove grimly across the bridge and continued east until she got to the Burger King, where she veered right onto Foster Road. Within a mile, the lots got bigger and the buildings got smaller in the way that indicates that, though the city limits…

The Portland Fiction Project:

A tailgate has a good feel to it: a brooding country song, a bottle in your hand, a woman in your arms…

+

Some things hurt slowly, building up over time / I don’t want to see you, to know you…

The Portland Fiction Project:

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” the little man spluttered, “Ada left me all her costume jewelry when she died. She’d been collecting it for years, wore the stuff around the house while she vacuumed and pretended she was the Queen of…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It is nice outside but he stays in. If I were to go out, he tells himself, I would only end up spending money, and this he cannot afford. His staying in is in this light a sacrifice, which is easy for him to get…

The Portland Fiction Project:

One day a girl came home from war. A soldier girl. A pretty girl. With long red hair that was dark red hair, that was almost brown and sometimes black. And it looked quite nice when it was in the light. And she thought, “I…

The Portland Fiction Project:

People ask me why I got into comp-fighting. They never ask how. The phrasing is always why, like it’s supposed to be linked to something else. Like it’s something I had to do, and not in a romantic sense. They’re looking for an instigator: it’s…