brief + incorrect

The man across the table is perfect. The name of the man beside her is difficult to remember. Fiction by Rachel Beth.

Laura thinks he has a lover. He wants to be a fish. The costume is rented; the sea has been gone for a thousand years.

A quarter million people in a room. Half of them are you. You’d like to discuss this with yourself, if you could find someone you recognize. Fiction by Russ Bickerstaff.

“It is remarkably easy to break divine will.” The god needs praise. Its keeper has learned how little will suffice. Fiction by Callin Naddy

Jeffrey Zable’s public figure tries to keep everyone pleased while saving for whatever employment comes after.

They’re on their way

He bought the mirror for its medieval frame. The dark circles and unfamiliar expression must be defects in the glass. A story by Clark Zlotchew.

He resented their diction, their privilege, their confidence. He wanted all of it. Oskar Callahan on writing until the envy runs out and having nothing of his own to say.

The apartment looks robbed. Starla is still there, sitting among the things she has searched. Whatever she’s looking for, she knows it isn’t here. Short fiction by Richard A Shury

“Where plants took root stands rebar” Anthony David Vernon writes a changing landscape: busier roads, identical homes, commercial tiles. The sand will shift again.

Four submission windows a year. Playlists that might bring someone back to a story. Names read out with a school-assembly feeling. Plus our Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net nominations. We’re all A students.

The spider in the bathroom has seen it all and snubbed it all. “Medications failed, but mutual pain helped.” A poem by Tamizh Ponni VP

A father calls 911 about his son’s transformation. Rachel Friedman’s darkly comic flash fiction explores the limits of “just puberty.”

A darkly comic story by David Gilbert: a digitized billionaire, a hacker in a war-scarred country, and shoes falling from the sky.

This happens once in a lifetime @bsky.app

Gerty the Great seems too kind a name for nausea. Miranda Jensen tries to write an uninvited companion into the margins.

And honored to learned that "A Movie," one of the first pieces published at @briefincorrect.bsky.social, has been nominated for a Best of the Net:

The fox may have cracked the code. The squirrels dispute it. The owls would like a grant. Word is getting around, although no one has established which word. New work by mryoung

Ndukwe goes to midnight service planning to steal the speakers. The pastor tries to push him down in prayer. Neither intends to give way. New fiction by Ekenedirichukwu

brief + incorrect is booked through January and publishing M/W/F. Submissions are paused while I catch up; I plan to reopen in December or January. I’m also editing NO-WIN, with hopes of finishing it by late January. Thanks for making all of this possible.

“They pose in family photos, passed down through generations.” Something is wrong with the children. Susan R. Morritt gives us the troubling possibility that the family photograph knows more than the family does.

Existential accessories. Search party favors. A snow globe from Novo Nordisk. Son House’s Holy Bible. A horseshoe crab automaton. Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s medical diploma. Malvolio has come up for an express purpose.

T-Rex can hold the taco. He cannot eat the taco. The algorithm sees potential.

Amber sells flood insurance. Every year, the tide enters her home. This time, only six inches remain between the water and the ceiling when someone knocks on the door.

A soldier threw a letter to his wife into the English Channel. He died two days later. Eighty-five years passed before a fisherman found the bottle and carried the letter to the same address, where the soldier’s daughter still lived.

A child searches the keychain rack for her name while ordinary girls hold proof that they have been seen. Years later, the sound of those metal names remains tangled with the jangle of a belt buckle.

Hallucination or ghost, fictional creation or creator, Perdue leaves Zlotchew with a profoundly disturbing possibility: perhaps writers do not invent their characters. Perhaps the characters invent them. And then there is the brown leather-bound book dated 1835.

A rusty nail, a dead horse’s stolen bones, the Bell Witch, Waterloo, poisonous wallpaper, Oscar Wilde, syphilis, Baudelaire. One fact develops complications.

Circles of language with no particular interest in letting you out.

A funeral director. A handsome widower. A dead wife who won’t keep quiet.

Brendan Clancy is reading about time. His audience is leaving in dribs and drabs. The narrator is disgusted by their impatience. Then Clancy announces a second reading. The audacity of the man.

During lunch, an android criticizes a man’s eating habits. The man responds by reconsidering the proper role of AI in his life and writing.

Dyuti and Indra disagree. Then the night, the bed, a reader, the words, a poet, the story, its title, time, the narrator, and the author all weigh in.

She wore the aqua dress because it circled her waist just right and made her red hair pop. All day at school, she leaned forward, smiling, hand raised, dying to be noticed. At home, she discovered that she had been.

John Lennon is dead. Dad is angry about Baxter at The Christian Book Emporium, Mum is flicking crumbs, and the cream of mushroom soup has been made with the “phoniness of milk instead of forthright water.”

E. G. Pearman turns class resentment into a banquet: the rich eat our attention, sweat, blood, and waking hours. Eventually, someone gets hungry enough to return the favor. Grotesque, funny, furious.

On the day jokes were no longer permitted in their town, Tiffany decided to cut her unwieldy toenails.

New York summer. Heartbreak. Sweat, memory, hatred, desire and the strange problem of finally escaping what was suffocating you. “What if I want to swelter?”

She has one hour before returning to her usual self: happily married, fifty-two, a teacher, a mother of two.

A paragraph that makes me appreciate the side hustle.

A motorcycle wobbles at sixty-six miles per hour on the Long Island Expressway. A crash is imminent, and then something impossible happens. Traffic slows. Time stretches. The Harley falls instead of crashes. The rider gets up unharmed. One person remembers it differently.

Twenty-seven flowers on the curtains. Six sides to the lampshade. A childhood fear born during the Cuban Missile Crisis becomes a lifelong ritual of trying to keep catastrophe at bay. Until, eventually, the counting stops.

His wife is having a heart attack. His phone would like him to know that his cloud storage is 99% full. A story about distraction, attention, and the increasingly difficult business of staying in the room. @zaryfekete.bsky.social

Bartholomew Lamb investigates who is a the greater storyteller: James Joyce, whose 24-hour Ulysses takes roughly 14 hours to absorb, or David, who once took two hours to describe a car that burned for less than three minutes?

brief + incorrect was almost acquired this morning. The word “almost” is doing some work here.

Hilda arrives at an empty cemetery on a rainy Monday morning carrying a small box. Her father has been dead seventeen years. Her mother has just died. There’s one last bit of family business to settle.

The Titanic is sinking. Julian Grey is a comic, acrobat, thief, and celebrated foot-juggler who has no intention of going down with it. All he needs is a dress, a warm coat, ladies’ boots, and one final performance.

A beautifully restrained piece about memory, migration, family, and the alternate lives we continue carrying long after we’ve left a place behind.

Love, grief, devotion, obsession—the distance between them is often measured in language. @dempseystrangeways.bsky.social