Rumpus Original Fiction
Rumpus Original Fiction: Career Day
It was too late for Lucy to be whatever she wanted. All she could do was be herself.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Daughterhouse
When things begin disappearing from the house, I know what is happening. My mother has always been good at taking what she is owed.
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From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Emergency Lifeboats: 24 (12 on Each Side)
“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Good Little Animals
“No remedy will undo your bad choices, or your addiction to sugar. And you can’t afford my prices anyway.”
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Three Flash Fictions by Niyah Morris
The lasso was a gaping mouth that opened wide enough, we hoped, to swallow the cloud.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: No Good
The sounds that she would expect here are entirely absent. There are no cries, no weeping. Just soothing, muffled tones.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Turning of Celestial Bodies
When I start running, I want you to keep your eyes on it, because you’ll notice something that may seem strange. You will find that no matter where I run, or how long, or how far, you will not see this moon move an inch in the sky.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: On the Farm
On the farm, I understand exactly the degree to which I have come to depend on alcohol, since in the first three weeks I think about it frequently and get worried and even look for it twice in the farmer’s house, and on the fourth week I am less interested, and on the fifth week I do other things.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Chicken
I used my fingers on the neighbor and he liked it.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Mr. Burley
My favorite was usually the smallest, the most alive.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Prepare a Table Before Me, Anoint My Head with Oil
Before I understood that I was a girl, I understood that I was a body.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Bridal Set
The salad was plump, squealing things I couldn’t understand. I remembered feeling a deep sadness that everything in the world wasn’t painted green, the best color. I hungered for green. The gift of sunlight flecked on leaves, the pale chartreuse of American money.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: White Ash
My wife, Ritu, a receptionist at a motel, works four nights a week. In the morning, I pick her up in our used Honda and drive her home. After she showers, I bring her a cup of fresh ginger and cardamom tea. She smells of lavender, her hair glowing with water beads, her eyelashes stuck […]
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Rapunzel House
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Give it time. It’ll grow on you.”
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Night of in Tangas
The problem for my father was the same. He had no money to buy confetti and to top everything off he now owed the price of two corundas.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: You Are One of Them
Everyone here is new. Everyone has run away from somewhere.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: An Other Man
This is a carousel that never slows to a point where you can board gracefully.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: When Will You Arrive?
We do not have lovers, if so there would not be need to reply or congregate to these stupid events, because the language of two people together is the exclusionary body of themselves. In the absence of a body, we settle for Snapchat . . .
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Black Bottom Swamp Bottle Woman
. . . maybe they believe labeling and understanding mean the same thing . . .
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Rumpus Original Fiction: To Go
Love can feel muddled, vast, diffuse; so little to do with the singular volatility of a firework. I hunger for that kind of crystalline precision, though. That clarity. To scream myself across the sky just once—consuming everything in my wake—and then vanish from view.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Only Humans
Hearing old people’s memories is like watching a once-in-three-generations downpour. In the past, they lived in abundance and air conditioning. So many details go over Salwa’s head. She doesn’t know how to transcribe all the words.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Forty-Six
Waiting to turn forty-six is like standing in the unrelenting sunshine.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Mycomorphosis
“Everything looks good,” the neurologist said. The hairs on his head, she couldn’t help noticing, resembled plump white beansprouts—they stood from his scalp as if fat with water. His fingers too. “The only thing is that you have extra fungus in your head.”
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Breaking Through
I read somewhere that sounds don’t stop, they keep going all the way into deep space, reflecting off whatever might be in the way and speeding infinitely on. My head feels like deep space, and those voices haven’t even begun to wind down in there.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Genesis
The speed boat moves fast and Genesis notices Kayla’s hair keeps getting into her eyes. She laughs, as do all the others, who bounce up and down and let out high-pitched screams each time the boat rides a wave up into the air before crashing back down on the choppy water. Kayla grips the edge […]
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Footnotes on a love story
Before they were married, they met in a photograph.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Mustard Seeds
At the end of the week, which was long with sleepless nights, Miri picked her heart out of the kitchen sink, put it in a paper lunch bag, and took it to the witch.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bloom
The bloom would not open until we arrived, but it was not waiting for us. It was a matter of timing. Each year in mid-March, the petals uncurled from their fetal sleeping positions, stretched out to face the sun.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bridle
But I am, I wanted to say. I am willing.
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