SHORT STORY REX Feb 2026

[Remember how last month I wrote about “how it felt hopelessly trivial to be nattering on about short fiction just now”? yeah, i remember that too…]

1. “Ghost Leopard”, Crystal Koo

The chain of causality that sets up this story is laid out right at the beginning and in such a matter-of-fact way, it all seems so simple when really it’s anything but:

Here in Blazing Mound, we are not adults until we have brought home a leopard. If we are not adults, then we cannot apply for a household registration record. Without a record, we are permanent dependents on our families. This means we cannot leave our yellow-clayed village to make our fortune in higher-tiered cities as a food delivery driver or a factory worker making phones for the rest of the world.

The protagonist goes hunting and gets her heart eaten out by one of the titular leopards. Willingly or not, that emotional link to village tradition is replaced by the dizzying sorcery of supply chain logistics and digital surveillance as she becomes something far more powerful than either of the aforementioned job titles. An interrogation of the hierarchy of needs, of the obstacles modernity creates to keep us eternally, incurably needy

2. “Instructions”, Perry Ruhlands

If you didn't know any better, you might mistaje this for a guided meditation--"You are in a tunnel. The walls, floor, and ceiling are of uneven stone. The stones which make up the walls form dramatic ridges and outcroppings. The stones which make up the floor are a fine powder. Each stone closest to you contains a rich variety of shades: ash, charcoal, slate, pigeon’s feather, pregnant cloud"--but then it cedes the floor midway to something else which, if you also didn’t know any better, would seem like some especially distraught sort of dream journal, a recapitulation, the same but less distinct, less articulate—”I am walking down a long tunnel made out of rocks”—but then again you do know better than all that, and you know better because of the image that bookends the switch:

(Series of closeups: Black sash for a blindfold knotted tightly behind the head. Wrists and ankles fastened to a chair with straps of ridged leather. Metal gleaming on sharp ninety-degree angles of armrests which squeeze the stomach. Noise-canceling headphones clamped over the ears. Static, microphone hiss. A voice:)

2nd person interpelates us, insinuates itself, browbeats us, until it gives way to 1st, a premeptive objectification of your subjectivity, a process we’re subjected to above any and all objections. That's just the beginning!

Really, I’m done. No more, please. I don’t want to be here.

MAGAZINE REC: Seize the Press #14

Been a while since I had a new issue of Seize the Press to recommend stories from, so here's making up for lost time! We get fearless sci-fantasy and transgressive genre grime of the sort STP fans have come to love and expect—see Samir Sirk Morato's “Starspeaker“ for more of the former and Amy Kitcher’s “Tabula Rasa“ for more of the latter (think “Spar” but like, recreationally, with more injustice and more revenge).

But there’s another note that stands out on the palate this issue, an irrealist flavor which has also been part of STP’s repertoire from the beginning, starting from Jude Kar’s “The Coffinmaker” which opens the issue and sets the tone. It's got that certain willful jankiness to the prose as though it were translated into English from another distantly-related lamguage, and it's an effect which greatly suits the story of Caspian, an American expat practicing his version of the Ghanaian practice of making extravagantly themed coffins (I seem to recall the soft drink Aquarius based an ad campaign arund this?), all whilst living nowhere near Ghana but rather in some Weird version of “a small Turkish island in the Mediterranean” where the locals have the heads of pigeons, of camels, of crickets. Also it’s a love story, possibly. Then there's “Lasik” by Nora Ray in which the titular elective surgery goes mind-warpingly wrong (though I’m somehow unconvinced that ‘wrong’ is the ‘right’ word here.) And LC von Hessen's tribute to the late, great David Lynch “One of Our Girls is in Trouble” with its three men, Misters One, Two and Three—”One wears leather, one wears velvet, one wears tweed. Gold chains, tie clips, malachite signet rings. Circling her with their little knives. Buck knife, jackknife, gravity knife”—all of whom for a very specific reason remind me of a Sherwood Anderson story, but I will have to come back to that idea (or one like it) as that's a story for another time

At this point, i’m surely you all don’t need me to hard-sell you into supporting Seize the Press, but there are still more great stories that i haven’t even mentioned, an article i haven’t even read yet on Repo Man, one of my most beloved of films, seriously so much stuff worth checking out, you’d have to be kind of a dumbass not to

Not-a-story rec: “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games”, of Montreal

This is it: the post that sent me into a week-and-a-half spiral of this song and this song alone being stuck in my head:

I was not triggered (am I probably more of a ‘late ‘90s hipster’? Can I claim that?) but something was triggered in me, a memory of a concert I attended at the short-lived Martin Street Music Hall, accompanying someone with whom I had a short-lived romantic involvement which probably ended unfairly on my part but anyway we had a lovely time at this concert by this band I had never heard before, and everyone there seemed at least 2 or 3 years younger than me and we were all young enough that the difference still felt like it meant something, it felt like I was watching it all from the far side of some generational cusp, seeing some ill-defined change in sensibilities already in progress, happening without me and without my permission. Still, had fun. So yeah, here’s the song: