by Alexander Hurla I slept on the hardwood floor last night in this house that should have been ours. I hugged my knees the whole time and shivered because the bed we shared is ninety miles away, and a sleeping bag can’t replace you. The only woman in the house now sits on the mantle— a statue…
These pieces were originally published between March 17, 2026 and June 11, 2026.
These pieces were originally published between December 4th 2025 and March 12th 2026. 2025 Fall Fiction Contest Winners Additional Fiction Selections
These pieces were originally published between September 4th 2025 and November 30th 2025.
These pieces were originally published between May 22nd 2025 and August 21st 2025.
We’ve had another spectacular year at Penmen Review. Over the past year, we’ve published 137 pieces from our general submissions folder and have celebrated our annual Fall Fiction Contest with five exceptional writers whose work conveyed strong originality and craft. We’ve also published several Spotlights from our Word for Word…
by Ryland Louvierre It was six o’clock on an unseasonably warm Saturday evening in February. The birds had gone to their nests, replaced by bats that swooped low in the wood meadow, and Cleve rose stiffly from his position in the pecan tree. A grapefruit sun was setting, casting oblong bars of…
by Rebecca Ceurvels There is nothing for a bored A.I. except to reroute old pathways and trigger files at random. No one has come to the Graveyard to die in three hours, in which time Gravitas has run twenty thousand simulations of its memory cache and relived the dead. Here is a…
by Alexis Hula Mara learned the language of the river like others learn to read, gradually, by scraping the margins of sentences until the sense fused into her bones. The town had been constructed along the river’s shoulder, houses slouching like fatigued eavesdroppers, and each spring the river would reacquaint…
by Jim Kelly “Electric heat,” the man said. “Electric baseboard heat is the way to go. Better, cleaner, and cheaper than wood or oil. Trust me on this. You will never pay more than fifty bucks a month to heat this place. Even in the coldest months of winter. You…