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Literary online journals showcase works by new writers and established authors. (I am collecting rejection notices from some the best of them.) Of the thousands of submissions per reading period for many journals, I notice that some publish fewer than four in the fiction category. This week I am reading selections from online journals.

•  “Dressed as Lamb”, by Mary W. Driver-Thiel, www.epiphmag.com

This is a clever title for a story about a woman who chooses not to act her age. In fact, the whole story is in the title.

• “No End to Up”, by Irene O’Garden, www.stickmanreview.com

In this micro story, playwright, poet and Pushcart Prize winner Irene O’Garden pushes a formative experience in a young girl’s life through her career in space and lands it the terrifying cosmos of intimate relationship. This is a story to study to understand the difference between using adjectives and imagery as modifiers. 

• “Secret Agents Dream Too”, by Marcus Pactor, www.caveat-lector.org 

Guess I was expecting a mystery or a thriller, but this story must be written in that shape shifting genre, speculative. My brain doesn’t have enough synapses to follow all the references and connect them.

•  “And Something Else”, by Mary Kate Flannery, www.apt.aforemetionedproductions.com

Flannery creates tension in the first sentence, “She didn’t scream,” and sustains it clear to the end. Like the wave that produced a deadly ocean encounter, this story rises up, arcs, crashes to shore and resolves in a tide of emotion that is both shocking and satisfying. Well done.

• “Here You Are”, by Rachael Monroe, http://www.interrobangzine.com/issues/volume-4/

A forty-one year old girl tries to leave her old, going nowhere life for a new life a million miles away and discovers that where ever you go, there you are. Parking yourself in a Bedouin tent and throwing away the keys is extreme, but whatever.

• “Air Show”, by Andrea Grassi, http://www.puritan-magazine.com/

“Four jets shake the skyline.” We think we know what’s coming, but no. In this dystopian world, multinationals watch an air show from their towered workplace while a girl named for a candy bar teases a co-worker who is haunted by a freaky specter. I would have loved to have been in a critique group with this author to hear how this story developed. It doesn’t quite hang together for me.

• “Nemecia”, by Kirstin Valdez Quade, www.narrativemagazine.com

First place winner in Narrative’s Spring 2012 Story Contest garners this story a place in Best American Short Stories, 2013. It’s about seeing the world through a child’s eyes, envy, and what we choose to forget.