First published in Die Laughing Literary Magazine January 2025

Hey Mina,

How’s it going? Wow, can you believe it’s been ten years? Crazy! I feel like I just saw you. HAHAHA!

So what have you been up to? I heard you’re living it up in Miami. Must be pretty nice living so close to the beach. 

I heard a few other things too. You live alone. No husband. No kids. What’s up with that, huh? You never struck me as the independent type. 

Me, I’m good. Really good, actually. Had a steady job at an auto body shop. Bought my own place. Met a girl, Shelly. Not much to look at from the neck up, but sweet. Kind. Generous. Nothing like me. Or you. 

All that’s gone now, but it doesn’t matter. 

First published in Freedom Fiction Journal January 2025

First time guests at Il Trucchetto could be forgiven for passing right by the restaurant without even realizing it’s there. They will observe the corrugated metal sheets, the ripped tarpaulin, the dented mini refrigerator lying on its side and mistake it all for just another pile of refuse abandoned by wayward travelers wandering through this scarred wasteland in search of some semblance of civilization. But as I have learned from many delightful visits to the eatery, whose menu skirts the line between Southern Italian and dystopian fusion fare, appearances can be deceiving.

First published in Issue 27 of The After Happy Hour Review, Summer 2025

It was the kind of night that creeps up on soft, silent paws, and has its claws in you before you even know it’s there. I was in my usual spot on the windowsill, watching a squirrel bury its loot and muttering all the things I’d do to it if I ever got the chance. Salty and Pepper had been yapping at each other all evening, no doubt planning another one of their get-treats-quick schemes. Falcor had his bell up against the wall of his cage and was trying to pick a fight with it, but didn’t quite have the vocabulary. (“Pretty boy want some peanut butter? Peanut butter?!”) Beside the cage, Gil and Bloop-Bloop circled each other around their bowl like an underwater Mexican standoff.

All things considered, it was a quiet night. You might even say, too quiet.

First published in Freedom Fiction Journal October 2025

Act I: In which two old friends share an otherworldly libation.

On the morning of Tuesday, the fifteenth of March in the Year of Our Lord, one thousand eight hundred eighty-two, Morris LeClair awoke with a slight headache and a belly aflutter with nerves.

Having overindulged in the pre-opening night frivolities of the previous evening, he was now faced with the demands of the day ahead. As he made his way through the city streets, he noticed a hunched figure hovering in the doorway of a brothel. While Morris shivered in his greatcoat, this poor soul had nothing but a green, threadbare shawl to protect themself from the chill. Feeling foolish for his own trivial worries, he fished a coin from his pocket and tossed it to the Luxy, who bowed gratefully, glowing with periwinkle light. 

Emily Gennis is a writer of short (and not so short) fiction. Her work has been published in The After Happy Hour Review, Die Laughing Literary Magazine as well as a number of anthologies. Her story Post-Apocalypse Prix Fixe was selected as part of Freedom Fiction Journal's 2025 Editors Choice Awards: List of Exemplary Eclectic Fiction.