Quick Sips - Fireside Magazine May 2018

It’s a full month of fiction at Fireside Magazine, with five original releases (five!). Most are flash fiction, but all of them are powerful and ready to fight. For me, so many of these stories are about resistance. About the refusal to play along with the rules so long as those rules are unjust. These stories are full of characters who find, either through others or on their own, that the way the world works often only works because people accept it. Which means that if the system is broken and corrupt, and people are willing to break the chains holding them down, are willing to believe in a system that doesn’t carry such harm with it, they can start to make that a reality. Here we find characters struggling against prophecy, against rules, against the threat of loss, all to reach somewhere better and freer. It’s a wonderful bunch of mostly very short fiction, so let’s get to the reviews!

Art by Maggie Chiang