Review of “Cabin 28” by Mary Thorson, published in BULL

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“Cabin 28” by Mary Thorson, published in BULL, is a creepy tale set in a cabin in the woods: “starkly quiet,” with lots of trees, and “darkness blocked out the window.”

It’s the scene for something terrible to happen, but before all the bad stuff, there’s Jim, Sarah, and Deb. Jim and Sarah are a married couple, and Deb is their friend. Deb is married to Charlie who, at the last moment, couldn’t join them on the cabin outing. There are things going on between Jim, Sarah, and Deb, as Jim “winks” at Deb while resting his hand on Sarah’s thigh. While Sarah is checking in at the cabin, Jim stood next to Deb, and “snaked his hand behind her back.”

Later, they are in bed together. Without Sarah knowing.

But before that, they get to the cabin, they have drinks, and Sarah gets blottoed, to the point of needing help.

The tension in the story is a combination of the location, the illicit relationship between Jim and Deb, and also the alternating storylines.

The other storyline is that of Charlie, Deb’s husband, and Thomas, the cabin clerk who is responsible for tracking down Deb, who Charlie hasn’t heard from in too long of a time period. He needs to hear from her asap, and he implores Thomas to “…physically walk [his] ass over to [his] wife’s cabin, knock on the door, and not leave until a Deborah Ann Fishly opens and says ‘Yes, I’ll call my husband right away’.”

While both storylines add to the overall narrative, Thomas’s storyline is the revelatory part of the story. If you’re a reader who enjoys dark, eerie suspense, then “Cabin 28” is calling your name. Watch out for open windows.

Read the story here.

Mary Thorson lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her short story, “Book of Ruth,” was included in Best American Mystery & Suspense, ’24, edited by Steph Cha and S.A. Cosby. Her short story, “Casadastraphobia,” was included in Best American Mystery & Suspense, ’25, edited by Steph Cha and Don Winslow. Her work has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, A Derringer, and a Pushcart Prize. She hangs out with her two feisty daughters, the best husband, and a dog named Pam when she isn’t teaching high school English, reading, or writing ghost stories. She is represented by Lori Galvin at Aevitas Creative Management. Her debut short story collection A Woman’s Guide to True Crime is coming out with Rock and a Hard Place Press in 2026. She is currently working on a novel. You can find her on Instagram and Threads: @mfranzen88 and on Bluesky @marythor.bsky.social.

Review of “Time Management” by Caelyn Cobb, published in Short Story, Long

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“Time Management” by Caelyn Cobb, published in Short Story, Long, is either a cautionary tale of corporate life, or it’s a reflection of what has already happened, or is happening. Probably both, but mostly the latter.

The narrative is told from a captivating POV. A third-person that uses the possessive “our” which is normally affiliated with a first-person POV. The narrator in “Time Management” refers to the main character of the story as “our girl.” This implicates readers in unconventional ways—creating a more personal realm of reading for what feels like a cool, distant telling of a story that is at once creepy, odd, fable-like, and reflective of our society’s relationship with late-stage capitalistic dehumanization of workers/people. The POV and the use of “our girl” makes it all the more personal.

While reading, I felt as if the piece was in conversation with other cautionary tales such as the television show “Severance,” and, in a way, Bartleby, The Scrivener. The three aren’t alike in format and genre, but they are, in their own ways, asking questions about how corporations, or society in general, treats women, employees, and the aging population, among other questions.

Objects play a significant role in the story: coffee/cups, cubicle dividers, a bell. These objects, among others, signify differences and, in some cases, changes in the characters. Sometimes the objects unify characters, at other times they divide.

Finally, the story is also a commentary on that one precious resource that unifies us all: time. (Can we even call time a resource?).

“Usually she only had time for sleep, chores, and staring at the wall until it was time to go back to work. Forget applying for those other jobs that her current job was supposed to lead to.”

Time is one of my writerly obsessions. I think time is fascinating—the way we attempt to understand it, define it, contain it, slow it down, speed it up: time is that wonderful equalizer, and while we have no way of controlling it in real life, we can absolutely manipulate it in the stories we write. In fiction writing, for instance—or any writing for that matter—we can massage the sentences and paragraphs to however much time we want. We can modulate how much time we take on the trip from point A to point B. It could be covered in a sentence, a paragraph, or maybe not at all. Maybe the hour-long drive exists only in the white space of a section break. (We were here, now we’re there). Or, we could move backward and show what happened yesterday. Or we can flash forward to tomorrow. These are wonderful writerly features that inform our writing, but they are impossible in real life: we can’t snap our fingers and suddenly arrive somewhere.

In “Time Management” Cobb pushes back on these ideas, delving into fantastical elements to explore what it might mean if we could actually manipulate time: would it make us happier or more successful? Would it make us a better person? This is a significant aspect of the story, and while I’d love to talk about it in more detail, I also don’t want to risk giving anything away. It’s worth a read to find out what happens.

“Time Management” is an engaging and thoughtful story on the menace of living and working in our go-go-go, climb-the-ladder work environment.

Check out the story here.

Caelyn Cobb is a writer and university press editor living in Queens, NY. She is the author of the short story collection Saturn Return, forthcoming from Whisk(e)y Tit Books. Her writing has appeared in Passages North, X-R-A-Y, HAD, and elsewhere.

Flash Fiction Friday: a review of “Sometimes Grief is a Moonrise” by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit

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There’s an introspective and meditative quality to “Sometimes Grief is a Moonrise” by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit. The atmosphere/mood of the piece is set, in part, by the distant narrative voice—a third-person POV—which simply reports the setting and actions of two friends standing on a porch. Through this recall of setting and actions and dialogue, Bell creates a feeling of unease, vulnerability. And yet, the thing around which the two friends talk and smoke is left unstated. Unstated, yes, but clearly understood (I won’t give it away. You’ll have to read for yourself.).

Also, a wonderful refrain of words and images throughout: the porch, cigarettes, a road, the moon and sky, an apple orchard, an owl. The reoccurring images create a looping feature that is at once hypnotic and connects us to the natural world: sky, owl, orchard.

This is a piece that explores a complicated kind of loss: “[The] kind of loss that is an extraordinary relief. Gratitude. Freedom.”

The entire piece is the processing of this loss and gratitude and freedom—how to make sense of it (read the title once more). One woman wants to be alone/silent, the other doesn’t want to leave her friend, for fear of being a bad friend. There isn’t much talking, but the smoking—neither person smokes regularly—becomes the activity around which the two keep company.

Bell shows her vast writerly ability in what is probably 500-600ish words. She shows us the complications (and freedom) of such loss, and, most importantly, conveys the emotional weight of such decisions through a masterful use of POV, tone, setting, and details.

Read the piece here.

Allison Field Bell is a multigenre writer from California. She is the author of two forthcoming collections: Bodies of Other Women (fiction, Red Hen Press) and All That Blue (poetry, Finishing Line Press). She is also the author of three chapbooks, Stitch (forthcoming from Chestnut Review Books), Without Woman or Body (Finishing Line Press), and Edge of the Sea (CutBank Books). Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here and the forthcoming Ask Me About the Money. More info at: keithlesmeister.com

Review of “The Train to Union Station” by Bob Johnson, published in Brown Hound Press

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Brown Hound Press (BHP) is a new online literary journal whose mission is to publish one new story each week. Their fictional bent is “…offbeat, a little different than the norm. Quirky is good. Dark humor is good. You might call our style mystery, literary, or Southern Gothic.”

BHP’s inaugural story was written by celebrated short story writer Bob Johnson, whose debut collection “The Continental Divide” (Cornerstone Press), earned him a spot on the longlist for the 2026 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.

Johnson’s latest story, “The Train to Union Station,” features Esther, a woman who is on a train from Waterloo, Indiana, to Chicago because she’s answered an ad in Winnetka to be a nanny for two kids. Esther’s left behind a fiancé and her fiancé’s sister, who’d recently moved in with them. When Esther told her fiancé, Kenneth (17 years her senior), that she was leaving, he’d said, “Sweetheart, have you lost your mind?”

Indeed, yes, if she hadn’t lost it already, she was slowly beginning to do so, and Kenneth seemed to be a critical part of her losing her mind. And Kenneth’s sister, too, who seemed to have an unusual relationship with her brother (Kenneth often rubbed her bare feet) would make disparaging comments and “criticize Esther’s cooking and fashion choices.” Kenneth dropped Esther off at the train station and told her, “When this insanity becomes clear to you, Esther, I’ll be waiting at home.”

Over the weekend, I listened to “The Yellow Wallpaper” (I’ve read it a few times already, but wanted to try the audio experience), and while reading Johnson’s story about Esther, I couldn’t help but hear hints of this slow-creeping insanity consuming Esther, in the same way it consumes the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story.

Except in this case, Esther’s containment isn’t a room in stately home, but instead a train car, where she meets a pushy young man who spills coffee on her and gets too close, physically, along with a train conductor who’s obsessed with Mike Ditka. As the story unfolds, Esther grows more unstable and more uncomfortable.

Objects play a significant role in the story as well, as Esther clings to an old purse whose contents, at one point, spill out onto the train floor—an exposure that results in an unusual amount of embarrassment, as if she’d just revealed her darkest secrets.

“The Train to Union Station” is a masterclass in how to introduce and sustain tension from the opening lines until the inevitable conclusion.

Read the story here.

Bob Johnson’s collection The Continental Divide was published by Cornerstone Press in February 2025 and was subsequently positively reviewed by Stuart Dybek in The New York Times. It has been long-listed for the PEN/Bingham Literary Awards. His stories have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Common, The Barcelona Review, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and many other places. bobjohnsonwriter.com

Review of “Dinner Party” by Pardeep Toor, published in Great River Review

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There’s an off-kilter feel to “Dinner Party” by Pardeep Toor. Perhaps, in part, because the story is built on one lie after another. When Neelam and Hans (a new couple) arrive late to Neelam’s childhood home, Neelam’s mother confronts them. “You’re late,” she says.

Neelam replies with a lie: “The roads are really bad down state.”

The reply leaves Hans feeling uneasy because “The roads were clean, and the snow had stopped in the morning. Neelam had driven over the speed limit.”

Of course the events of the story are more complicated than the telling of a few lies. Neelam is bringing Hans home for the first time to meet her parents, an immigrant couple who has not returned to India after living in the States for at least a couple of decades. Hans himself, an immigrant, hasn’t returned either, but would like to do so. When Hans asks Pam (Neelam’s father) if he misses India, Pam replies: “Miss what? The overpopulation? The smell of sewage?” This answer complicates the situation because Hans wants to impress Neelam’s parents but also wants to defend his home country.

Throughout the dinner conversation, it’s revealed that Neelam has relatives in India that, apparently, have never been mentioned by her parents, Pam and Dal.

The dinner party itself is a lavish spread of food, wine, dessert liqueur, and prolonged dialogue, often tense and uncomfortable. It’s clear, for instance, that Hans holds his homeland in high regard, whereas Pam does not.

Despite the prolonged conversations, there’s much that’s not said as well. And Hans, meeting the parents for the first time, feels as though he’s now meeting the real Neelam for the first time. And Hans acknowledges to himself, at one point, “[He] believed that not telling was the same as lying,” as he continues to learn more and more about Neelam—who she is and her relationship with her parents.  

The mix of what is said versus not said is central to the story. And this dynamic is what propels Hans, ultimately, to determine what happens next between himself and Neelam.  

An engaging and important story about immigration, relationships, and class dynamics.

The story can be read here.

Pardeep Toor grew up in Brampton, Ontario and currently lives in Las Cruces, NM. His writing has appeared in the Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize, Electric Literature, Midwest Review, and Southern Humanities Review. His debut story collection Hands is forthcoming in April 2026. More info at https://pardeeptoor.com/.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the forthcoming story collection Ask Me About the Money (Fall 2026). He currently serves as fiction editor at Cutleaf Journal. More info at https://keithlesmeister.com/.