Category: Fiction

J. August’s Fiction

Short story in Kaleidotrope

On By Julia AugustIn Fiction, Fiction elsewhere, Short Story

It’s July and I’m back in my favourite zine with a story (science fiction, very rare for me) about a dam and the problem of power transmission. It’s called Transmission Systems.

Top-secret corporate communications, report the secret police to their superiors. Highly suspicious, most likely an attempt by the opposition to influence the election, and the military security man, filing his report on the secret policemen rather later, remarks that: José is cheating on his mistress with Aníbal’s wife who is certainly blackmailing him for our eastern quadrant comrades. Recommend to keep under observation. But none of them stay long enough to see the message divide…

There are so many other great pieces in this issue. Look at the table of contents!

Flash in Cosmic Horror Monthly’s Patreon Series

On By Julia AugustIn Fiction, Fiction elsewhere, Flash fiction, Short Story

Cosmic Horror Monthly is running a series of Patreon-only flash pieces: this month’s is mine! Dunwich Revisited, a tiny quiet reflective walk around a Lovecraft-flavoured valley.

Short story in Kaleidotrope

On By Julia AugustIn Fiction, Fiction elsewhere, Short Story

Not an April Fool’s! It’s ‘Charybdis’, a fun bouncy story about working in customer service, when all your customers are the supernatural type:

I was sitting at my desk with my feet up, filing my nails, when Martin Josephs walked in. Big man, black, probably a shifter with those eyes, probably a bear with those shoulders, he was looking around the dingy Victorian hall as if he might be trying to find the town council, then saw my desk under the pale fluorescent light and headed for me instead. I’d pegged him for a client straight away and you only get one chance to make a first impression. Unfortunately, I plumped for Cherry.

He hesitated, and I swung Cherry’s legs down from the desk with aggravating slowness and gave him a bored pink lipstick smile. “Hi,” I said. “This is the Old World Advice Bureau. Can I help you?”

I love Kaleidotrope and feel very much at home there: everything in the zine is fun and worth reading.

A wild flash reprint appears!

On By Julia AugustIn Fiction elsewhere, Flash fiction, Short Story

It’s ‘Modern Cassandra’, originally published in F&SF a couple of years ago, now free to read in Small Wonders:

Modern Cassandra tries so hard to warn us, but all her visions go to Junk. I have an important revelation! she writes. I saw you in my dreams. This is urgent. Please reply, but even though she flags her emails as top priority we never do.

With thanks to Medium Amanda, who made a really dedicated effort to connect with me towards the end of 2019! And yet I never replied to her. What would have happened if I had?

Short story in Cosmic Horror Monthly (September)

On By Julia AugustIn Fiction, Fiction elsewhere, Short Story

I am so late to this, but I had a story in the September issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly: ‘Tyger, Tyger’, about a big cat in a concrete jungle, and being so bored you burn your own life down, and of course there’s some William Blake hiding in there too.

Wednesday morning, eleven a.m. There’s an abstract depiction of hell splashed across the lobby. Nick looks once, sees immortal souls arrayed in burning torment, looks twice and realises it’s a tapestry, red blurring into yellow blurring into infernal murk. The symmetry is upsetting, like one screaming face flung endlessly between two fragmenting mirrors. “Can I take your coat?” the girl says. “I’ll show you down.”

This is the third of what I think of as my Weird London stories, following Psychopomps of Central London in The Dark and Puppet Show in Places We Fear To Tread. You can get the issue in print ($11.99) or digital ($3.99).

Fantasy Magazine Poem Free to Read

On By Julia AugustIn Fiction, News, poetry

It’s out! You can read it here! It speaks to the great passion of my life! (Lavender.)

So many of my neighbours grow lavender that I know I’m in the right place. (And head on over to Instagram for my full bee collection.)

Poem in Fantasy

On By Julia AugustIn poetry

A tiny new departure for me. I have written three poems since I was eighteen; the third of them is in this month’s issue of Fantasy Magazine, available to subscribers here. It will go online later this month, but of course you should subscribe and get the whole fantastic issue right now.

My piece is called The End of Little Dreams and it is a poem for anyone getting through the day by thinking very, very hard about the place they are definitely going to have sometime:

It’s 6.18am and you are looking at / reproduction William de Morgan tiles / and Morris & Co fabrics on John Lewis…

Flash in F&SF

On By Julia AugustIn Fiction, Fiction elsewhere, Flash fiction

I have another tiny “where-are-they-now” story in the May/June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction called ‘Modern Cassandra’. I wrote this in January 2020. It’s about that jerk Apollo and I want to dedicate it to Medium Amanda, who tried so hard to get in touch with me towards the end of 2019. And yet I never opened any of her emails! Who knows what would have happened if I had?

Extract: "She worked as an artist's assistant before she matched with Apollo on Tinder. In the middle of painting exquisite hyperrealist copies of torn-out newspaper pictures to inspire her employer, Apollo took her to lunch in a Covent Garden restaurant filled with pheasant feathers and stags' heads"

The restaurant is Rules! I’m pretty sure it’s run by Apollo the Hunter. Who else?