F. Brett Cox
author
Up the Steps
dailysciencefiction.com, 2022
"28. You stand at the bottom of the steps, each worn smooth by over a century of devotion. God's love is manifest in all things; so you were taught and so you believe. Yet the steps rise before you in seeming indifference. They do not care how, or if, you get to the top."
They Got Louie
See the Elephant Issue Two, 2016
“How many times have we been told, since practically we were born, ‘Don’t eat the green shit. It smells good, it tastes better, but don’t fucking eat the green shit.”
Where We Would End a War
War Stories: New Military Science Fiction
edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak, Apex Books, 2014
When Amanda came home from the war her family was there to greet her at the platform. She knew what to expect when she rematerialized, but she’d forgotten about the mortar-like chuff! chuff! chuff! as the others arrived after her. It didn’t scare her—she was beyond being scared by loud noises—but it added to her disorientation as she stumbled off the platform into her dad Ernie’s arms.
Up Above the Dead Line
The Dead Mule, January 2000; Reprinted in Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction, edited by T.J. McIntyre, 2011
It had happened for the last time. That was all there was to it. Ned Grainger had told his brother Joshua time and time again not to let his hogs feed on Ned’s land and not to let his sons take water from Ned’s well, but Joshua hadn’t listened. He had never listened when they were boys, and he wasn’t listening now. He kept on letting his hogs roam over onto Ned’s land and mix with Ned’s hogs and eat Ned’s feed and drink from Ned’s trough. And those worthless sons of his let it go on while they came over like hogs themselves and drank from Ned’s well. So it had happened for the last time. That was all there was to it.