Favorite Web Stories: May 2025
TRAPDOOR by Melissa Cundieff
Care and memory and the narration navigates a lot of things people try to write about honestly and clearly. I read it once and then a second time, where I jumped around in the paragraph order sometimes, and I like that it still worked. This one’s from April technically, but May sucked so hard that I don’t care. No, it was fine. It was beautiful getting teeth ripped out of my head and rolling my ankle. I’m sure it will all seem right when I’m remembering it, taking the memory as real.
Slowsand by Joe Koch
There are things I think I know about this story and there are things I think I can’t know and there are other things. Narrator is doing a task and they’re also sinking in dirt, I think, and that’s part of the assignment. It’s related to their grandfather. The impossible figure Mr. Schrift is approaching and out of full perception, approaching backward, always. Schrift, German for writing and I think probably related somewhow to the anime Bleach (I know nothing, I search), feels like a looming death figure but less knowable. I’m a sucker for big block paragraph stories. This one’s slippery in the right ways, trying to see it is like the narrator’s effort to see Schrift, but still the language moves around clear phrasing, it’s just tied together with blur.
The Trial, by Thora Dahlke
Drug trial turns weird and a relationship exploration, kind of, and maybe more of a self exploration, desire and distance. Nice use of internality vs what’s shared. Good and varied flow, especially early on. I liked the questioning about reporting side effects to the testing organization. I liked the turns on the relationship to self and control. Maybe a couple too many recursive moments in the three-quarter mark that didn’t seem as intentional or woven in. Who’s to say? Not me. I’ve never done a pharmaceutical trial.
Private Notary by Samuel M. Moss
Like almost all stories I find exciting, and as I often find in my late blooming interest in “weird” fiction, this one explores questions about reliability, intent and influence, and how the mind slips. The Private Notary amasses seals he never uses (well, not entirely true), rare acquaintances who confuse his position, and twists what a seal might be, what affirmed truth might do, and turns back to himself. Again, who knows what I know, but I enjoyed thinking with this. And it uses a ton of what I think of as “precise and interesting word bingo” type language, like “verdigris”. And it’s a good example of something longer that I finished on the web.