Scenery and Bedtime, two new fictions, in Issue 1 of New Sinews

Two more of my very short fictions, "Scenery" and "Bedtime," appear online in the first issue of New Sinews. Here's a little of the latter:

I told my son a disappointing story, a story, he said, that was no good. That wasn’t very good, he said, deadly serious and not at all tired. Not that I had so much invested in this story, but I wasn’t sure where to look for a moment. For a moment—and this will be unflattering, I think—I wondered if maybe it wasn’t the story after all, a pretty good one, I thought, exactly like the one he’d liked so much the night before, just with different animals and a little girl instead of a little boy, and I thought, maybe he would have said this after any story I told that night, no matter how good, which is to say that, for a fraction of a second, I wondered about my son’s true motivations, which is also to say that I wondered if it wasn’t so much the story I’d told as that I’d told it and not, I mean, his mother, and so I inhaled and held my breath for just long enough to calm myself but not so long that it would alarm my son, and then I asked him to tell me a story, and he did.

The issue also features new work from Vi Khi Nao and Tongo Eisen-Martin, among others.