Midnight Breakfast

31/05/2022

Issue 19 is out now! Issue 19 is an echo of what we’re thinking about now, of so many questions we have and the ways in which we can navigate those questions. https://midnightbreakfast.com/issue-19

29/09/2021

We're thrilled to share Midnight Breakfast Issue 18 with you! This all-fiction issue features writing by Rita Chang-Eppig, Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick, Shyla Jones, Abigail Oswald, Reena Shah, and Ross Showalter; and art by Madeline Gobbo, YY Liak, Adrienne Lobl, Alana Salguero, Vivian Shih, and Kelsey Short. We hope you enjoy!

Midnight Breakfast is a free online literary magazine publishing a diverse selection of fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and visual art that we hope will spark conversation. More ›

30/05/2021

"Though it was midday, the sun was too far above them to bestow anything but a soft gray light. As Priti looked at the slurping, pursed body atop hers, she thought of her dead mother, brows furrowed as she filed their taxes, and so Priti turned her mind to samsara, and then—for what else was there?—to her terrible hunger. The forest was full: of pine needles, and birds still too young to fly, and their mothers, to and fro, bearing worms. But there was nothing she could stuff into her mouth. She’d never killed a bird—she’d never eaten flesh. But there were ways of bloodletting with needles, weren’t there, that weren’t fatal? Blood, surely, tasted."

Fiction The Rose Apple Tree by Rashi Rohatgi She was hungry. Priti had felt sodden with pregnancy, waterlogged, and now she was immersed in the sea of motherhood, where fruits felt soggy and flavorless and cold to the touch. Lars’s expulsion from her body had seemed a discrete act, the bloody afte...

29/05/2021

"She turned around and lifted up the hem of her gray shirt, showed me her shadowed back, the pores dilated wide as windows. I saw skies in her skin. Turning away, I said: Be careful about exposing your back that way. The toxins of the world can get in, I said, quoting my mother. Mace laughed and told me about her name, saying that caution was her inheritance, that she was born a weapon of defense."

Fiction Skins by K-Ming Chang We were shoplifted out of our mothers, Mace and me. My mother was eight and a half months pregnant when she fell asleep on the bus and woke up at the end of the line with her belly like a slashed tire, sputtering hot air, salt water bolting out of her. She took the bus....

29/05/2021

"There was a raw lack as the winds settled, a sudden stillness and silence that came like a roar. The grass stopped burning orange beneath her bare feet. The soil oozed sweat between her toes. The sky suspended above her as if at any moment the strings would snap and send it crashing down. And two pulsing eyes that reached for her. Cate was slick with sweat, a single drop beading and trickling slowly down her leg into the freshly bleeding scrape on her knee. The blood itself fattening and sliding down her shin, leaving a shining crimson trail in its wake. The man placed a hand on the glass and devoured Cate from afar, pulsed, opened wide and howled."

Fiction Santa Ana by Katie Antonsson 3109 S. Manitoba Drive, Santa Ana I drove out to Santa Ana, chasing the winds. When I got off the 405 the traffic lights were blinking red all down Fairview, and cars weren’t quite sure what to do at a five-lane, four-way stop. We all looked at each other throu...

28/05/2021

Midnight Breakfast is funded exclusively by readers like you. If you're enjoying our new issue, please consider becoming a Patron. If all our Facebook followers subscribed at just $1/issue, we'd be able to publish and pay our writers and artists indefinitely.

Become a patron of Midnight Breakfast today: Get access to exclusive content and experiences on the world’s largest membership platform for artists and creators.

28/05/2021

"Later on, my friend told me I uttered a single word.

But I only remember looking up.

I only remember blue sky.

I only remember red blood.

My friend says I stared up, blank expression, and asked, Why?

I had a black eye. I was in college at the time, and I went to class. I wanted someone, anyone, to ask me what had happened. I thought of the reasons a young woman might have a black eye. I looked around the room, waiting.

I waited. I waited.

But no one asked. I sat in class, in their silence, thinking of all the ways silence keeps us sick, of all the many ways we have of failing each other."

Nonfiction How to Tell A Trauma Story by Bethany Marcel This story begins with a punch in the face. My face. The woman’s fist. For a decade I’ve been trying to write this story. This is always as far as I get. I’ve tried telling the long version of this story and the short one. The long versio...

27/05/2021

"At a romantic point in our marriage, I would’ve said I could not live without Justin. But I woke up after he left me, which was evidence to the contrary. I grabbed my mother’s cookbook and placed it with the shirt and the controller in my reusable shopping bag. It was part cookbook and part history of our family. The recipe for mac and cheese included in the margin the reason why the women in our family should never, ever travel abroad. It seemed we were determined to live small, maybe simply enjoy life. I decided to live life with care, on purpose, so death could become like the due date on a library book. Good story, but it’s time to return it. The women before me all died with enough impression on the people in their lives that they were mourned, but not grieved. That was the risk of a small life: the potential to be forgotten."

Fiction Come What May by Danielle Decatur Justin left me in the middle of the night, while I dreamt of my impending death. I woke up to orange light peeking through the blinds and the other side of the bed sunken with his imprint. In my dream I died slowly, which must be why I didn’t hear him star...

27/05/2021

"The boys were idling on their BMX bikes, throwing rocks and talking s**t when the guy drove past. He stopped, reversed, and rolled down his window. 'There’s a place that’s top secret, little dudes,' he said. He wore a backwards baseball hat and had a patchy beard. He thumbed somewhere behind the Honda Civic, which sputtered and rattled, the bass of the subwoofer pounding like some enormous animal caged in the trunk. He said, 'Just look for the X on the street in Winooska Woods,' then made an X shape with his arms and shouted, 'Suck it!' The boys knew the reference well and returned the gesture by crossing an X over their crotches. The guy in the car continued: 'When you find the X, just go straight until you see it.' The boys didn’t know what 'it' was, but he seemed like the kind of guy who knew about secret spots. There was something about the cartoonish jest in his voice, like Bart Simpson but grown up. The boys felt their eardrums shake as the guy cranked up the bass and put the car in gear, then sped away, leaving a billow of black smoke in his wake."

Fiction No Hands by Davon Loeb The boys were idling on their BMX bikes, throwing rocks and talking s**t when the guy drove past. He stopped, reversed, and rolled down his window. “There’s a place that’s top secret, little dudes,” he said. He wore a backwards baseball hat and had a patchy bea...

26/05/2021

"I often think about dance when I read fiction and personal essays. The way a writer stitches together sentences to create something larger and more profound is not unlike the choreographer’s role. And the end result is not unlike a dance itself. Which is why I’ve taken a shine to a particular phrase—something that has echoed in my mind over the last year, especially: the choreography of language. It’s one of the highest forms of praise I feel I can offer a writer, to say the choreography of their language has left me in awe. Because it means they are doing something I recognize as a form of alchemy. They know how to wield words in such a way that sometimes surpasses my own understanding of the form. They are working at a higher level, not just of language but around it and within it. 'How on earth did you do that?' I want to ask them. And also: 'Can you teach me what you know?'

Issue 17 Letter from the Editor by Rebecca Rubenstein Hello, Not many people know this about me, but I really love modern dance. I’ll be the first to admit I understand little about it, though Pina and Talk to Her are two of my favorite films, and during my senior year of undergraduate, two friend...

26/05/2021

Introducing Midnight Breakfast Issue 17! Featuring fiction from Katie Antonsson, K-Ming Chang, Danielle Decatur, Davon Loeb, and Rashi Rohatgi; nonfiction from Bethany Marcel; and art by A Andrews, Lyndsey Lesh, Adrienne Lobl, Lara Odell, Austin Powe, and Kelsey Short!

Midnight Breakfast is a free online literary magazine publishing a diverse selection of fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and visual art that we hope will spark conversation. More ›