Here are a few of Rasmenia’s stories that have been published online. Click on the titles and read them for free.
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Soothing Sizzle – Published by The Molotov Cocktail, May 1, 2011
In my bathroom, I laugh because my hand looks like steak tartar. It’s funny because I really like steak tartar and my meat looks delicious.
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The First – Published by Eunoia Review, April 22, 2012
He had been the first to break her heart, the first to make her say “goodbye.” The first she had seen lowered into the ground.
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Our Sickness – Published by Fiction365, October 8, 2012
I light a cigarette and try to make sense of what Sam was saying. My mom. My boyfriend. He could be telling the truth. Sometimes a cokehead will do that. He wipes a tear from his cheek. The way misery looks on Sam, it looks as horrible as it does on anyone.
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Weird Girl – Published by Every Day Fiction, October 8, 2013
Parker knows that’s just another way of calling her a freak. A didn’t-go-to-college, can’t-get-a-real-job freak.
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I Try to Imagine You – Published by The Flash Fiction Press, September 22, 2016
That night created the before and after. It drew the line between “what if” and “what the fuck have I done.”
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Too Many Words – Published by Intrinsick, January 16, 2017
I tell people she’s dead. It isn’t the truth, but it isn’t a lie. Breathing isn’t proof of life. Breathing sometimes happens only because the body hasn’t caught up yet. It will sooner or later. In time, her body will realize that she’s already gone. Not because she’s special, but because it happens to everyone.
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Questions Crawling Past – Published by Danse Macabre, May 24, 2017
When he kissed me and eased me down on the bed, I forgot about the dead things for a while.
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We Could Be Heroes – Published by The Sunlight Press, January 27, 2019
She tells herself this is just the defeat that happens before the heroine finds the strength to be even more super and awesome than before. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t the truth. It only matters that it could be the truth.
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Dead Flowers – Published by X-R-A-Y Literary Fiction, November 1, 2019
We laugh because of the weirdness Troy always brought around, and because we thought he was the fool, and we were so smart. Like we knew something he didn’t. Like we knew anything about what was real, or how to make anything last.
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Twenty-Seven Boxes – Published by Anti-Heroin Chic, November 8, 2019
Clotilde’s words resonate through every footstep, car engine, and pigeon coo that bounces off the exterior of these old buildings as I make my way home from the métro station at Barbès-Rochechouart. I push past a man trying to sell me cigarettes, and all I hear is her voice saying, “You demand a lot from lifeless things.”
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A Single Breath – Published by Every Day Fiction, March 13, 2020
Sucking in a big inhalation, air has become a solid, uneven thing that resists my effort to pull it inside my body. That’s how much air it takes to plummet from a bit nervous to sweat-soaked panic. A single breath.
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Pissing Bullies – Published by The Sunlight Press, August 12, 2020 – Nominated for 2021 Best of the Net
We never talked much about how the accident transformed him into a widower with a limp and an odd dent in his forehead. We felt no need to speak of how that night changed everything, leaving the two of us alone and in debt. Me and Dad made our own little world from the wreckage of what we endured and were content to live in it.
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Velcro – Published by Every Day Fiction, January 10, 2021
Their rumors stuck. I couldn’t peel them off. Nobody wanted to see what was underneath, anyway.
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Too Much – Published by Reflex Press, July 9, 2021
She wants to ask him what it’s like to have more than enough; to have so much you don’t even realize it. She wants to unleash a storm upon him, but it feels like too much effort.
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Don’t Fear the Reaper – Published by BOMBFIRE Lit, December 17, 2022
He’s basking in his imagined future. I smile and nod, hoping he can’t see me suffocating.
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Cemetery Runway Lights – Published by Tales From the Moonlit Path, June 16, 2023
I told him they had to be animal bones, but he wasn’t having it and I didn’t feel like arguing, so I said, “Dude, don’t you think the owners will want those back?”
Cal shrugged. “Even if they did, they have no use for them anymore. And it’s not like they know where I live.”
“Except those bits of bone are like runway lights, man,” Jason said. “They’ll know exactly where to land.”
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Mother in the Ruins – Published by The Los Angeles Review, July 1, 2023
When I’m alone in my cell, I look real hard at those photos. Before long, I know every cloud and each blade of grass. I hear feet grinding pebbles underfoot on the road. The sun is burning my face and shoulders. I smell the dust in the air. After a while, I can even go all the way back to when that volcano scorched and smothered everything. Back to when that dust was still people. Before everything burned.
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Shells – Published by bioStories Magazine, July 27, 2023
My arms and thighs were glued to the clammy limbs of my two new siblings, who pushed and nudged, insisting I stop touching them. It was my lot to forever be consigned to the middle seat. That’s the way it goes when you’re the summer sibling.
Temporary children learn to live with the uncomfortable seat.
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