KN Magazine: Short Stories
You’re Perfect
Beren has watched from the doorway for months, longing to belong to the joyful, radiant community gathered in a basement meeting room. When she is finally welcomed inside, the warmth, music, and affection feel intoxicating—like flight. But as acceptance turns to possession, and belonging morphs into something far more sinister, Beren discovers that some invitations are not acts of love, but of hunger.
A Visit From the Past
When Ozark Rangers commander Rob Miller walks into a gas station robbery, he expects danger—not divine intervention. Saved by a mysterious young man who vanishes without a trace, Rob is left with a haunting question: was it coincidence, courage, or something from beyond? As the truth unfolds, faith, family, and the past collide in a powerful story about protection, prayer, and promises that refuse to die.
Sisters
Set in an Italian immigrant household in 1920s Newark, “Sisters” explores the volatile bond between two adolescent sisters shaped by beauty, jealousy, longing, and survival. As desire, shame, and power collide during a single summer day, the family’s fragile equilibrium fractures, revealing how love and rivalry can turn irrevocably destructive within the confines of tradition, patriarchy, and poverty.
Penalty Kick
When a celebrated college soccer star is found murdered in her dorm room days before a championship match, Detective Megan Hall uncovers a web of academic fraud, booster corruption, and moral compromise beneath the surface of a tight-knit Southern university. As pressure mounts from the media, the community, and powerful interests invested in winning at any cost, Hall must follow the evidence to a truth that exposes how integrity can become dangerous when money, reputation, and ambition collide.
The Canaries
A pharmaceutical CEO is abducted, blindfolded, buried alive, and forced to listen. His captors are not seeking ransom or revenge—they want accountability. As the night unfolds, a chilling moral reckoning emerges, transforming a kidnapping into a meditation on power, profit, illness, and the cost of being unheard.
Detour to Murder
When a Fred Harvey “Indian Detours” tour group arrives at the Hotel Alvarado in 1920s Albuquerque, a body turns up in the courtyard—platinum hair, blood, and a secret no one wants exposed. As Detective Webb untangles alibis, speakeasy detours, and mistaken identity, the case reveals a clever twist where jealousy, invisibility, and assumption become deadly.
Survival Tactics
In a scorched desert landscape where family history and buried grudges collide, a mother and daughter visit an estranged patriarch whose past crimes and looming inheritance spark a deadly reckoning. Survival Tactics is a tense, character-driven crime story about violence deferred, revenge rehearsed, and the brutal clarity of self-preservation.
The Final Portrait
As a military junta closes in, a young painter races to finish a portrait that may do more than capture a face—it may capture a soul. The Final Portrait is a tense, magical-realist political thriller about art as resistance, the legacy of grief, and the deadly power hidden in a pair of painted eyes.
Oh, Susanna
When a long-lost accomplice strolls back into town, elderly Susanna finally gets her chance at revenge. But in this darkly funny, sharply drawn tale of aging, resentment, and poetic justice, nothing is quite what it seems—and Susanna’s methods are far older, quieter, and deadlier than anyone guesses.
The Corner Booth
A man waits in a rundown diner for the woman he once loved, their shared past flickering between memory and ruin as they sign the papers that will end their marriage. In the sticky booth where everything began, he confronts love, loss, and the cracks—literal and emotional—that have slowly spread between them.
A Matter of Time
When Madison stops in a nearly abandoned town to repair her grandfather’s antique watch, she discovers a chilling truth: Horary Crossing isn’t just forgotten—it’s unstuck in time. As the past awakens around her and a long-dead killer returns, Madison must fight to survive a night that has already happened… and is happening again.
CONFESSION
A haunting epistolary short story in which a woman finally reveals the truth about the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake, the child she lost, and the new identity she forged to survive. A confession of grief, reinvention, and the fragile boundary between the past we flee and the past that shapes us.
THOSE HE KILLS
A tense noir thriller in which Jim Wyman discovers he’s being hunted by a legendary, unseen hitman—until a twist puts the predator and prey in shocking reversal.
MY STRANGER
A man becomes transfixed by a stranger whose appearance mirrors his own, drawing him into a haunting, dreamlike pursuit through rain-blurred streets, empty buses, and echoing corridors—until the boundaries between self and other begin to dissolve.
Avalanche
When a backcountry ski trip turns deadly, one man must fight the mountain—and his own limits—to survive. After an avalanche buries his fiancée’s father, Blake faces impossible choices in the frozen Colorado wilderness. Avalanche is a taut, heart-wrenching story of endurance, guilt, and love pushed to its breaking point.
Loretta Wakes Up
In Loretta Wakes Up, Molly Wilcox delivers a raw, redemptive story about a mother haunted by her past and a daughter who turned pain into art. Set against the shimmering backdrop of early 2000s Los Angeles, this haunting excerpt from Wilcox’s upcoming novel Off the Record explores guilt, love, and the thin line between redemption and ruin.
Accidents Will Happen
When three suburban widows discover freedom—and perhaps satisfaction—in a series of “accidental” deaths, dark humor meets moral ambiguity in Ken Pisani’s Accidents Will Happen. A sharply written tale of revenge, friendship, and fate where every accident might just be planned.
Cerulean
When Deacon learns that a Category 5 hurricane is headed straight for his father’s home on Maynard Key, he races into the storm to save him. But what he finds in the old house is far more haunting than the weather outside—a mysterious blue spark, a father’s grief, and the ghostly presence of a mother long gone. Cerulean is a story about loss, love, and the fragile space between the living and the dead.
Concert Debut
During her American debut, concert pianist Magdalena Estrada is center stage when a man falls from the catwalk above, smashing the piano and setting off a chain of events that uncovers a sinister case of impersonation, kidnapping, and family secrets. In a gripping blend of mystery and drama, a deputy chief and his detectives unravel a tangled web involving identical twins, a long-buried past, and a terrorist plot—culminating in a triumphant encore no one saw coming.
Emerald Lake
A deeply moving story spanning generations, Emerald Lake follows Mateo’s journey of love, grief, and legacy through the Sierra mountains. From a first proposal to a final farewell, the story weaves memory and place into a timeless tribute to devotion and healing.
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