Books Short Fiction Spotlight Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: February 2026 Ghosts, bridge trolls, and soothsayers populate the best short fiction of the past month… By Alex Brown | Published on March 16, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share This month I once again bring two new magazines into the spotlight on top of the ones long established in my rotation. Many of these stories are bittersweet or end on a note of impending doom. I wonder why those were the pieces I gravitated to in February? It’s not like everything is terrible and we’re on the brink of a third world war or—*checks notes* Oh. Okay. Well, here are ten awesome short science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories for you anyway. “Corporeal Form” by Kit Harding (Penumbric—February 2026; issue 5) Two ghosts work at a haunted beach attraction. The protagonist takes a liking to a human tourist, Melody, who has come hoping to encounter the wailing Woman in White (aka the protagonist). The two form a brief but toxic relationship. I liked how Harding gives the reader just a snippet of this world. We get hints about other characters and tastes of the larger world, but for the most part it’s like looking through a pinhole; you know there’s more out there but you can’t see it. That narrow view adds to the unsettling feeling of the plot. “The Embroidered Garden” by Manahil Bandukwala (Tales & Feathers—February 2026; issue 4) Our narrator is a child waiting for Baba to return home after weeks of working at the port. They’re left behind with Amma, who is frustrated with the state of her garden. Our narrator is practicing their embroidery and somehow the flowers they stitch come to life in the garden. And so do other things, even foxes. Whatever they can stitch, they can make appear. The ending of this story made me sit up and shout “Oh no!” For most of the way through it feels like a sweet little magical realism tale and the end takes a sharp turn. “Jumper on the Troll Bridge” by Shannon Cross (Flashpoint SF—February 2026; issue 1) Flashpoint SF has been around for a while, but they recently switched from releasing individual stories on their website to collecting them together in a single issue. In this new format, it was my pleasure to read this story about a troll trying to collect bridge tolls. The only way it can get tolls nowadays are through people who jump off the bridge in an attempt to take their life. But this isn’t a dark story about suicide. Rather, it’s about second chances. I’m from the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Golden Gate Bridge used to be a common jump point until they put up barriers and installed phones that connect to crisis hotlines. Most people who survive a suicide attempt say they regretted trying almost immediately after they did it, and this story takes that on in a refreshing way. “Medusa’s Ship, or The Thing About Bodies” by Natalia Theodoridou (Beneath Ceaseless Skies—February 5, 2026; issue 450) This story is about a lot of things. It’s about gender and bodies and how we change ours so they fit better. It’s a play on the Ship of Theseus paradox where if you replace all the parts of the ship is it still the same ship. It references the Greek myth of Medusa but layers on feminism and patriarchy commentary. And since it’s Theodoridou, it also has a unique narrative style: the story is bookended by fragment sentences and em dashes. In the middle is the plot about a spaceship captain who arrives on a planet where the Ship can turn herself into a woman, but only as long as he keeps his eyes covered with a blindfold. A stunning story with a visually interesting layout and a compelling plot. “Rest Stop” by Pedro Iniguez (Nightmare—February 2026; issue 161) Yolanda and Bernard are on a road trip to El Paso. While in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, Yolanda begs him to pull over at the next rest stop so she can use the bathroom. A simple request, but it lands like a ticking time bomb. The bruises on Yolanda’s arms tell the reader that this relationship isn’t a safe or kind one. In the dilapidated restroom, Yolanda is offered a choice: go back to the evil she knows or leave but into a future she knows nothing about. What if things are better if she leaves? What if things are worse? Iniquez’s flash fiction is weightier than its brevity would have you believe. “The River Speaks My Name” by Ocoxōchitl la Coyota (Strange Horizons—February 16, 2026) Two young women grow up in a small village. They spend their days playing in the river but avoid the strange abyss at the center of it. Until they revisit as adults and Isabella is sucked into it. When she emerges, she’s out of her mind with terror. After she dies, the land floods and the drought is temporarily abated. Our narrator realizes there is a connection to people who disappear in the river abyss and the storm that follows. That connection is haunting her now. A dark fantasy climate fiction story about sacrifice and tradition. “This is Why Magical Realism and Family Tree School Projects Shouldn’t Mix” by Abigail Guerrero (Adventitious—February 2026; issue 1) Adventitious is a new bimonthly magazine that, according to their website, covers “speculative, surreal, and literary fiction. We admire its reach, its weirdness, and its refusal to color inside any lines.” Their first issue had a lot of stories that were as unusual as they were unexpected, but the one that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about is Guerrero’s. Clarita is assigned a family tree project in school and the story is her presenting various people in her genealogy. One of Clarita’s ancestors had a child by a demon in goat form, so now all the descendants have goat parts. Another ancestor is a grumpy pile of bones. Guerrero touches on the tension that a lot of marginalized kids and kids with non-traditional families experience with these projects, like me. (Imagine being a Black 10-year-old in a predominately white school and having to tell your white teacher that you can’t go any further back than the 1860s because of slavery.) By the end of her presentation, even her teacher regrets the assignment.  “Three Fortunes on Alcestis as Told by the Fraud Baeliss Shudal” by Louis Inglis Hall (Clarkesworld—February 2026; issue 223) Baeliss is the last descendent in an ancient line of diviners. Except she cannot see the future. The Duke Ernestid Arkady, ruler of the world, summons the soothsayer to tell his future and so she lies. That fortune takes her to a battlefield and then the aftermath of a war. Each time she has to tell a fortune, she lies. The subtext reasons for those lies are what make this story so powerful. The future isn’t immutable or inevitable. It is what we make of it. “Uncontrolled Emotion” by Allison Mulder (Radon Journal—February 2026; issue 12) “Everyone at the company started with a signed contract and a memory wipe.” Dermot is a safety censor for a company that scours surveillance footage to monitor communications. He marks things said and unsaid and files them. What happens when someone acquires too many infractions isn’t told to the reader, but it presumably isn’t good. The conversation he listens in on in the story triggers something from the life he had before his memory was wiped. It’s a gut-wrenching revelation, and his reaction to it is complex and depressing. Mulder hints at how the capitalistic and fascistic system forces people into awful situations but that we also always have some power to change things for the better. It may not be a lot, but there is always something we can do. “What Haunts the Newbuild?” by Meagan Kane (PseudoPod—February 6, 2026; 1015) If you haven’t noticed, another theme this month is stories with shocking endings. You think the author is going one direction and then they shift at the last minute into an entirely different one. In this piece, two houses, Good Bones and LUXURY VINYL FLOORING (aka Newbuild), start a competition to see who can get the most from their human occupants. The houses sip the lifeforce of humans in their care, kind of a twist on the haunted house story. But that ending! Wow. Makes you look at new construction McMansions a whole lot different.[end-mark] The post Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: February 2026 appeared first on Reactor.