The Gorko Gazette

Daily Humor

thegorkogazette

12.12.2025 7:00 AM

Short fiction by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Family Planning

After a life of doing many bad or at least ambiguous things, this guy feels it. The finger, the breath, the warning. When that happens, what do you do?

Get your cards read by someone who really knows what they’re doing, that’s what you do, so that’s what he does.

As he’s getting his cards read, he looks like he already knows, but he asks anyway. ‘What’s going to happen to me after I die?’

Is it hell? It can only be that. Then what can he do to prevent such calamity? The fortune teller flips over several cards. It’s the Empress and some pentacles. But not hell, she explains. ‘You’re going to become pregnant.’

‘Pregnant?’ he asks.

‘Big as a house,’ she says. ‘Most likely twins.’

‘But after I’m dead,’ he says. ‘Not before.’

‘Yes,’ the fortune teller says.

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ he says.

It’s Easier Being a God than the Alternative

You’re cold. You wonder if you’re dead. Probably not, but you decide to ask Alexa just in case.

‘Alexa,’ you ask, in your bravest voice. ‘Am I dead?’

It takes the longest time for Alexa to answer. Seasons, seeds turning into forests, families of monkeys making a home in your yard, that long.

‘No,’ she finally says. ‘But you should be trying a little harder at being alive.’

So you go outside and tend to the monkeys who revere you.

About the artist

Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s fiction can be found in X-Ray, The Pinch, Invisible City, Heavy Feather Review and The Offing. His short story ‘Taylor Swift’ won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story ‘Goodwill’ was picked as one of Wigleaf’s Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He lives in Barcelona. https://linktr.ee/hughsteinberg.