Fiction • Joel Hans

Forthcoming

“Propp’s Thirty-One Functions for a Girl Living Inside an Apple” — Fairy Tale Review

“Sapling by Shingle by Soot” — Passages North

2024

“An Interrogation of the Official State Fossil of Indiana” — Cotton Xenomorph

2023

“The Bedtime Emptying of Our World” — Flash Frog (also a finalist in the 2023 Flash Frog Blue Frog contest) nominated for the Best Small Fictions and Best American Short Stories!

“The Flamingo” — HAD

“Once, You Were Asked to Count the Hummingbirds” — New Flash Fiction Review

“Once, the Sound Dad and I Loved Most” — Variant Literature

“When Stars Are Just Stars” — Peatsmoke nominated for Best Small Fictions!

“A Protest of Tortoise” — Gone Lawn nominated for the Pushcart Prize!

“Once, Three Brothers Guided Two Moons Across the Sky” — Fractured Lit

“Two Decorated Skulls in the Miramonte Swamp” — Story, Issue 16 nominated for the Pushcart Prize!

“On Return from the Land Where One Never Dies” — The Journal

“The Earth, Measured” — Cease, Cows nominated for Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions!

“The Times I Traded Time With the Crows” — Atlas and Alice to be anthologized in Best Small Fictions!

“Feeding the Oscars” — trampset

2022

“The Princess on the Glass Hill Becoming” — Crow & Cross Keys

“The Reception” — Occulum

“Meal Prep” — Nurture

“Beneath the Undergarden” — Tiny Molecules

“Attn: Butchers & Locksmiths” — hex literary

“First it Was the Brushfires” — Puerto del Sol, republished online from Vol. 53

Go ahead, push the button. Start everything all over again. For those too young to remember: first it was the brushfires, and then the world flooding. It was the expanse of peoples, how they tried to make fertile every new possible land. We begin in the end, because I can’t let anyone forget. We begin in the end, with a question: What is it like to kill the last of a thing?

— “First it Was the Brushfires”

2020

“A Man, His Oblations” — No Tokens, republished online from Issue No. 2

The ocean’s rules, as he understands them, are simple. Oblations given to the unnamed banding of coastline are eventually returned to the pale sands of the beach in a better form.

— “A Man, His Oblations”

2018

“The Aunt of Everything” – West Branch, issue 88 (view the PDF version or buy a copy of the issue)

“First it Was the Brushfires” — Puerto del Sol, Vol. 53, The Science Issue (read it online or buy a copy)

2017

“Does Yours Have a Heart, Too?" — Green Mountains Review

2016

“Evaporation” — The Adroit Journal

“The Boomslang Coup” — The Masters Review

“Jackalope” — Noble / Gas Quarterly

“Ghosts of Wildly Different Species” — Eleven Eleven, issue 21 (print only)

2015

“Whisperingbird” & “Hellhound” & “Astral Glider” — New South

“Apatosaurus” — Atticus Review

The apatosaurus looks over at her lover as the ashcloud descends. Somehow, she knows that his bones will be uncovered, and hers will not.

— “Apatosaurus”

“Ochre Unicorn” — Yemassee (print only)

"Ochre Unicorn" was translated into Spanish by Julia Velasco!

“Black-Clawed Rapturus” & “Sea Elephant” & “Giant Beaver” — Sundog Lit, Issue 8 (print only)

“Once There Was an Upside-Down Girl” — Booth: A Journal

“Crepuscular Bear” & “Tree Needler” & “Thick-Skinned Buffali” — Caketrain, Issue 12 (print only)

The crepuscular bear mother waits in her den and when the sun falls without her crepuscular husband’s return she knows he has been felled by the rawboned man with the beard going silver. The children are playing on a rabbit skin rug.

— “Crepuscular Bear”

“Opal Feldwing” & “Gray Flix” & “Martian Globules” — Wyvern Lit

“Cardinine, Seafoamyst, Morningite” — West Branch

“Humongous Doubleray” & “Planet” & “Protenean Amoeba” — Noble / Gas Qtrly