Bold, Boundary-blurring Fiction

MAY SMOKE | 2026

A May issue of people haunted by memory, sharpened by desire, and marked by what family leaves behind.

MAY

Smoke

Explore the issue

Read Editor's Light

Enter the Smoke

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Current Issue

Funny how time flies when you’re wandering through the smoke.

The latest issue of Neon & Smoke brings together stories of memory, obsession, desire, family dysfunction, violence, longing, and the strange choices people make when the world presses too hard against them.

This month, you’ll find characters choosing to remember when forgetting would be easier, women fleeing from evil or falling into it, and men carrying the brutal weight of family, hatred, and inheritance. The work is sharp, strange, intimate, and alive.

As always, we move across genre without apology. Speculative fiction, horror, comedy, erotica, literary realism, and everything glowing somewhere in between. What binds these pieces together is not category. It is character.

Flawed people. Conflicted people. People standing at the edge of who they were and who they might become.

Our poetry theme also turns toward Dopamine Hits, a space for obsession, craving, pleasure, and the things we chase even when we know better. We’re thrilled to open that theme with the sensuous poem “Insatiable.”

The May issue is live now.

Step into the smoke.

- T & J

Where the Glow Meets the Haze

What
We
Want

Flash Fiction

Voice-driven stories with narrative stakes, emotional pressure, and language that leaves a mark.

Poetry

Poems with heat, texture, and aftertaste. Formal or experimental, but never inert.

Digital Art

Curated visual work that deepens the issue theme and adds another pulse to the publication.

Editor's Light

On First Lines (What I’ve Been Learning About Them Lately)

First lines won’t tell you everything, but they reveal more than you think. Voice, tension, intent, energy. The best stories arrive already alive, carrying a quiet charge from the start. At Neon & Smoke, we’re drawn to that pulse, that hint of promise in the opening line that says something real is about to unfold.

Apr 22

What We Mean By “Half Genre / Always Lit”

At Neon & Smoke , we publish work that is half genre, always lit . Writers ask us what that means. I suppose it’s a reflection of how we see the world: most people, in real life, are hybrids. We are soft and hard. Tender and sharp. Holy and unholy. Poetry one minute and curse words the next. Horny but ashamed. We want connection and we want distance. We want safety and we flirt with danger. We are brave and terrified, loving and cruel, often in the same breath. Human being

Mar 9

We Write, We Grow

Remember when you first knew you wanted to be a writer? I was eight at the time. All of my friends wanted to be firemen and policemen. I wanted to write Batman comics. (Sometimes I still do.) Back then, I thought it was about the action. Now I know it’s about the words. We often say words have meaning. But they have more than meaning. They’re a kinetic force—able to cut, convince, and comfort. They linger. They travel. They land in places we may never see. As I’ve gotten old

Feb 2

Our Story Unfolded

Neon & Smoke is a home for bold, voice-driven fiction with emotional weight and narrative fire. We publish stories that don’t sit quietly—tales where the plot might thrill, chill, or make you laugh, but always reveals something deeper. We crave characters who leap off the page, language that crackles, and stories that blur the line between genre and literary not for the sake of novelty, but it’s the most honest way to tell the truth.

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