Literary Fiction
A selection of published literary works by Zachary Kellian
"Twelve blocks north and two blocks west. That's where we'll go. There's a planned community up there with the most beautiful houses you've ever seen. Kids get dropped off after school right in front of their own homes and the private pools are cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It's not far."
​
A young man tries to escape poverty, by choosing to live the dream instead of choosing to live the life in this Short Édition/ Principal Foundation Grand Jury Prize Winner.
"In this chrysalis state, smothered in her hoodie, the world around her muted and small, she is changing from the timid girl who riots with anxiety in the presence of her father, to the cool, confident women who cuddles strange men in the center of Tokyo’s shopping district."
​
A woman and her clients find both companionship and loneliness at a Tokyo Cuddle Cafe.
"Out on the baked flats, Terrell and Watkins were now stripped down to their jeans, their back muscles bunched like coiled sidewinders as they tussled under a patchwork of cloud shadow. Off in the west, against the relief of jagged mountains, lightning licked the horizon, and the air around them spat ash."
​
The toxic masculinity within a team of Nevada desert dowsers comes to a head when a member of the drill crew is forced to come to terms with his own sexuality.
"I once asked my mum, an unlikely yet immutable a source as ever, why there wasn’t a pornography industry in Ireland. She didn’t even pause between adding the egg and the buttermilk to the soda bread mixture:
“Because we’re all good Catholic girls here.” She continued stirring, then, as an aside to no one in particular, she added, “Plus we’re all ugly as sin.”
​A Catholic teen confronts her own fears surrounding intimacy with humor and an entrepreneurial spirit in this novelette.
Rule Number 1:
When asked about your parentage, give suitably vague answers.
"Her grandfather had died, leaving behind the leftovers from his failed cancer treatment: a generous inheritance of opiates and barbiturates. Grey’s cousin Leeland moved in with her shortly after that. The man knew opportunity when he saw it, and the two had been getting high and selling the remainders for weeks now."
​
In an opioid-plagued West Virginia town, a simple break-in reveals some sad truths.
"Someone will decide that tonight they’ve had enough. Help will come. She thinks these things, but she knows they are just a fantasy. Among the coal-rich hills and valleys so deep they swallow the sun, people keep to themselves."
​
​An isolated mother must rely on herself to escape an abuser when others fail.
"He looks behind him to the tracks he’d left through the fresh powder the evening before. They are not the straight, assured tracks of the man he had been 50 years ago. A jagged, serpentine line of boot prints winds up the rise toward the one-room cabin he built in the 60s. He had hewn it from the wilds around him. He had built it for her."
​
A solitary man of the mountains, set in his routine and his rigorous documenting of it, accidentally chronicles a global crisis.
*Originally published in Terse Journal.
A conversation between two strangers in a small diner on the border of Kansas and Nebraska develops in a shocking way in this finalist for the Ernest Hemingway Short Story of the Year (2016, Ernest Hemingway Foundatin of Oak Park)