R.K. Brown-Whitt has always been a terrible liar. There seems little reason to start now. Best to describe their fiction as what it is, then: an honest telling of the unreal.
R.K. Brown-Whitt writes literary speculative fiction that moves through unearthed memory, emotional realism, and poetic surrealism. In their stories, the unreal is not something to be explained away. It is something to be looked in the eye, something taking shape in the spaces between words. Let the woods peel up from the margins. Go in.
There are people waiting inside. Protagonists, antagonists, antiheroes, and all those who have never fit neatly into any of those categories. They bargain for their existence, for visibility, tenderness, agency, and survival. Sometimes with one another. Sometimes with gods, with monsters, with places that shelter as readily as they wound.
The worlds may be impossible. The bargains are not.
Short Stories
Published/Forthcoming
Church, 2025
"Church" moves through the aftermath of intimacy forged too early, within a sanctuary meant to keep secrets buried. Told in the cadence of confession and shaped by a gothic pastoral sensibility, the story bends time until past and present are inseparable. Memory hangs thick in the air of Church—a world where silence hums, dust rises, and the ache of waiting never quite ends. Church was published in Trace Fossils Review Summer 2025 edition.
Fantastic, 2025
In "Fantastic," a mother's desperate attempt to reconnect with her daughter through a cherished Barbie doll unravels into a haunting confrontation with loss and grief. Amid the crowded aisles of a store on Christmas Eve, the mother's frantic pursuit takes a surreal and devastating turn. This story poignantly captures the blurred lines between memory, hope, and the painful reality of irreversible loss, demonstrating how a single word, 'fantastic,' can embody both profound joy and heart-wrenching sorrow. Fantastic was published with Alternating Current Press’s The Coil in August of 2025.
“Crooked” unfolds like a palimpsest—past, present, and memory folded into each other with cinematic pacing and chiaroscuro atmosphere. It follows Uriel, a young Black boy carrying the visible and invisible scars of his childhood, as he seeks refuge in a home that is not quite his, among people who might yet become family. Through material decay, fragile affection, and generational silence, the story explores resilience amid suffering, tenderness amid ruin, and how crooked, improvised forms of love can still be enough to sustain. Crooked will be published in The Good Life Review’s Spring 2026 Edition.
In “Camelia in the Field,” a mother and daughter emerge from a car crash into a landscape both scorched and strange. As Camelia navigates the wreckage, physical and emotional, she encounters a wounded man, her own fragmenting memory, and the elusive figure of her daughter. Set in a haze of smoke, sirens, and surreal stillness, the story captures the disorienting aftermath of trauma and the fragile hope that flickers in its wake. With lyrical precision, it explores the interstice between the real and the mythic, where memory, loss, and maternal instinct converge beneath a sky that doesn’t answer back. Camelia in the Field was published in Necessary Fiction in February of 2026.
In Circulation/Unpublished
The Lapis
In “The Lapis,” Dante enters a strange, myth-lit bar where God dances in the corner, Darkness keeps close company, and wanting can be found only by those willing to be consumed cleanly enough. Caught between Shane, whose possessiveness has slowly blurred the line between intimacy and ownership, and the uncanny figures who move through the bar’s blue-black light, Dante searches for a desire that might finally belong to him. Lush, surreal, and intimate, “The Lapis” explores queer agency, coercive attachment, and the first fragile movement toward selfhood.
Dragon Keep Us
The Petina
In “Dragon Keep Us,” Tròta carries Dragon beneath his skin: a sacred weapon, a god-machine, and a hunger trained to mistake survival for annihilation. Charged with leading Daven, a foreign feed-star with californium eyes, across a country ruined by autonomous war, Tròta must bargain with the thing in his bones using memory, contradiction, and desire. As the River watches and the sky fills with gnats, the story moves through violence toward a quieter terror: the possibility that tenderness itself may become another form of possession.
TBD
The Witness
The Krait
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