Matthew Zanoni Müller

Short Fiction Publications

“Tornado Warning”

“She had wanted to be bad and cynical and small and say wild and kind of fucked up things and she had wanted him to know they were more or less all true and untrue at the same time and she had wanted him to love her for it anyway and now he didn’t even know who she was."

“Eat Me”

“People were always doing that to me, just taking what they wanted without asking, as if I had a blinking sign over my head that said “Eat Me.” But did anyone ever think about what it was like for me get eaten, to sit around afterward with only the dark little hole where my pinky had been? With my wound?”

“Field Survey”

“His name was Michael and he was looking up at something outside of the frame of the picture and his grinning white teeth were visible through the darkness of his beard. She scrolled down.”

Halfway Down the Stairs

"The pond was fed by a river, she had told him, and though it was calm, there was still a fine undertow. Water rushed in on one side and spilled out the other. She had said this as though it were a good thing... "

 Bartleby Snopes

"She swam out into the lake, dipped under the buoys and kept going. She pushed out with a steady breaststroke, and Paul called for her, and called, until his father came, and they watched her getting smaller and smaller..."

Short Memoir Publications

A selection of the published pieces from Drops on the Water: Stories about Growing Up from a Father and Son

Gloom Cupboard

"We crawl away from the bottom of the stairs. We go to the front door and hide in the coat closet. Through the bottom of the coats we see her white shadow come down and stare at the pile..."

Prick of the Spindle

Surrounded by the lights of Rockefeller Center, she would skate to me across the ice and then I would kiss her, and her lips would be thin and soft and I would feel the warmth of her breath. I wouldn’t care then if anyone saw, and among all those people we wouldn’t be on display; they would just be a bright noise all around us. "

decomP magazinE

"He let us ride along as we moved through the streets, cars pulling to the side of the road as the house rolled by like a big moving ship..."

"The Many Uses of Crying"  The Boiler Journal. *Chosen for annual print issue.

"The rest of my day was wonderful. I got to lie in bed and read, moan now and again to show everyone that I was still sick and hadn’t been faking..."

"Samson"                               Fwriction : Review

“I put my fingers into my mouth and watched my mother flick the scissors from her pocket. She held my father’s hair between the scissors' sharp shiny edges and then looked at him and waited for his nod..."

Hippocampus *voted "most memorable."

"I only glanced up for a second, looking at the sky and the surrounding houses, thinking that my parents’ house was now very far away and if David and Ramona left me there it would be difficult to ever get back..."

Toasted Cheese

"She probably didn’t count on him coming outside just then, coffee cup in hand, only to see his two suitcases going up in flame, their flimsy ribcages pointed up to the sun.."

Halfway Down the Stairs

"Filling me constantly was the picture of him in the tiny stuffed store in Germany, choosing my binoculars from a shelf and holding them in his fat fingers, hoping that I would like them, while in the meantime I was running down our wide street in Oregon, trying to look into all of the neighbor’s houses, to see what the American children were doing..."

Micro Prose Publications

“Totems” Lost Balloon Magazine

“The next year she couldn’t have had a thirst big enough for all the cups that lined up on every nightstand and countertop and end table. . .”

Literary Bohemian

"The radio in the corner carried voices from the dark waters outside into the living room all night, voices calling to other boats, Come in Sea Slipper, come in Juniper, southwest wind, fishing tomorrow, drank too much, still drinking..."

A-Minor Magazine

"But when the child was born it came in the shape of a lion and leapt to the fields, devouring sheep and the shepherds that tended them..."

Nano Fiction

Read a mini interview with me about this story, at the link above, and listen to the story below.