Beds: Short Story

by Karen Heuler

A ward where patients will betray someone else to save their own lives. From O. Henry Award-winner Karen Heuler's Inner City, this short story is one of a set of fifteen compelling works of strange and surreal beauty.

ChiZine Publications (CZP) curates the best of the bizarre, bringing you the most excitingly weird, subtle, dark, and disturbing literary fiction. Look for more titles in the ChiZine short stories collection to build your digital library.

25 pages, ebook

First published May 13, 2014

About the author

Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over 100 literary and speculative journals and anthologies, such as F&SF and Asimov's and Conjunctions. She has won an O. Henry award, been nominated for Pushcart and Best American Short Story awards, and was a finalist for the Bellwether Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. The New York Times called her first collection, "The Other Door," “haunting and quirky.” Her short-story collection, "The Inner City," was listed as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2013. Her novels include "Glorious Plague," about a beautiful apocalypse. Her last book, "The Splendid City," from Angry Robot Books, exiles a novice witch and the man she illegally turned into a cat to Liberty (formerly known as Texas), where constant parades and missing water make life interesting. Her newest collection, "A Slice of the Dark," messes up reality a bit--just a bit--maybe a little more than a bit--with strange tales that might explain a lot.