Mel Hornyak

Full-Length Works

  • At Our Most Golden – Short Story Collection, In Process

Short Stories

  • Carina, 2022, figments Literary Magazine
    • “Camus was nearly finished with the painting — her skin glowing, pulsing in the setting sun — when he finally allowed himself to relax. Just the background, he thought, and his signature, and then she would be perfect.” | An artist’s rendition of the perfect woman comes to life and wants to become a painter.
  • 812 Firkin Street, 2021, figments Literary Magazine
    • “Walls, floors, and ceilings have long memories. They learn through the motions of those who move within them. And when a house is steeped in anger, stewed in malice, the echoes never really fade.” | The protagonist returns to their childhood home to find it different. Angry. Fleshy. Hungry.
  • Scior, 2021, figments Literary Magazine
    • “The lines burned into my skin are my own thoughts. These words are among them — as I write, I see them appearing across my wrists, with a slight tugging and the cold burn of excoriation.” | An epistolary story about an undergraduate trapped in his school’s eldritch library as a strange, lonely creature stalks the stacks.
  • A Little Off The Top, 2020, Here and There Issue 2: Shelter in Place
    • “He felt emotions he had only read about in books; the highest flights of love and lust, the depths of despair, the constant worry about whether he was becoming all he was supposed to be.” | A college student, sent home for the COVID-19 pandemic, takes his haircuts into his own hands.
  • Salt and Bone, 2020, figments Literary Magazine
    • “I don’t believe in the wind-gods. Peter does, and I light the abalone-patterned candles and sweep the doorstep with a sagebrush broom for his sake. He kneels before the steady Northern wind every morning and prays for the lamp-oil and the wick and the Fresnel lens. I kneel beside him and pray that we might eat our breakfast before it gets cold.” | A woman with amnesia washes ashore near the lonely lighthouse where a frustrated housewife is looking for something to believe in.