Three for the Week – July 24
Jake Gilmore breaks down some hot new songs. Please go stream “Becoming a Stranger” by Go Public, “Indu” by Greg Freeman, and “Breaking Atoms” by Chuck Strangers featuring billy woods and Zeroh. Support under-appreciated artists!
A Man Is What He Don’t Do
Ray had run a fence crew for thirty years and he had carried on with a woman out of Federalsburg for eleven of them, and Barbara had found out in 1990 and thrown him out and taken him back in six weeks. It was known. It had been known so long that it had stopped…
Pineshade Phantom
The river has always been hungry. For forty years, the town of Pineshade told itself the nightmare ended when Stanley Kane, the masked Phantom, plunged into the black waters of the Silaq’tem. But the river never releases what it claims. It only waits. And it never forgets. Now the past claws its way back. Whispering…
Erin Roberts’ Reluctant Slasher: Clown Shoes & Crimson Shadows
Erin Roberts’ Reluctant Slasher: Clown Shoes & Crimson Shadows Erin Roberts never asked to be the world’s most sarcastic vampire hunter — or its newest president. One chaotic Book 1 later, he’s leading the newly minted Vampire Hunter League of America (VHLOA), complete with a snarky AI sidekick, a team of colorful slashers, and a…
A Constitutional Question the Court Decided It Didn’t Want to Answer
When the Supreme Court handed down its decision this morning that states may bar transgender girls from girls’ and women’s sports teams, the headline wrote itself: a 6–3 majority upheld laws in West Virginia and Idaho restricting female athletics to biological females. What the headline obscures is how the majority got there, and the route…
Low Water
This is a horror story. But so is life. This is a Fenton Wexler original work. And for that, you are welcome.
The Rightest Way
Part of me hopes you have no clue what you did to me, and the other hopes you do. Because if you didn’t know, that means I’m not defending a villain. But if you did, then at least I know my pain is justified.
The Off-Season
“I’m not going to be it,” she said at last. Gently. Definitively. “I want to be clear before you start building something in your head, because I can hear you starting. I’m not the thing you come home to when the city stops working. I had that. I had eleven years of being the thing…
If I Had His Face
She had the same eyes as her brother. Same jaw, same crease in their brows when they argued. Their mother had said so their whole lives, strangers said it, photos said it. She had always loved that, the sense of being matched, of belonging to someone. She had never hated it until now.
Doubt Your Doubts
“…A woman has been liking on you. That’s it. That’s the whole sickness.” Her voice didn’t rise. It went lower. “And it has eaten you alive. Because you don’t know what to do with a thing you didn’t con somebody into.”
The Jester
When the cursed jester doll from an estate sale brings a legendary slasher killer to a coastal town of Westport, California, it awakens a legacy of horror that refuses to stay buried. Generations ago, Aleron—a jester betrayed by a king—laid a curse on the unjust. Now, his vengeance returns in the form of the legendary…
All The Things They Didn’t Say: Heated Rivalry and The Ugly Story Behind a Pop Song
I yearn to yearn. Do you?
A Map of Canada: On Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You”
The image of love as the touching of souls is borrowed from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, which Mitchell has acknowledged. What Mitchell does with the borrowing is the interesting part. She does not just quote the idea. She takes the idea and turns it back on the lover. You said love was touching…
The Wish and the Cost: A Critical Look at Obsession
Curry Barker’s Obsession arrived in American theaters on May 15, 2026, carrying the kind of pre-release expectation that usually crushes small horror films. It came out of TIFF’s Midnight Madness block the previous September with strong word of mouth, sold to Focus Features for a reported fifteen million dollars after being made for about one…
The Seed Library
Mara opened the door of the old branch library at six in the morning, the way she had every Tuesday for the past three years. The lock still stuck. She still kicked it. The hinges still complained in their tired metal voices, and she still loved the sound. The building had not been a real…
The Work That Disappears
“I do not want to make this essay too tidy. There is something hard about the kind of life I am describing. To work on systems that disappear when they succeed is to accept a particular relationship with recognition. You will not get a parade. You will, in many cases, not even get thanked. You…
Like the Flower
Calla will check her arm in the morning. Sober, in a different light, some name she half-invented outside a kitchen with bad tiles. She says her name again. It gets absorbed into the peeling wallpaper.
Unfinished Bussiness
Ron Harper thought the worst thing that could happen in college was being invisible. Then he died—and it stuck. Now a ghost classified as an Unfinished Business Person, Ron is trapped in an afterlife run like a cosmic bureaucracy, where the only way out is solving his own murder. Teaming up with Jessica, another newly…
THE LANDSCAPE HAS ABANDONMENT ISSUES
I am currently wedged in a ventilation duct that is precisely the width of my own optimism—which is to say, significantly narrower than it looked from the floor—arguing with a 17th-century oil painting. A merchant named Cornelius stares at me from across the room with judgmental intensity, while my target, a 1683 Dutch landscape, is…
last dawn of humanity
The Last Dawn of Humanity by rowdy rood . Chapter 1: Echoes of the Fallen City The concrete arteries of the city lay fractured, choked with the dust of fallen titans. Twisted rebar clawed at the bruised sky, skeletal fingers reaching for a sun that offered no solace, only a stark illumination of…
The Colors, Oh the Colors
There is a particular quality of light that belongs exclusively to the past. Miriam had come to understand this slowly, the way one comes to understand most important things, which is to say reluctantly, and only after a great deal of unnecessary suffering. The light of memory, she had decided, possessed a warmth that no…
I Was Thinking About Space And Not The One Between Us
My own thoughts. Based on the song, “In Another World,” by EJAE.
ERIN ROBERTS, RECLUANT SLÄSHER
Erin Roberts, the awkward black sheep of a legendary slasher family, fails spectacularly at every kill. More at home with vampire myths than knives, he’s the Slasher League of America’s biggest liability—until his latest target doesn’t die. She’s a vampire nursing a 1950s grudge against his bloodline. One lost mask later, fangs crash through SLOA…
Classics from the Public Domain – The Tell Tale Heart
Introducing Classics from The Public Domain The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe Editor’s Note: We are thrilled to launch a new feature at The Olive Branch Review: Classics from The Public Domain. In a space dedicated to amplifying contemporary voices, we recognize the importance of honoring the literary giants whose works have shaped…
Erosion Has Become Assertion
A companion piece to “The Rise of Mussolini and Lessons for Modern Democracy,” July 2024
The way we talk
This may not be the post for everyone. If you are in a mood for reflection, understanding and some mourning, this could be you.
Old Friends
Ash and Mari are old childhood friends who were separated by their differences but have always been neighbors. Upon graduation, Ash has completely changed and Mari seems interested in wanting to be her friend again, feeling guilty for the way they ended, but Ash trusts no one except her childhood best friend. Tyger, a ruthless…
My Uncle, My Nightmare
After a terrifying call from her long-dead “Uncle Tony” on her late-night paranormal radio show, radio host Lydia finds herself plunged back into the nightmare she thought she escaped as a child. What begins as a personal haunting quickly spirals into something far darker. A string of brutal ritualistic murders — starting with bartender Samara…
Creature Feature
In the shadowed woods of Washington State, Sidney and Martha Jones sought refuge from the greatest tragedy of their lives — the mysterious disappearance of their fourteen-year-old son, Billy, in the Great Smoky Mountains. But some nightmares cannot be escaped. When a towering, telepathic creature known as B2B begins visiting their secluded cabin, the grieving…
The Devil at Mile Marker Twelve
“They stood there, the two of them, while the jukebox played and the dawn crept closer. The woman at the bar hadn’t moved. The bartender had his hands below the counter, probably on a shotgun, probably not planning to use it either way.”
The Woman in 4B
“He didn’t tell her. Not that night. But he thought about it. Thought about her question. Thought about her eyes in the dark, watching him like she was reading something written on his skin.”
In My House Is Where You Should Be
“And maybe that is the final loss. The loss of having someone in your life in a way that is visible and shared. What remains is private. Internal. Yours alone.”
OVERHEATED RIVALRY: The Long Game Comes To An End
This story is a work of fan fiction, born from imagination and deep respect for the characters’ original context. The ending you’re about to read is my personal interpretation—one of many possible paths for Shane and Ilya’s journey. Other fans might envision different outcomes, some more hopeful, some perhaps even more heart-wrenching. Their story,…
ONE DEAD END AFTER ANOTHER
If human life is a journey, as the cliche goes, our daily lives become the road that we travel. It happens that for some individuals, the streets they travel along, with indecisions and misfires, take them to dead ends. During his journey, Jason U. reached a dead end. He had to make a decision.
Polluted Marrow
Lilou wakes up covered in blood. It splatters her cheeks like paint, dripping down her neck like heavy tears.
What is a writers job as the world bows and cracks?
Our job is to help, provide honest spaces – to give people something to compartmentalize their own thoughts on the world.