Jiksun Cheung is a speculative / literary fiction writer from Hong Kong who writes about parenthood and confronting the unknown. His stories have been published or featured in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Apex Magazine, Atticus Review, The Molotov Cocktail, Flash Fiction Magazine, Arsenika, and elsewhere.

His work has received nominations for The Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, The Shirley Jackson Award, Wigleaf Top 50, and will appear in The Molotov Cocktail’s 6th, 7th, and 8th Annual Prize Winner’s Anthologies. His story “Cupola” was a finalist for the 2020 SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction.

Jiksun is EIC at The Bureau Dispatch and Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. He is currently working on his debut novel.

He and his wife share their home with two boisterous toddlers and enough play dough to last a lifetime. He used to think he could multitask, but now that his kids have mastered the fine art of scream-sprinting, he’s having difficulty single-tasking.

FICTION / CREATIVE NONFICTION / POETRY

Cupola

Smokelong Quarterly

Finalist in The Smokelong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2020

Nominated for The Shirley Jackson Award

Fiction | Published July 2020 in Issue Sixty-Eight | Reprinted July 2022 in Miramichi Flash

The sea breeze whips at my bathrobe and whistles beneath the floorboards of the front porch. Something seems off again, but I can’t put my finger on it. Millie says the isolation will do that to you.

Behind me, the glass dome of Hak Island Lighthouse glints in the autumn haze. The dome is called the cupola, as I’ve learned since we first moved in as caretakers. Millie says the word originally meant a burying vault.

Continue reading:
http://www.smokelong.com/cupola/

 

The Precipice

The Molotov Cocktail

1st Prize Winner in The Molotov Cocktail Folked-Up Flash 2022 Contest

Nominated for The Best of the Net 2023

Fiction | Published March 2022 in Volume 12, Folked-Up Flash

Every year, on the fifteenth night of the seventh lunar month, when the gates of the underworld are thrown open, he returns to the corner just off the main road in Kam Tin beside the entrance of a rundown amusement park, where he sets a bundle of joss papers alight in a rusty tin can and then takes a pinch of gravel and rooster blood between his fingers and rubs the vile mixture into his eyes until it burns.

Continue reading:
https://themolotovcocktail.com/vol-12/folked-up-flash/the-precipice/

 

The Shoal

Wigleaf

Fiction | Published September 2021

The apparition materializes again in the back alley between Golden Horse Nightclub and Swanky Joe's. The girl is dressed in the same faded gown and trousers patched at the knees. She is on her haunches watching a spot in the concrete as keenly as a black kite tracks a fish in the water.

Traffic is light at this time of the night, but even when a truck thunders past, booming as it hits a rut in the asphalt, the girl doesn't look up; she doesn't notice at all.

Continue reading:
https://wigleaf.com/202109shoal.htm

 

Landfall

And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing:
Parenting Stories Gone Speculative

An anthology of speculative stories around parenting and parenthood, written by 76 authors, edited by Hannah Grieco, and published by Alternating Current Press.

Nominated for The Pushcart Prize

Fiction Anthology | January 2022

In the time that my mother has been missing, the skies have turned a gray, roiling mass. The radio is calling it the most violent typhoon to make landfall in thirty-two years.

We’ve looked everywhere and there’s nowhere else left except here, in the ruins of the abandoned Wah Fung housing estate, where my mother and I once lived in a tiny room on the sixth floor.

Purchase on Amazon

 

What the Humans Call Heartache

Arsenika

Featured in Words for Thought: Short Fiction Review, Apex Magazine, Issue 127

Fiction | Published April 2021 in Issue 8

The egg crunched in her fist, yolk oozing between her fingers onto the kitchen counter. She wiped away the mess, dropped the empty carton into the whirring garbage disposal chute, and patted down her apron in the doorway to the dining room.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Astrid, “but we seem to have run out of eggs.”

Continue reading:
https://arsenika.ink/fiction/what-the-humans-call-heartache/

Read the review:
https://apex-magazine.com/words-for-thought-november-2021/

 

Bearing Witness

Atticus Review

Creative Nonfiction | Published December 2020

The first one million five hundred seventy-six thousand eight hundred minutes of my daughter’s life will be lost to childhood amnesia.

It’s seven thirty-two on a Thursday morning.

Continue reading:
https://atticusreview.org/bearing-witness/

 

Descent

The Molotov Cocktail

Top Ten in The Molotov Cocktail Flash Monster 2020 Contest

Fiction | Published October 2020 in Volume 11, Flash Monster 2020

Sunlight rarely finds its way into depths below two hundred meters, but at half a kilometer there had still been the faintest hint of cobalt bleeding from above as the submersible entered the part of the ocean where darkness was perpetual.

At six hundred meters, he heard the distant hum of a blue whale, long and solitary, followed by a series of deliberate, inquisitive clicks as if the whale was asking: alien thing, why are you here?

Continue reading:
https://themolotovcocktail.com/vol-11/flash-monster-2020/descent/

 

Anglers on Cannon Ridge

The Molotov Cocktail

Top Ten in The Molotov Cocktail Flash Odyssey Contest

Fiction | Published August 2020 in Volume 11, Flash Odyssey

He considered waking his daughter, asleep beside him in the passenger seat, but decided not to. It had been days since they had eaten anything more than a bit of boiled root and precious shavings of salted fish. They were almost at the top of the ridge; it was better to let her sleep.

He drove hard, forgetting for a while the extinction beyond the flood of the headlights and seeing only the crumbling road in front.

Continue reading:
https://themolotovcocktail.com/vol-11/flash-odyssey/anglers-on-cannon-ridge/

 

Smoke & Mirrors with Jiksun Cheung

Smokelong Quarterly

Interview | Published July 2020 in Issue Sixty-Eight

[Interviewer] There’s a recurring theme in this story of loss and new beginnings. Since I’m interested in work histories in fiction, what did your narrator do before starting over at the Hak Island Lighthouse?

[JC] “Cupola” actually began as a four-thousand-word horror story called “The Caretaker.” That’s right, the first draft of “Cupola” was four thousand words long...

Continue reading:
http://www.smokelong.com/smoke-mirrors-with-jiksun-cheung/

 

The Big Bad

The Daily Drunk / Podcast Micro

Nominated for Best Micro Fiction

Fiction | Tragedy of The Wolf, Part 1 | Published July 2020

“Beat it,” says Reginald, his Buttonville Beanstalks baseball cap pulled tight over his mottled scalp.

“Yeah, get lost,” says Jeremiah.

Lenny, the third pig, doesn’t say much; he’s noisily sucking on a popsicle.

I look up at the treehouse they’re standing in, rosy cheeks and salmon-pink snouts protruding from a square opening on the side.

Continue reading:
https://dailydrunkmag.com/2020/12/01/the-big-bad/

Listen to the podcast:
https://micropodcast.org/podcast/bala-x-cheung-x-jones/

 

Then All The Reindeer Loved Him

The Daily Drunk

Fiction | Tragedy of The Wolf, Part 2 | Published October 2020

“So I take a lighter to the Pigboy Magazine,” says the wolf, “and lob it into the treehouse.”

The group around the sorting table breaks into laughter and mock indignation.

“Den what happened?” asks Boris the senior mail clerk, an overweight grizzly bear wearing a pair of old wire frame spectacles.

Continue reading:
https://dailydrunkmag.com/2020/12/10/then-all-the-reindeer-loved-him/

 

Villainy in Pinewood Forest

The Daily Drunk

Fiction | Tragedy of The Wolf, Part 3 | Published March 2021

Old Nan spotted the station wagon among the dense black pines as it trundled along the unmarked road toward her cottage.

“How much do you think he can take?” she asked.

The girl, Sam, didn’t hear the question, or if she did, chose not to respond. Instead, she hefted one of the bulging cellophane bricks in her palm and then wordlessly tossed it back onto the pile on the kitchen table.

The girl had always unnerved her.

Continue reading:
https://dailydrunkmag.com/2021/03/22/villainy-in-pinewood-forest/

 

When The Landslide Passes Us By

Cypress Literary Journal

Poetry | Published August 2020

 

All The Love In The World

Flash Fiction Magazine

Longlisted for Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2021

Fiction | Published April 2020

“Siri, put Emotr on the wall,” he said.

The wall screen flickered and blue light flooded the narrow apartment.

An attractive looking woman was posing in the snow. It was his neighbor Miki, holidaying somewhere glamorous again. Whistler, probably. The post had four thousand and twenty-seven loves. Four thousand and twenty-seven!

“Play post,” he said.

Continue reading (Contains NSFW content):
https://flashfictionmagazine.com/blog/2020/04/15/all-the-love-in-the-world/

 
OTHER THINGS

The Bureau Dispatch

An ode to the writer’s bureau.

The bureau is the easel. Or it is the laboratory, the microscope, or the telescope; it is the cauldron or the smelting furnace; it is sanctuary or it is battleground. But perhaps there is no need for metaphors because no two bureaus are alike: the bureau just is.

The Bureau Dispatch is a celebration of working writers everywhere: forging onward alone, bound together by craft and camaraderie; a collection of one-of-a-kind micro stories accompanied by photographs of writers at their places of work—where the focus is as much on the people behind the words as it is on the stories themselves.

bureaudispatch.com

 

Artefact Disco

In search of the postworthy.

A postcard is thought made physical. It travels the world in search of its recipient and the distance it covers is real. You use a pen (or a pencil!) and you make your mark. These are not options, there is only ever a single original, and - once you've posted it - well, you know the rest.

The Artefact Dispatch Company, or Artefact Disco, is a postcard company unexpectedly birthed after a few afternoons spent devouring Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec. This particular series is an ode to his fascinating work.

Go forth, and seek the postworthy.

artefactdis.co

 

Go Public Mediaworks

Story-driven shenanigans.

Go Public is an award-winning brand strategy consultancy based in Hong Kong bringing together talented designers, developers, and strategists to help businesses thrive.

Since 2007, we’ve had the privilege to work with over 150 clients - from global brands to scrappy, bootstrapping startups - to help them find and tell their stories.

Our largest publicly traded clients have a combined market capitalization of just over HK$122 billion – while our smallest client has three founders (and zero employees.)

gopublic.com.hk

 

Desk of Jiksun

Sci-fi, art, writing, geekiness, and retro artefacts from the depths of the interwebs for your viewing pleasure.

Follow @JiksunCheung

 

Copyright © 2023 by Jiksun Cheung​

All rights reserved. Content may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Fin.