Publication news! My short story “Superhero Dispatch” is included in the Cloaked Press anthology Spring Into SciFi 2026, Volume 1. Contents of both volumes listed below, followed by a preview of my story!

Contents (Volume 1):

• Grigory Lukin – “A Simple Matter of Consent”

• Mike Murphy – “A Good Cry”

• Bettina V. Bosch – “Agent Ash’s Acceptance”

• K.R. Thunderman – “Paid to Remember”

• Keltie Zubko – “The Glitch: An NPC Love Story”

• Mord McGhee – “The Day the World Stopped Synching”

• Geneviève Laprise – “Double Down”

• Navarun Mallick – “The Gilgamesh Protocol”

• Chad Gayle – “Stolen Words”

• Karl El-Koura – “Superhero Dispatch”

• Matthew McKiernan – “Anukaranam”

• Duncan Shepard – “We Run Like Dreams”

• Ernesto I. Gomez Belloso – “Human Enough”

• Sylvie Althoff – “Knit One Make One”

• Nathaniel Mumau – “Gilroy’s Last Heist”

Contents (Volume 2):

• Gaetan Battaglia – “Wonderful Sludge”
• Alex Minns – “Emerging From The Flames”
• Fendy S. Tulodo – “The Asteroid That Asked for My Name”
• Felicity Talisman – “Unfulfilled Yearnings”
• Stephen Shewmake – “Time is a Luxury”
• Erin L. Swann – “Plasma Guns and Wizards Don’t Mix”
• Mark Reasoner – “Mevlokia Falls”
• E.J. LeRoy – “Plants, Pirates, and Purple Prose”
• Daniel Loring Keating – “Chekhov’s Little Red Button”
• Ed Sams – “Lucky at Cards”
• Lisa Timpf – “Till the Green Woods Ring Again with Laughter”
• Dwain Campbell – “Impact Imminent”
• Fulvio Gatti – “Daughter Will Know Best”
• Aeryn Goodspeed – “Fight for the Crown”
• Clifton Brown – “Hidden Treasures”

Superhero Dispatch

by Karl El-Koura

Sunni Ashar walked out into the glaring sunlight, blinking. She’d gotten the job? How had she gone from unemployed, likely an unemployable wreck one week to on-the-spot-job-offer material?

She’d been publicly fired from SuperTech, the leading provider of everything a superpowered individual might desire, and she’d feared that no one would ever take a meeting meet with her, let alone hire her.

The call for applicants had gone up on the jobs board the day after she’d been fired. And the position had seemed so well suited to her that she’d been having a hard time motivating herself to apply for anything else when she received the invitation to present herself at Cymark Industries the next day. And the interview … should not have gone well. The same person who met her at the security desk, a man about her age, led her to the building’s ground floor café and sat down with her at a table on the patio, which was enclosed in invisible windows. He ordered a coffee, so she did the same, and they chatted for a while, Sunni thinking that perhaps the hiring manager wasn’t ready for her and this poor young man—he’d introduced himself as Markos Melandry—had the task of keeping her busy. It was only ten or fifteen minutes later, when he asked her to tell him a bit more about her journalism experience, that she realized this was the interview.

And yet . . . somehow . . . she’d gotten the job.

 

Keep reading by buying your copy of Spring Into SciFi 2026, Volume 1.