DELENDACARTHAGOSHORT FICTION FROM OBLIQUE ANGLES
Not your
usual read.
Microfiction, flash fiction, and short stories exploring human experience through compression, ambiguity, allegory, and dark humour.
Read stories on SubstackCompressed.Allegorical.Offbeat.
01
Micro & Flash Fiction
Microfiction and flash fiction sit at the centre of Delenda Carthago’s work.
These short forms explore human experience through oblique lenses, moving across literary and speculative fiction without settling neatly into either. Compression, ambiguity, sudden shifts of perspective, allegory, and dark humour make the reader an active participant.
Titles are part of the story, multiple readings remain possible, and what is left unsaid matters as much as what appears on the page.
Read short fictionThe title is part of the story.
The reader completes the gaps.
02 / FEATURED WORK
AN OFFBEAT, BREATHLESS, UNSETTLING DYSTOPIAN SATIRE.
A strange road trip through societies that feel uncomfortably familiar.
Capital 4 has solved every human problem, including human nature. Cast into the wild, four unlikely companions cross strange societies, each certain it has found the right way to live. All they want is somewhere no one will correct, classify, or tame them.
Compact, illustrated, and tightly compressed. Told in sharp, fast-moving episodes with plenty of white space on the page and a lot going on underneath.
View the book Published 15 May 2026
03
FLASH FICTION COLLECTION
Brief forms.
Long afterlives.
FIRST EDITION · PUBLISHED
(In)credible Stories
at the Bus Stop
(In)credible Stories at the Bus Stop brings together 28 illustrated flash fiction stories, each told in fewer than 1,000 words. Moving through science fiction, satire, surrealism, and everyday life, the collection explores human experience from unexpected angles.
Brief Journey Notes accompany each story, offering a glimpse into the ideas, experiences, and questions behind it.
A second edition is in preparation.
View the first edition04 / OTHER SHORT STORIES
More room for the strange to unfold.
Delenda Carthago’s longer short stories give the same oblique approach more room to unfold. Moving between literary and speculative fiction, they place ordinary people in situations where familiar rules begin to shift.
Settings, genres, and narrative forms may change, but the focus remains on human behaviour, social structures, unexpected perspectives, and the strange possibilities hidden inside apparently ordinary lives.
Some stories are published independently online; others appear in collaborative anthologies.
05
ABOUT
Delenda Carthago
“Why keep writing the same stories in the same way?”
The question at the foundation of the work.
His stories are his biography.
Microfiction, flash fiction, and short stories explore human experience from unusual angles. Ordinary people and moments are viewed through oblique lenses, often at the speculative edges of human experience.
Stories where tropes and genres bend in surprising directions, rewarding readers open to unfamiliar structures and new ways of telling stories.
Linguistic compression, ambiguity, sudden shifts in perspective, allegory, and dark humour shape fiction that calls for active reading, with many spaces deliberately left blank.
His published books include (In)credible Stories at the Bus Stop, a collection of flash fiction, and Nature Against, an offbeat dystopian novella. His microfiction and other short stories can also be found online.
Delenda Carthago lives in Europe.
06 / READ & FOLLOW