by Megan Lui | Mar 16, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction
The pigeon first flew to me the same morning that a stranger found my grandfather melting into the midsummer pavement in a mirage of dementia. My mother texted me that his hospital room had sealed windows facing a brick wall and was daubed with longitudinal streaks of bird droppings. She sent a video of him. Beeping monitors immured him, and each flashed a phalanx of graphs. Digital green gridlines boxed in meandering red lines, pixelated projections of his still-beating heart and still-coursing blood – a man’s life collapsed onto a two-dimensional Cartesian coordinate plane.
I ducked into my office’s pantry to text my mother back: I had flagged the emergency to my manager, but nevertheless, he would not release me until I finished adjusting the logos on the slidedeck for his 2 o’clock. As my gaze slumped beyond the pantry’s window, striped with dried acid rain mixed with car exhaust, a pigeon stared back at me from the other side. It perched in high relief against the mirrored grid-like windows of the skyscraper across the street. Most pigeons that swarm Manhattan are monochromatically gray, often with wings fettered by two black bars. This one was a houndstooth of pigeon gray and dove white. The brown iris of its right eye ensnared me into its soot-black center – there, I faced a faceless woman, bricked in by a brown cubicle, and a panopticon of screens on which red and green numbers streamed. My mind traced how much more of the world this houndstooth pigeon would see today, while this faceless woman is immured here – my grandfather’s hospital room window would be but a quick five-minute glide across the water. But no, a distant snap of my manager’s fingers summoned me. I found myself back in my swivel chair, adjusting gridlines on a spreadsheet with glassy eyes.
The next morning, at my apartment, the pigeon found me again, after I slept overnight in a hospital recliner chair, but before I changed out of the previous day’s business casual vestment into the next one gray shift dress for another. The pigeon had homed its way to my fire escape and ensconced itself on the rusty railing. Every morning that followed, after 10 hours at the hospital and before 14 hours at work, there the mottled pigeon dozed, keeping watch. The sunlit languor in which it basked was the same that would crown my grandfather after a long day of work at the garment factory during my childhood. He would crumple on the stoop and rest his liver-spotted temple against his rusty railing, surveying the little hard-won kingdom that was his home. That memory of that grandfather of the past made me turn my gaze away from the fire escape every morning. The one time that the pigeon did manage to pull my gaze, it pulled me in for yet another glimpse of the silhouetted woman, once again as seen through a window, but this time she was quartered by the shadow of the window’s frame. Reflected in the window and in the shadow of the woman were the vertical grillwork of a fire escape and the brick wall of the building across the street.
One morning, just as I crossed the threshold of my apartment, returning after another vigil at the hospital, my mother called me to head right back: the meandering red lines of my grandfather’s hospital monitors had flattened into the horizon over which the sun had just risen. As my finger pressed the red phone button on my phone to hang up, my gaze accidentally landed on the fire escape. My eyes struggled to find focus – the pigeon was gone. Only a white smear of excrement and a phantom pocket of air marked the spot on the peeling black railing that the pigeon had warmed for weeks.
Weeks later, I found myself almost exactly halfway around the world with no return ticket. I found myself in Singapore, during the Hungry Ghost Festival – the one time a year when the gates of the afterlife open and ancestral ghosts wander among us. On every street corner were altars offering roasted suckling pigs and blood-red strawberry soda. Urns of burning incense invited ghosts to feast. I wandered into a hawker center and found myself in line at a stall famous for its prawn mee, noodles swimming in a collision of lava with ocean – the gore of blood-red prawn heads erupting into milky bone-building pork bone broth, initiating an explosion that seems to augur expansion.
My grandfather had helped me, as a toddler, to wean off my mother’s milk by giving me prawn heads to suckle. “With the blood of the prawn, our minds take on its strength too,” he had said. When he himself began to lose his mind and his teeth, he swatted away all food, except for prawn heads and broth, leaving piles of the spent carcasses in his wake.
As I waited online for prawn mee, I watched white pigeons circle and peck at crumbs at a nearby table. By the time I returned to the same table with my own bowl of sanguineous bone broth, the birds had long gone. I sat down anyway. A flock of elderly white-haired uncles asked to join me – this was their usual lunch table. My fluid Cantonese shocked them as their own grandchildren had forsaken it – this, the dying dialect of my grandfather. Their avine eyes crinkled at the edges like my grandfather’s did, and swallowed me whole like the sea.
When I resurfaced, I dove towards the infinite sky. Ever since, for weeks, months (or maybe only minutes) now, I have chased a never-ending horizon with my dove-white wings as the sea continuously unfurls in all directions below me. I now close my lacquer-black eyes, ringed with gold, to luxuriate in the sun. The glassy sea below bends and fractures into the mirrored windows of a chrome skyscraper. The windows reflect to me the feathery outline of a woman immured, but I cannot quite remember where I have seen her before.
by David Ryan | Mar 16, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction
You’re moving through the lasts. When you lived for a time with farmers in the northern country. You and your wife and daughter had a little room above a cottage beside one of the barns that had begun to buckle like a foal. A wooden bucket in the barn opened like a flower, oiled tool stamens, thick rats scaling wall shadows; pigs rooted, floating behind split elm boards. Cold sunrise, fertilized haze of afternoon, call of penned animals in the indigo night. You’re moving through the lasts. Your wife kept the farmer’s books. You were drinking a lot then, or had been, though maybe this is important only as a marker of forgetfulness—the loss of large sectors of meaning once grafted to time. Of thin sleep and proximities of death and sharpened, slurred, oiled words grafted like skin. Skin of recent jobs. Grafted last entries into the grieving stage of promises, alcoholic statements, remedies, problems solved, passing synapses lost, how many lasts.
But your daughter loved the pigs, so many dozens of them, a hundred of them, sea of pigs on this farm where your wife did the books and you were trying out decency. But the farmer slaughtered the pigs one day. You’d gone with your wife and daughter to a cabin with a lake for a weekend. To escape that terrible music. And when you returned, you didn’t know what to tell your daughter when she asked why they were suddenly gone. Oh, they’ve moved, you said. Where? she said. The next farm, you said, too quickly, conveniently—a better farm, you said, as if it helped. Why this was your answer, you couldn’t say. You were a bad improviser. She asked nothing else but watched you, the way a child can, with a distracted gaze of deep attention. A last. Her eyes regarding your first betrayal shone a silent glassine light around you. And you thought this would be the one betrayal. This would be the great doubt. And when you saw the farmer next, he appeared to you as a jovial murderer. He had seemed to like the pigs. He’d named many of them, given them endearments. He’d once said to your daughter, They’re not much different from us.
You and your wife and your daughter lived at this farm for just a few months. There have been several lasts since, lives and places and you grew older and now it is now.
Your daughter’s gone off to college. Another last you’re moving through. Tonight, your sleeping wife stirs. Since your daughter left, your wife’s sleep cycle has changed. For instance, her voice wakes you, her opened eyes blinking rapidly. You say her name in the dark. She continues not with words but articulated shapes of breath. Brutalist dream words woven, expressed, worsted in meaning. She stops, and her eyelids close.
How she looks in the room’s darkness there like a memory of an angel on the edge of death or sleep, a purple-powder-blue vein pulsing in your wife’s cheek, each pulse a star, a constellated city map, the names whited out, years passing down the hall cloaked in a gown woven from thousands of eyelashes, this is your wife at this moment. Death, or sleep, or maybe just memory, a composite; you’re moving through the lasts. These nights since you last saw your daughter, your wife’s sleeping arm sometimes extends, reaching out like a cobra, then descends and slaps the bed. As if her arm alone were somnambulant. Sometimes, the arm comes down across your face, your body. And so, increasingly, you’ve been a light sleeper.
Tonight’s last, just now, you were crowning from a dream in which your children, hundreds of them, were waiting in line for the important test only you could tell them they’d passed. This test had lifelong implications in failure, but you’d never been told what those were. Reason was gestural, the implications implied. You wanted the children to love you, all of them, to grow up and call you more than occasionally on the telephone after they’d left. You wanted them to please stop forgetting you. Tonight, when your wife’s arm came down and slapped your face, the dream woke to a dark room. A despairing dark. That you couldn’t save them, though you were about to. But they were left there before the test finished.
Your wife, still sleeping, is moving through a listing dream. You hear the farm conspire in the dark of her sleeping breath, naming things. You’re back upstairs in the small incandescent flicker of that cottage room. You hear a memory of the pigs outside in the barn, moving about, rooting, sleeping, being together, a family. A last imprint. You hear them now, gone. You close your eyes. Out the cottage window, you see the farmer and his wife in their kitchen. The farmer rises from the table, moves beyond the window. He appears at the back porch and crosses the dirt lot to the larger barn. The last barn. It’s dark enough, moonless; his body moves inside shadows cast by the structures, his indigo shape etching through the deeper, stilled black. He opens the barn door, you can see through the open vent there the vastness of emptied pens, of former lives, of traces of family now evacuated, atomized. Had the pigs ever wondered about the lasts? Has the farmer ever wondered what he’s done, and to how many, and for what?
And what of you? The bed shifts. You open your eyes. Your wife’s arm has risen again, charmed and strange. You reach up and gently guide her hand down to your chest and hold her over you, and a tension releases in this silence between death, dream, and memory, you feel her lasting pulse on your chest, and here it comes, here it comes, here it comes as you descend into sleep.
by Fractured Lit | Mar 11, 2026 | contests
AWARDING $3,500 + PUBLICATION
JUDGED BY JEMIMAH WEI
July 17 to September 14, 2025
(Closed)
Ready for the opportunity to turn reality on its head? We’re bringing back our Elsewhere Prize! We want those stories that make a mystery out of the ordinary, that make the rational out of the mystical. Play with the edge of genre, but make sure your character is still the star of your story. From July 17 to September 14, 2025, we welcome submissions to the Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize.
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
For this contest, we want writers to show us the forgotten, the hidden, the otherworldly. We want your stories to take us on journeys and adventures in the worlds only you can create; whether you make the familiar strange or the strange familiar, we know you will take us elsewhere. Be our tour guide through reality and beyond.
For this prize, we are accepting micro and flash fiction, so we’re inviting submissions of stories from 100-1,000 words.
We’re thrilled to partner with Guest Judge Jemimah Wei, who will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Good luck and happy writing!
In flash I seek the crystallized vision of a writer’s imagination — prose that understands intimately the tides of boldness and restraint, that isn’t afraid to venture into uncharted realities, emotions, and psychologies, yet never loses the thread of their story’s heart. Give me hitherto unmapped routes to familiar emotion, sentences that clarify and surprise, and a sense of the writer’s vision within and beyond the story’s limits.
Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore and is now based between Singapore and the United States. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. Her highly anticipated debut novel, THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER, is a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and an IndieNext pick. It debuted at #1 on the Straits Times Bestseller list and has been named a best book of Spring 2025 by Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Apple Books, and more. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She is presently a senior prose editor at The Massachusetts Review.
The deadline for entry is September 14, 2025. We will announce the shortlist within twelve to fourteen weeks of the contest’s close. All writers will be notified when the results are final.
OPTIONAL EDITORIAL FEEDBACK:
You may choose to receive editorial feedback on your piece. In your cover letter, please let us know which piece you’d like your editor to focus their review on. We will provide a two-page global letter discussing the strengths of the writing and the recommended focus for revision. Our aim is to make our comments actionable and encouraging. These letters are written by editors and staff readers of Fractured Lit. Should your story win, no feedback will be offered, and your fee will be refunded.
by Fractured Lit | Mar 11, 2026 | calendar
AWARDING $3,500 + PUBLICATION
JUDGED BY JEMIMAH WEI
July 17 to September 14, 2025
Ready for the opportunity to turn reality on its head? We’re bringing back our Elsewhere Prize! We want those stories that make a mystery out of the ordinary, that make the rational out of the mystical. Play with the edge of genre, but make sure your character is still the star of your story. From July 17 to September 14, 2025, we welcome submissions to the Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize.
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
For this contest, we want writers to show us the forgotten, the hidden, the otherworldly. We want your stories to take us on journeys and adventures in the worlds only you can create; whether you make the familiar strange or the strange familiar, we know you will take us elsewhere. Be our tour guide through reality and beyond.
For this prize, we are accepting micro and flash fiction, so we’re inviting submissions of stories from 100-1,000 words.
We’re thrilled to partner with Guest Judge Jemimah Wei, who will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Good luck and happy writing!
In flash I seek the crystallized vision of a writer’s imagination — prose that understands intimately the tides of boldness and restraint, that isn’t afraid to venture into uncharted realities, emotions, and psychologies, yet never loses the thread of their story’s heart. Give me hitherto unmapped routes to familiar emotion, sentences that clarify and surprise, and a sense of the writer’s vision within and beyond the story’s limits.
Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore and is now based between Singapore and the United States. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. Her highly anticipated debut novel, THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER, is a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and an IndieNext pick. It debuted at #1 on the Straits Times Bestseller list and has been named a best book of Spring 2025 by Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Apple Books, and more. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She is presently a senior prose editor at The Massachusetts Review.
The deadline for entry is September 14, 2025. We will announce the shortlist within twelve to fourteen weeks of the contest’s close. All writers will be notified when the results are final.
OPTIONAL EDITORIAL FEEDBACK:
You may choose to receive editorial feedback on your piece. In your cover letter, please let us know which piece you’d like your editor to focus their review on. We will provide a two-page global letter discussing the strengths of the writing and the recommended focus for revision. Our aim is to make our comments actionable and encouraging. These letters are written by editors and staff readers of Fractured Lit. Should your story win, no feedback will be offered, and your fee will be refunded.
Guidelines
-
- Your $20 reading fee allows up to two stories of 1,000 words or fewer each per entry—if submitting two stories, please put them both in a SINGLE document.
- We allow multiple submissions—each set of two flash/sudden stories should have a separate submission accompanied by a reading fee.
-
- Please send flash micro fiction only—1,000 word count maximum per story.
- We only consider unpublished work for contests—we do not review reprints, including self-published work (even on blogs and social media). Reprints will be automatically disqualified.
- Simultaneous submissions are okay—please notify us and withdraw your entry if you find another home for your writing.
- All entries will also be considered for publication in Fractured Lit.
- Double-space your submission and use Times New Roman 12 (or larger if needed).
- Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history (if applicable). In the cover letter, please include content warnings as well, to safeguard our reading staff.
- We only read work in English, though some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
- We do not read anonymous submissions. However, shortlisted stories are sent anonymously to the judge.
- All AI-generated work will be automatically disqualified.
by Fractured Lit | Mar 11, 2026 | calendar
AWARDING $3,500 + PUBLICATION
JUDGED BY JEMIMAH WEI
July 17 to September 14, 2025
Ready for the opportunity to turn reality on its head? We’re bringing back our Elsewhere Prize! We want those stories that make a mystery out of the ordinary, that make the rational out of the mystical. Play with the edge of genre, but make sure your character is still the star of your story. From July 17 to September 14, 2025, we welcome submissions to the Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize.
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
For this contest, we want writers to show us the forgotten, the hidden, the otherworldly. We want your stories to take us on journeys and adventures in the worlds only you can create; whether you make the familiar strange or the strange familiar, we know you will take us elsewhere. Be our tour guide through reality and beyond.
For this prize, we are accepting micro and flash fiction, so we’re inviting submissions of stories from 100-1,000 words.
We’re thrilled to partner with Guest Judge Jemimah Wei, who will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Good luck and happy writing!
In flash I seek the crystallized vision of a writer’s imagination — prose that understands intimately the tides of boldness and restraint, that isn’t afraid to venture into uncharted realities, emotions, and psychologies, yet never loses the thread of their story’s heart. Give me hitherto unmapped routes to familiar emotion, sentences that clarify and surprise, and a sense of the writer’s vision within and beyond the story’s limits.
Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore and is now based between Singapore and the United States. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. Her highly anticipated debut novel, THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER, is a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and an IndieNext pick. It debuted at #1 on the Straits Times Bestseller list and has been named a best book of Spring 2025 by Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Apple Books, and more. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She is presently a senior prose editor at The Massachusetts Review.
The deadline for entry is September 14, 2025. We will announce the shortlist within twelve to fourteen weeks of the contest’s close. All writers will be notified when the results are final.
OPTIONAL EDITORIAL FEEDBACK:
You may choose to receive editorial feedback on your piece. In your cover letter, please let us know which piece you’d like your editor to focus their review on. We will provide a two-page global letter discussing the strengths of the writing and the recommended focus for revision. Our aim is to make our comments actionable and encouraging. These letters are written by editors and staff readers of Fractured Lit. Should your story win, no feedback will be offered, and your fee will be refunded.
Guidelines
-
- Your $20 reading fee allows up to two stories of 1,000 words or fewer each per entry—if submitting two stories, please put them both in a SINGLE document.
- We allow multiple submissions—each set of two flash/sudden stories should have a separate submission accompanied by a reading fee.
-
- Please send flash micro fiction only—1,000 word count maximum per story.
- We only consider unpublished work for contests—we do not review reprints, including self-published work (even on blogs and social media). Reprints will be automatically disqualified.
- Simultaneous submissions are okay—please notify us and withdraw your entry if you find another home for your writing.
- All entries will also be considered for publication in Fractured Lit.
- Double-space your submission and use Times New Roman 12 (or larger if needed).
- Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history (if applicable). In the cover letter, please include content warnings as well, to safeguard our reading staff.
- We only read work in English, though some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
- We do not read anonymous submissions. However, shortlisted stories are sent anonymously to the judge.
- All AI-generated work will be automatically disqualified.
by Fractured Lit | Mar 11, 2026 | calendar
AWARDING $3,500 + PUBLICATION
JUDGED BY JEMIMAH WEI
July 17 to September 14, 2025
Ready for the opportunity to turn reality on its head? We’re bringing back our Elsewhere Prize! We want those stories that make a mystery out of the ordinary, that make the rational out of the mystical. Play with the edge of genre, but make sure your character is still the star of your story. From July 17 to September 14, 2025, we welcome submissions to the Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize.
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
For this contest, we want writers to show us the forgotten, the hidden, the otherworldly. We want your stories to take us on journeys and adventures in the worlds only you can create; whether you make the familiar strange or the strange familiar, we know you will take us elsewhere. Be our tour guide through reality and beyond.
For this prize, we are accepting micro and flash fiction, so we’re inviting submissions of stories from 100-1,000 words.
We’re thrilled to partner with Guest Judge Jemimah Wei, who will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Good luck and happy writing!
In flash I seek the crystallized vision of a writer’s imagination — prose that understands intimately the tides of boldness and restraint, that isn’t afraid to venture into uncharted realities, emotions, and psychologies, yet never loses the thread of their story’s heart. Give me hitherto unmapped routes to familiar emotion, sentences that clarify and surprise, and a sense of the writer’s vision within and beyond the story’s limits.
Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore and is now based between Singapore and the United States. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. Her highly anticipated debut novel, THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER, is a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and an IndieNext pick. It debuted at #1 on the Straits Times Bestseller list and has been named a best book of Spring 2025 by Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Apple Books, and more. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She is presently a senior prose editor at The Massachusetts Review.
The deadline for entry is September 14, 2025. We will announce the shortlist within twelve to fourteen weeks of the contest’s close. All writers will be notified when the results are final.
OPTIONAL EDITORIAL FEEDBACK:
You may choose to receive editorial feedback on your piece. In your cover letter, please let us know which piece you’d like your editor to focus their review on. We will provide a two-page global letter discussing the strengths of the writing and the recommended focus for revision. Our aim is to make our comments actionable and encouraging. These letters are written by editors and staff readers of Fractured Lit. Should your story win, no feedback will be offered, and your fee will be refunded.
Guidelines
-
- Your $20 reading fee allows up to two stories of 1,000 words or fewer each per entry—if submitting two stories, please put them both in a SINGLE document.
- We allow multiple submissions—each set of two flash/sudden stories should have a separate submission accompanied by a reading fee.
-
- Please send flash micro fiction only—1,000 word count maximum per story.
- We only consider unpublished work for contests—we do not review reprints, including self-published work (even on blogs and social media). Reprints will be automatically disqualified.
- Simultaneous submissions are okay—please notify us and withdraw your entry if you find another home for your writing.
- All entries will also be considered for publication in Fractured Lit.
- Double-space your submission and use Times New Roman 12 (or larger if needed).
- Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history (if applicable). In the cover letter, please include content warnings as well, to safeguard our reading staff.
- We only read work in English, though some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
- We do not read anonymous submissions. However, shortlisted stories are sent anonymously to the judge.
- All AI-generated work will be automatically disqualified.
by Fractured Lit | Mar 11, 2026 | calendar
AWARDING $3,500 + PUBLICATION
JUDGED BY JEMIMAH WEI
July 17 to September 14, 2025
Ready for the opportunity to turn reality on its head? We’re bringing back our Elsewhere Prize! We want those stories that make a mystery out of the ordinary, that make the rational out of the mystical. Play with the edge of genre, but make sure your character is still the star of your story. From July 17 to September 14, 2025, we welcome submissions to the Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize.
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
For this contest, we want writers to show us the forgotten, the hidden, the otherworldly. We want your stories to take us on journeys and adventures in the worlds only you can create; whether you make the familiar strange or the strange familiar, we know you will take us elsewhere. Be our tour guide through reality and beyond.
For this prize, we are accepting micro and flash fiction, so we’re inviting submissions of stories from 100-1,000 words.
We’re thrilled to partner with Guest Judge Jemimah Wei, who will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Good luck and happy writing!
In flash I seek the crystallized vision of a writer’s imagination — prose that understands intimately the tides of boldness and restraint, that isn’t afraid to venture into uncharted realities, emotions, and psychologies, yet never loses the thread of their story’s heart. Give me hitherto unmapped routes to familiar emotion, sentences that clarify and surprise, and a sense of the writer’s vision within and beyond the story’s limits.
Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore and is now based between Singapore and the United States. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. Her highly anticipated debut novel, THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER, is a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and an IndieNext pick. It debuted at #1 on the Straits Times Bestseller list and has been named a best book of Spring 2025 by Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Apple Books, and more. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She is presently a senior prose editor at The Massachusetts Review.
The deadline for entry is September 14, 2025. We will announce the shortlist within twelve to fourteen weeks of the contest’s close. All writers will be notified when the results are final.
OPTIONAL EDITORIAL FEEDBACK:
You may choose to receive editorial feedback on your piece. In your cover letter, please let us know which piece you’d like your editor to focus their review on. We will provide a two-page global letter discussing the strengths of the writing and the recommended focus for revision. Our aim is to make our comments actionable and encouraging. These letters are written by editors and staff readers of Fractured Lit. Should your story win, no feedback will be offered, and your fee will be refunded.
Guidelines
-
- Your $20 reading fee allows up to two stories of 1,000 words or fewer each per entry—if submitting two stories, please put them both in a SINGLE document.
- We allow multiple submissions—each set of two flash/sudden stories should have a separate submission accompanied by a reading fee.
-
- Please send flash micro fiction only—1,000 word count maximum per story.
- We only consider unpublished work for contests—we do not review reprints, including self-published work (even on blogs and social media). Reprints will be automatically disqualified.
- Simultaneous submissions are okay—please notify us and withdraw your entry if you find another home for your writing.
- All entries will also be considered for publication in Fractured Lit.
- Double-space your submission and use Times New Roman 12 (or larger if needed).
- Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history (if applicable). In the cover letter, please include content warnings as well, to safeguard our reading staff.
- We only read work in English, though some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
- We do not read anonymous submissions. However, shortlisted stories are sent anonymously to the judge.
- All AI-generated work will be automatically disqualified.
by Fractured Lit | Mar 11, 2026 | calendar
AWARDING $3,500 + PUBLICATION
JUDGED BY JEMIMAH WEI
July 17 to September 14, 2025
Ready for the opportunity to turn reality on its head? We’re bringing back our Elsewhere Prize! We want those stories that make a mystery out of the ordinary, that make the rational out of the mystical. Play with the edge of genre, but make sure your character is still the star of your story. From July 17 to September 14, 2025, we welcome submissions to the Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize.
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
For this contest, we want writers to show us the forgotten, the hidden, the otherworldly. We want your stories to take us on journeys and adventures in the worlds only you can create; whether you make the familiar strange or the strange familiar, we know you will take us elsewhere. Be our tour guide through reality and beyond.
For this prize, we are accepting micro and flash fiction, so we’re inviting submissions of stories from 100-1,000 words.
We’re thrilled to partner with Guest Judge Jemimah Wei, who will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Good luck and happy writing!
In flash I seek the crystallized vision of a writer’s imagination — prose that understands intimately the tides of boldness and restraint, that isn’t afraid to venture into uncharted realities, emotions, and psychologies, yet never loses the thread of their story’s heart. Give me hitherto unmapped routes to familiar emotion, sentences that clarify and surprise, and a sense of the writer’s vision within and beyond the story’s limits.
Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore and is now based between Singapore and the United States. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. Her highly anticipated debut novel, THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER, is a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and an IndieNext pick. It debuted at #1 on the Straits Times Bestseller list and has been named a best book of Spring 2025 by Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Apple Books, and more. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She is presently a senior prose editor at The Massachusetts Review.
The deadline for entry is September 14, 2025. We will announce the shortlist within twelve to fourteen weeks of the contest’s close. All writers will be notified when the results are final.
OPTIONAL EDITORIAL FEEDBACK:
You may choose to receive editorial feedback on your piece. In your cover letter, please let us know which piece you’d like your editor to focus their review on. We will provide a two-page global letter discussing the strengths of the writing and the recommended focus for revision. Our aim is to make our comments actionable and encouraging. These letters are written by editors and staff readers of Fractured Lit. Should your story win, no feedback will be offered, and your fee will be refunded.
Guidelines
-
- Your $20 reading fee allows up to two stories of 1,000 words or fewer each per entry—if submitting two stories, please put them both in a SINGLE document.
- We allow multiple submissions—each set of two flash/sudden stories should have a separate submission accompanied by a reading fee.
-
- Please send flash micro fiction only—1,000 word count maximum per story.
- We only consider unpublished work for contests—we do not review reprints, including self-published work (even on blogs and social media). Reprints will be automatically disqualified.
- Simultaneous submissions are okay—please notify us and withdraw your entry if you find another home for your writing.
- All entries will also be considered for publication in Fractured Lit.
- Double-space your submission and use Times New Roman 12 (or larger if needed).
- Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history (if applicable). In the cover letter, please include content warnings as well, to safeguard our reading staff.
- We only read work in English, though some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
- We do not read anonymous submissions. However, shortlisted stories are sent anonymously to the judge.
- All AI-generated work will be automatically disqualified.
by Fractured Lit | Mar 11, 2026 | calendar
AWARDING $3,500 + PUBLICATION
JUDGED BY JEMIMAH WEI
July 17 to September 14, 2025
Ready for the opportunity to turn reality on its head? We’re bringing back our Elsewhere Prize! We want those stories that make a mystery out of the ordinary, that make the rational out of the mystical. Play with the edge of genre, but make sure your character is still the star of your story. From July 17 to September 14, 2025, we welcome submissions to the Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize.
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
For this contest, we want writers to show us the forgotten, the hidden, the otherworldly. We want your stories to take us on journeys and adventures in the worlds only you can create; whether you make the familiar strange or the strange familiar, we know you will take us elsewhere. Be our tour guide through reality and beyond.
For this prize, we are accepting micro and flash fiction, so we’re inviting submissions of stories from 100-1,000 words.
We’re thrilled to partner with Guest Judge Jemimah Wei, who will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Good luck and happy writing!
In flash I seek the crystallized vision of a writer’s imagination — prose that understands intimately the tides of boldness and restraint, that isn’t afraid to venture into uncharted realities, emotions, and psychologies, yet never loses the thread of their story’s heart. Give me hitherto unmapped routes to familiar emotion, sentences that clarify and surprise, and a sense of the writer’s vision within and beyond the story’s limits.
Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore and is now based between Singapore and the United States. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. Her highly anticipated debut novel, THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER, is a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and an IndieNext pick. It debuted at #1 on the Straits Times Bestseller list and has been named a best book of Spring 2025 by Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Apple Books, and more. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She is presently a senior prose editor at The Massachusetts Review.
The deadline for entry is September 14, 2025. We will announce the shortlist within twelve to fourteen weeks of the contest’s close. All writers will be notified when the results are final.
OPTIONAL EDITORIAL FEEDBACK:
You may choose to receive editorial feedback on your piece. In your cover letter, please let us know which piece you’d like your editor to focus their review on. We will provide a two-page global letter discussing the strengths of the writing and the recommended focus for revision. Our aim is to make our comments actionable and encouraging. These letters are written by editors and staff readers of Fractured Lit. Should your story win, no feedback will be offered, and your fee will be refunded.
Guidelines
-
- Your $20 reading fee allows up to two stories of 1,000 words or fewer each per entry—if submitting two stories, please put them both in a SINGLE document.
- We allow multiple submissions—each set of two flash/sudden stories should have a separate submission accompanied by a reading fee.
-
- Please send flash micro fiction only—1,000 word count maximum per story.
- We only consider unpublished work for contests—we do not review reprints, including self-published work (even on blogs and social media). Reprints will be automatically disqualified.
- Simultaneous submissions are okay—please notify us and withdraw your entry if you find another home for your writing.
- All entries will also be considered for publication in Fractured Lit.
- Double-space your submission and use Times New Roman 12 (or larger if needed).
- Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history (if applicable). In the cover letter, please include content warnings as well, to safeguard our reading staff.
- We only read work in English, though some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
- We do not read anonymous submissions. However, shortlisted stories are sent anonymously to the judge.
- All AI-generated work will be automatically disqualified.
by Elizabeth Lee | Mar 10, 2026 | flash fiction
I grew up in a store called Boise. I was born between the tomatoes-on-a-vine, $2.50 for 4, and the green curves of watermelons, whose viridescent rinds bled into one another like tie-dye, and which, when in season, were buy-one-get-one.
I was produced among produce, a product of production. I swelled my mother’s belly into a watermelon, fed on vine-ripe tomatoes and fresh pasta, and on the day of my birth she squatted down in aisle 4 so I could slide out like a clementine loosed from its biodegradable bag, clutching at tile flooring and squalling as I tasted my first whiff of egg-carton air ripe with the sensation of green bananas just starting to yellow.
I knew vegetables intimately. I knew the thirst of lettuce leaves, their frail, frilled edges quavering beneath the touch of misted droplets, never quite quenched. I knew the nervous tumble of potatoes as they burrowed into their shallow trench. I knew the secrets of papayas, that intensely private fruit, which—though eventually they, too, betrayed me—I will never tell.
My mother manned the register from noon to night, but in my memory it was always night, just before closing, when the overtime stragglers, the desperate and the hungry, plodded through the automatic doors, a narcotic parade collecting late-night cravings. Puffed bags of popcorn seasoned with rosemary and sea salt, bunny-shaped gummies Made With Real Fruit!, loaves of sourdough bread with spongy innards and crackling crusts. Dropping items on the stuttering conveyor belt, soothed by the sporadic beep of the scanner against which my mother expertly shuffled barcodes, the stragglers’ eyes drooped before bursting open like summer-plumpened cherries between the teeth of the total flashing onscreen.
$$$? they asked incredulously, handing over their credit card. Is that right?
It’s not right, my mother informed them. Nothing ever is. She swiped the card with a practiced flick of her wrist.
I inherited that place, though it was not mine to inherit. The wooden crates in the back brimming with pimpled cucumbers; stacks of flour satchels that emitted a clean, rich dust; fish with frozen eyes and gaping mouths, shocked into silence. I strutted the aisles of crackers and vitamins, climbed the towers of natural-flavor sodas, sashayed behind the deli counter while tracing my fingernail along the grains of the chopping block; I re-piled the roll-prone carrots, telling them to stay, and they did—already ordered, without my knowledge, by some greater force against which I could not reckon, an authority I could not command to face me.
When I say I inherited the place, I mean I inherited the invasion of it, as an unwanted blight. I buried my face in the mushrooms, inhaling their earthy scent, and they whispered with vitriol, Scourge! I nestled myself among the plums, my body curled soft and round. Imposter! I pricked my finger on the butcher’s knife; I bottled my blood and offered my flesh on a Styrofoam tray, but no amount of packaging could make me what I was not.
I, too, was born from the soil, I insisted. I am from dust and to dust I will return. But they did not believe me, eyeing me with skepticism, knowing that as much as I did not belong among them, I was not worth the effort of removal, either—transport is never cheap. Still, I would not break; I was born like a clementine and similarly thick-skinned. I dusted flour off my pants and froze my face into a smile, genial and nonthreatening. I tried out phrases my mother used on customers: I’m so sorry you don’t like me. Is there anything I can do to help? But the kumquats said nothing; the bell peppers would not ring.
Caught in the middle of an attempted metamorphosis into a pickle, I caught a man stealing fruit. Staring at each other, he with one apple-clenched hand thrust in his jacket pocket, I with my foot in a jar of brine, we reached a certain understanding. I was a thief, too, though it was I who had been stolen from. I was a thief, and I would not say Stop or No; I would watch, toes wrinkling with salt, as he pressed his bulging coat close to his body and surged beyond those blind doors into an endless night. Go, I said softly as I pulled my foot, still dripping, from the jar. Go and don’t look back.
I inherited my mother’s exactness with numbers and propensity for shuffling barcodes, and, shortly after the thief encounter, I began exercising these talents. I learned to say, It’s not right. Nothing ever is, and swipe the card with a practiced flourish. And when I pushed the register drawer shut with a thrust of my hip, there it was: the ring of cold cash, and only then did they extend open arms. You are one of us. You belong here. You always will.
I was almost convinced of it, tempted by that long-expired dream I had of fitting like a carton in a freezer slot. Tempted to stay frozen in time, kale perpetually green. Still, I decided I’d rather wilt than wonder. After deciding to leave, the leaving was easy. My mother? I can almost hear her now, as she watches my retreating figure, her hands already caught in the movements of attending to the next customer, calling after me beyond the incessant beep of the scanner: Go. Her voice is clean like soapy water for mopping the sticky contents of dropped bottles. Go and don’t look back.
But I would be lying if I said I never looked back. Since Boise, I have lived in many places and times; I have consorted with mushrooms and interlocuted with plums; I have even set foot in similar worlds of frozen fish and stale crusts—but it is never the same. The butcher’s block wears different cracks. The sourdough is less sour. Never again will I live there the way I did then.
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