1st: Place: At the Bottom of the Well is a Home by Laur Freymiller 2nd Place: My Brother, Named and Unnamed by Steven Sherrill 3rd Place: Hair, Teeth by Josiah Nelson Shortlisted Titles and Writers A Modern Fairytale by Amy Wang Double the Fun by Ryder Collins...
I once held two men at gunpoint. This was on a Sunday, after my wife had returned from mass while I repaired our radio. If I held the copper coils just so, a signal would form out of the static, sometimes a speech by the new president, sometimes an opera. I’d managed...
At dusk, we snuck into the backyard and planted birdseed by the drive. This was so robins would sprout out of crabgrass and dirt, talons curled around rock, wings opened like palms. Our mother glared from the door, said flight cannot be born from earth. Nothing grows...
These 20 stories thrilled us with their specific and creepy details, their attention to character, and their surprises in plot and language! This shortlist has been sent anonymously to Amber Sparks! A Modern Fairytale Double the Fun Monster Diary The Bottom of a Well...
These 39 stories thrilled us with their specific and creepy details, their attention to character, and their surprises in plot and language! We're narrowing it down to our shortlist and this will be sent to judge Amber Sparks very soon! Flesh and Blood Regarding the...
In her old age, the Virgin Mary moves to your town in the North Carolina backwoods, buys a fixer-upper and takes walks on the side of the freeway. As she walks, she hums — a song by Lennon, or Handel’s Messiah. Or something else. A lullaby with a name you can’t...
You were 48 hours old when I called the midwife and told her that my uterus was falling out, hanging on by a thread. “That’s simply not possible,” she said, far too cool. I told her I was splayed on the bed, naked, holding a hand mirror, and nothing down there looked...
Sister Francis’ long black coat whipped behind her in the wind, clipping the heads off dying dandelions and scattering white fluff into the air behind her. Two by two she led us like a grim reaper with a yardstick across the soccer field and into the funeral home. The...
When the boys' father came to pick them up at their mother's and take them for the day, he was not driving his green Ford truck but a red Porche that could not have been his. "What do you think, boys?" His voice swelled with aggression and enthusiasm and...
When Tía Amelia died, we ordered KFC. “Kentucky Fried Cruelty,” she used to call it, before biting into the flesh of a drumstick, brown breadcrumbs on her white teeth, fingertips slick. Red ink bleeding on paper bags scattered before us now outside her empty bedroom,...
She calls herself Rat Girl, but she looks like a little Swiss doll. Now in the Chapel, she is singing round-eyed over our heads and serpentine-ing her head in the shape of infinity as she always does. Her arms are sinewy, pounding at her guitar; bracketing small...
The Marys—mothers, daughters, whores, saints, queens and killers—meet every Thursday afternoon in Riverside Park during the spring and summer months. In inclement weather they go to the New York Public Library on 67th Street, between the firehouse and Lincoln Center,...