We're proud to announce the 57 titles of our longlist! The submissions we received were so thrilling, inventive, and affecting that we've had a hard time narrowing down the list! From this list, 20-25 stories will make it to the shortlist for judge Kevin Brockmeier to...
I wear my dead sister’s lipstick around the house like Grandma told me to. It leaves my lips dry and the shade doesn’t suit me, it’s purple and dark and velvety, against her golden-brown skin luminous and edgy. On me it looks tired. Most things do. But I wear it...
Our father knows all about fishing, but he doesn’t do it anymore. He doesn’t do a lot of things anymore. He used to be real good. About once a year when we were young, he used to drive his old red station wagon all the way down to Kentucky to fish in a competition....
1 She is cold, but they are frost and shiver. She digs them holes in the snow, sweeping ice crystals away. They burrow like wolf pups, snuggle inside enclosed walls. They think they are safe. Once she is sure they are sound asleep, she tiptoes away. They will survive...
The truth is I got hired for my looks and promoted for my flexible standards of truth and that is really all there is to say about it. Except the job was easy enough at first, standing by the door and chiming Irasshaimase! whenever anyone entered, even though it was...
Plan to Free The dog ate the turkey. Then killed all the village swans, piled the white corpses at the front door, impossible to hide, a pyre to be paid for with exile. In the orange school bus, every morning and afternoon, no matter the snow or dust, we’d lower the...
From the time I learn how to bleed I keep a scab in the fleshy inner curve of my ear. Small, coarse, red-brown. I tend to it like I should tend to myself. When I am lonely, or need something to ruin, I dig a fingernail into the cartilage, tear the scab. Little blood,...
I don’t know where Mom learned to drive. I don’t know where she learned to hold the wheel firm or belt my chest with her right arm whenever we stopped suddenly for the stray deer lying in the road, still half-breathing, or the broken homes that spilled their bricks...
A seed is an escape pod. A plant egg detaches from its mother from the start, Jody says as she presses two speckled brown beans into each of our palms. Jody used to just be our babysitter, but now she’s Dad’s girlfriend. “But don’t go asking your dad about it yet,”...
Behind the books on her shelves she finds the artifacts of their girlhood, all of them fuzzed with dust: pocket-sized dolls with safety-scissor haircuts, crayon stubs, origami frogs, magnetic letters. She frowns when she finds the Tagalog flashcards, a reminder of all...
Protection Erik is raising three chicks in his backyard. Erik is always telling us how he’ll have fresh eggs once they’re grown, bright orange yolks from the paprika-mixed grains he’s feeding them, tough shells that require a good thwack to crack. We’re all jealous so...
1 Remember when the river ran just beyond our door, when rains replenished this ribbon unfurled blue and raspberries ripened close so we could smell them through our bedroom window. Remember when the robins flew in with their red breasts and you sucked the red of this...