1. Reduce The first night you eat Peking duck. It is not your first time to consider ducks as food or something less than the geese who always know where to go during winter: your mother used to cook it for your birthday. To this day, you don’t know her ethnicity, and...
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...
Father says he built the house back in Poland and hauled it with him across the Atlantic. The story goes: once, there was a field, and in the field, there was a cabin, and inside the cabin was a man, and inside the man’s stomach was a house. He gave birth to it during...
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...
We wait until the soft explosions above deaden to absolute silence—not the kind of silence that listens but the kind that sleeps, and teenage girls know the difference. We wait until our murmurs turn to whispers and even the whispers seem loud—muffled collisions,...
I did not combine melted butter and eggs in the medium mixing bowl or beat the mixture with the hand blender. Did not add organic flour and sugar, breaking the lumps with my fingers before whisking the contents together. Did not transfer the batter into a greased...
When they ask the hero how big the bomb is, he says “Big enough to blow a hole in the world,” and we know we’re done for. It was a normal day. We were going to work. We were going to visit the grandkids. We wear toolbelts and have a wife. We are the working-class...
wears a killer whale’s tooth like a toe tag and populates every available margin with sketches of the sea Oreos. Clara and I don’t sit near her because her acrylics alone look “responsible for an obituary” (Clara’s assessment) and we don’t want to “become a hashtag”...
My son starts grinding his teeth in the Fall of 3rd grade. As he sleeps. The scraping, the pressure - I hear it through the thin walls of our shoebox in the Tenderloin. Our third apartment this year. He in the bedroom, me on the couch. It keeps me up all night. Just...
At eight I was rich and powerful, controlled railroads and electric companies. A banker, I embezzled rainbows of cash that I flashed at the twins while our parents slept in. Let’s play restaurant, I’d say. Jacob, you’re the chef. I’ll be the customer who leaves a big...
The bloom of your skin as the river thickens around us. Constellations of algae exhale. We eat the fish that bob to the surface. Suffocated. The flesh tastes of mud and cumin. Our campfire flares in the night, a signal no one is close enough to answer. Three elements...
On Sewing and the Anatomy of Lips Cupid's bow: The contour line of the upper vermilion. I am drawn tight, nocked with pretty words and flattering susurrations, pulled close like the fletch of a hapless arrow trembling in that heartbeat of before—then released, flung...