One time, a porcelain doll lived within a music box. Beautiful, everyone who saw it said, pale skin and dark hair, raised en pointe with hands brushing the sky, forever dancing in an endless twirl. The doll was fragile; everyone knew that, but no one paid much mind....
Cora couldn’t explain why she was baking a blackberry pie at three in the morning, even though she hated blackberry pie. She couldn’t explain why she dug into every cardboard box, searching for all her kitchen tools. She couldn’t explain why she tossed everything else...
Congrats to all of our long-listed writers! Your story stood out to our readers and editors, and we're excited to continue reading to find the perfect shortlist to send to Judge Dan Chaon! Longlist: Temptation a white horse runs without its rider The Bureau of Exiled...
And the winner is… What the Bones Remember by Melinda Li We loved this story from its opening line. The way it plays with paradox creates this liminal space between a god and their people. The story had a great structure with the god returning in new forms, each one...
The sky went dark on a Monday, pushing the straining sun behind a curtain of smoke, creating an opaque swath of grayness where light would catch – lost – never making it to the retina, never lighting up the things we had been used to seeing: tree leaves in the...
Back home inside our first floor apartment at 2PM, as we were, after a morning at the city library where we spent several hours while mom searched through the mysteries for one that suited her and I picked out a couple of graphic novels, after mom had splashed the...
Dad calls it “Eyesore Trashtown”. I don't read perfect yet, but looking at the letters on the sign, I don’t think that’s right. “It’s called Eastlake Terrace,” Mom says, hugging her purse tight and shooing me into the elevator. “Dad thinks he’s funny.” Dad wasn’t...
His body was cocooned in ice. A casket of ice. Like one of those gag gift ice cubes—plastic-clear with a fly trapped in the center. Illinois winter was that plastic cube and he—that boy—miles and years downriver—he was that fly. He was that fly. If he’d been alive...
I was on our excuse for a back porch, no one ever put in screens, and it smelled like oranges under my finger nails. Jack lowered himself into the lawn chair next to the old Boy Scout cot I was on, looking up at the rain-stained roof with bits of tar paper peeking...
“The birds are always watching,” Mama used to say. We had a bird cage in nearly every room of the house. The parakeets in the living room seemed more at home than I did. The lovebirds in the kitchen reminded everyone how bonded they were every time you tried to make...
The bruises bloom like purple flowers. Hibiscus perhaps. Hibiscus rosa-sinensis. The marks will fade to a deep blue. Like cineraria. Cineraria senetti. After that, a sickly yellow. Tansy. Tanacetum vulgare. You recite the names in your head, your mouth forming...
I named her Christina. She began as they all did—a greasy secretion that shimmered and then solidified into a milky coat of wax. It reminded me of the hospital where we were only allowed to write with crayons because you couldn’t puncture someone’s larynx with a...