Writers and Readers! We've been spending our time this summer and into the fall reading for this contest, and we've finally set our longlist! There was a great response to this contest, and so many great stories that it took us longer than usual, but we're excited to...
My dad sits on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner and announces he wants buried in Carhartt overalls. He's 82, retired from the mines, and too cheap to buy Carhartt while he's alive. "I hear they’re warm. Leave a clawhammer in the pocket." He pats his jeans. "If...
The television casts a garish parade of colors across your unlined brow. From the corner of the bar, you watch me, not the game, but drop your eyes when I meet your gaze. More mating whisper than mating call. Wesley, the sleepy-eyed bartender, spies my nearly-finished...
Your older sister is the amusement park at the end of the boardwalk, the one that’s been in the mayor’s family for a century and looks it; the one the mayor doesn’t maintain because the newer one, halfway down and closer to the big hotels, gets all the foot traffic...
Seeking a companion. Need not be romantic; platonic is fine. Just someone to wake up to for that morning breath that feels stale with closed-mouth soft snores, and those eyes holding long, floating eyelashes that I want to touch but won’t. Just someone who will empty...
during a 50-minute massage. The grading, the emails, the sunken cold: my mid-back balled into a walnut. At Hand and Stone, a blind masseuse named Homer leads me to a room with prancing emerald lights: hospital sink, mirror from Marshall’s—a franchised underworld....
Winter lay down fat in its white robe as if to die. The war was over, and he ached to get home after years of service in foreign parts. The villagers kept cramming his mouth with sausages and boiled cabbage and the grime of their fingers. They had made him their own....
Capuchin monkeys are named after the monks who are named after the drink or something like that, could be the other way around, so when Sam says that Olivia’s voice is like cappuccino we nod but we don’t really know what it means because none of us have tasted...
Caren Beilin’s new book, Sea, Poison, is a short, sprawling novel, remarkably complex in its brevity and wonderfully playful despite the heaviness of its themes. It tells the story of Cumin Baleen, a writer living in a “city of hospitals,” as she tries to make sense...
The brother, Paleo, and I are doing inventory when it begins raining. Acid. It’s Acid Rain. The one that strictly arrives on the first Saturday of every month, to burn away the soil nutrients and kill the grass that has grown since the last acid washing. It’s a very...
In Low Bone Parish, the water don’t knock. It just rises. Quiet at first, like breath held too long. It slicks along the bayou’s edge, kisses porch steps, then swallows whole towns without a word. Folks call it a natural disaster. But the women on our street ...
I’m clean. I was clean five minutes ago. I scrubbed every inch of skin, washed my hair twice. Now I stand as the water streams over my body. The shower curtain is clear plastic. On the other side, standing before the mirror, Henry shoots the dope into his arm. I can't...