We’re having lunch at the faux restaurant. My mom is eating her fish at a glacial pace, and I’ve moved on to dessert. Without warning, she reaches over, scoops up a forkful of my ice cream, and spreads it over her fish. Disgusting, I think, but I say nothing. Why?...
A shrimp’s heart is in its head. You used to say your heart was in your stomach when you couldn’t get out of bed all day. You won’t eat shrimp because your dead dad who you hated used them as bait when he took you catfishing as a kid. I found that out when I made...
The hole drinks the grass, the leaves, the twigs, and our favorite park bench. Insatiable. Thirsting. It then drinks the sidewalk where little kids and their mothers play games like ‘avoid the shark’ and ‘alphabet hop’. But children don’t play on the sidewalks...
When you start needing a place to scream, you try most of the rooms in the house. You start with the shower. At first, you take a weird pleasure in screaming behind the shower curtain. In college, you had a film major roommate, and the two of you would take over the...
Two-lane rural route to the boatyard, boondocks enough for hoedowns, cross-burnings, not that I knew much about either, except they happened, that’s all. Downtown Philly boy a little young for my age, I once asked the burly guy who ran the place (clean shaven, blue...
“There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this,” a line from W.H. Auden’s “Twelve Songs, VIII” came to mind when reading Sheila O’Connor’s Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions (Rose Metal Press, 2019), an elegant and ambitious melding...
My sister turns her key in the lock and pushes. The door moves a handbreadth. Mum croaks from the living room. “Hang on—I’m coming.” She grunts as she bends to move the draught excluder guarding the door, and we are assailed by the familiar onslaught of lavender air...
They say she’ll do anything for a tenner. She’s fourteen. She lives in the trailer park across from the river. Sometimes in late spring when the ice goes out, the bridge closes to traffic and the school bus has to stop at the dirt lot of the Fish & Game so she can...
Louis liked the name: Prospect Cemetery. As if its prescient eighteenth-century builders had known that one day college boys would come there to look for one-night boyfriends. Louis himself found no prospects in Prospect Cemetery. He tried but they didn’t find him...
Maybe I was twenty-one or so, somewhere around there, young anyway, and I don’t remember much about where this all took place, but our teacher sat on his desk and read us the magnificent one-sentence story “The Dinosaur” by Augusto Montessero of Guatemala, which goes:...
1st Place: Tiny Little Goat by Jasmine Sawers Admittedly, I am a sucker for a funny/sad story that succeeds. It’s a rare beast, as the line between comedy and tragedy is a treacherous one indeed. In “Tiny Little Goat”, one of the shorter stories on the shortlist, I...
The love story starts here. I am dreaming of Orlando Bloom when I’m awakened by an icy poke into my bare shoulder. It feels like a cold bony finger pressing deliberately into my flesh. Flurries swirl outside, bathing the room in a white glow. I catch my...