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...
At dusk, we snuck into the backyard and planted birdseed by the drive. This was so robins would sprout out of crabgrass and dirt, talons curled around rock, wings opened like palms. Our mother glared from the door, said flight cannot be born from earth. Nothing grows...
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,...
In her old age, the Virgin Mary moves to your town in the North Carolina backwoods, buys a fixer-upper and takes walks on the side of the freeway. As she walks, she hums — a song by Lennon, or Handel’s Messiah. Or something else. A lullaby with a name you can’t...
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...
You were 48 hours old when I called the midwife and told her that my uterus was falling out, hanging on by a thread. “That’s simply not possible,” she said, far too cool. I told her I was splayed on the bed, naked, holding a hand mirror, and nothing down there looked...
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”...
Sister Francis’ long black coat whipped behind her in the wind, clipping the heads off dying dandelions and scattering white fluff into the air behind her. Two by two she led us like a grim reaper with a yardstick across the soccer field and into the funeral home. The...