The guide led the small group of tourists through the grand foyer of the Powell Hall plantation house. Madison shambled far behind the others, eight months pregnant and exhausted by the Georgia heat. As she and Justin stood in the parlor listening to the...
Do not let your children stand in the shopping cart. Do not let them ride in the bottom of the cart, where pigtails or small hands could get trapped in the filthy wheels. And never — never — leave them unattended in the store. You will linger while looking for the...
Here is the shortlist of 20 micros we couldn't stop discussing! We're excited to have sent these stories to judge Deb Olin Unferth! Results in 4 weeks! Runaway Dad Never Gave Me a Rabbit's Foot Fifteen Shades of Pink To Play the Blues I Come From Aliens A woman makes...
1. I jump on my bicycle and keep my head straight when I see the girls a grade ahead of me who have boyfriends at sixteen—like that’s gonna last. They wave. I don’t. I’m heading to Pumpkin Circle to see what’s selling, last week it was crayfish and false hope. I’ll...
The yellow, lazy heat trickles onto the rice patties still humid with promise. It soaks into the straw hat of a young cowherd and pools onto the shoulders of his favorite black ox, named Ox. They’re sauntering to their favorite creek, where Ox can have a drink, and...
by Erin Vachon In Patricia Bidar’s debut novelette Wild Plums [ELJ Editions, 2024], Maya moves to Oregon with an older partner, an English professor at a liberal arts school for women. She’s adapting to a slower life, trying to be useful in a new environment. Above...
You can see the backdrop of my loneliness from the interstate. Today it’s an advertisement for the World’s Largest Truckstop, take exit 284. There were other messages before. I’m up here on our billboard’s platform, listening to my Discman, draped in the scratchy...
My dad mowed the lawn every Saturday morning—weather permitting—for seventy-two years. Vacations were scheduled around it, plans turned down, brunches skipped, because that lawn wasn’t gonna mow itself. When his heart started acting up, and I said maybe he could think...
Microfictions often set-up and exhibit their own kind of narrative rules, and we're excited to honor these 47 rule-breaking stories. We will announce our shortlist very soon. We're excited to get those stories to judge Deb Olin Unferth as soon as possible! To Keep...
They spoke with such thick accents that she sometimes couldn’t understand them, her father’s distant parents, but she clearly heard the woman say, “It can’t be yours, not blood-related, not this loud little silly girl,” and so she tried her hardest to be quieter, and...
My uncle showed me a casting from one of his hawks. I asked if it was the same as a pellet, and he said it was, but with hawks you call it a casting. I knew what a pellet was because earlier that year a lady in khakis had come to my classroom and handed out owl...
We walk cautiously along the trail in leaden morning light, here for the spawning salmon and for a change. That’s how she said it on the phone last week, my daughter: I need a big fucking change of scenery. The forest is dank, decayed, ripe with torn-open fish carried...