We are thrilled to announce that selections have been made for the 2025 Best Small Fictions anthology. Congratulations to these amazing pieces of short fiction by these terrific authors whose work will be included in the annual anthology. The 2025 edition will be available from Alternating Current Press this fall.

Best Small Fictions is the first-ever contemporary anthology solely dedicated to anthologizing the best internationally published short hybrid fiction in a given calendar year. Now in its tenth year of existence, Best Small Fictions features the best microfiction, flash fiction, haibun stories, and prose poetry from around the world.

• “This Little Catalog You’ve Been Assembling” by Rosa Alcalá / The Hopkins Review
• “Thread” by Mikki Aronoff / The Mackinaw
• “Tokyo Panorama Suite” by Cassandra Atherton / The Mackinaw
• “Record of Lumber Used in the Great Temple’s Main Hall” by Stewart C. Baker / Sans Press
• “And We Know” by Rebecca Ball / Flash Frontier
• “All Made-Up” by Megan Baxter / Diagram
• “Evacuated” by Aimee Bender / Vestal Review
• “Wool” by Carly Berwick / The Cincinnati Review
• “Something That I Learned from Someone Who Is Gone” by Darsie Bowden / The Prose Poem
• “Doubting the Enterprise” by Brady Brickner-Wood / Sonora Review
• “Sundays Are for Yard Work” by Kate Brody / Electric Literature
• “Tell Me I’d Look Pretty on Your Wall” by Sébastien Luc Butler / Hayden’s Ferry Review
• “Things I Did to Live” by Joseph Byrd / Exposition Review
• “You Work in the Worst Diner in Existence That’s Always Open for Business” by Avitus B. Carle / X-Ray Literary Magazine
• “Razia, Razia” by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar / The Good Life Review
• “Cumulonimbi” by Christine H. Chen / Flash Flood
• “NASA Plays I’ll Be Seeing You Trying to Wake the Mars Rover” by Chloe N. Clark / Banshee Press
• “Small Places” by Majella Cullinane / Meantime
• “Her Heart Was a Chipmunk” by Michael Czyzniejewski / Cleaver Magazine
• “This Because Dog Is God Spelled Backward” by Erinola E. Daranijo / Okay Donkey
• “Blue-Naped Parrots See More Than They Say” by Judy Darley / New Flash Fiction Review
• “Some Guilty Pleasures on This Side of the Border” by Moisés R. Delgado / Craft
• “Family Politics” by Ehiorobo Derek / African Poetry Book Fund Evaristo Prize 2024 Co-Winner
• “Things We Do for Loved Ones” by Thad DeVassie / Vast Literary Press
• “On Loneliness” by Merridawn Duckler / MacQueen’s Quinterly
• “What Would the Aliens Think?” by Ekpenyong Kosisochukwu Collins / SmokeLong Quarterly
• “Roofing in Warm Weather” by Corey Farrenkopf / Brilliant Flash Fiction
• “Based on a True Story” by Epiphany Ferrell / Witcraft
• “Nesting Doll” by Melissa Flores Anderson / Swamp Pink
• “At Once” by Sarah Freligh / Ghost Parachute
• “Whale Fall” by Shauna Friesen / Gone Lawn
• “Lottery” by Scott Garson / Centaur
• “No Ponyboy” by Faithna Geffrard / Susurrus
• “They Fired Up the Laser” by Timothy C. Goodwin / Dishsoap Quarterly
• “Finding the Water to Cry” by Jacqueline Goyette / Stanchion
• “After Reading a Newspaper Clipping of Emily Dickinson’s Obituary Online” by Charlotte Hamrick / Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine
• “Five Things She Brought with Her to the End of the World” by Fatema Haque / Hayden’s Ferry Review
• “The Beak” by Robbie Herbst / The Masters Review
• “Trespasser, Singular” by Alex Herod / Trash Cat Lit
• “Acorns / Hard / Underfoot on the Pavement” by D. G. Herring / Splonk
• “A Cock Among the Bathers” by Sara Hills / Bath Flash Fiction Award
• “One Summer” by Zac Hing / Takahē
• “Ledge (Ars Poetica) (Love Poem) (True Story)” by Amorak Huey / The Cincinnati Review
• “The Comeback” by Lincoln Jaques / Micro Madness
• “A Girl Experiments with Being Human” by Ruth Joffre / Barrelhouse
• “A Day in the Zoo” by Brianna Johnson / Emerge Literary Journal
• “Off a Duck’s Back” by Jupiter Jones / Tiny Sparks Everywhere
• “How to Bake a Cake in Outer Space” by Audra Kerr Brown / Moon City Review
• “Enough” by Mike Kilgannon / Bridport Prize
• “Family Night” by Ani King / SmokeLong Quarterly
• “The Long Walk North” by Caitlyn Kinsella / The Citron Review
• “I’ve Been Getting Letters from Santa for Twenty Years and All I’ve Learned Is He’s an Asshole” by Nicola Koh / Okay Donkey
• “Cowboy” by Francesca Leader / Southeast Review
• “Let’s Go Holoholo” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee / Wigleaf
• “Apparitions” by Arthur Mandal / Bending Genres
• “Aunt Lou” by Miriam McEwen / American Literary Review
• “The Way We Love Each Other” by Rebecca Meacham / The Ilanot Review
• “Pristine” by Douglas W. Milliken / Notch Magazine
• “This Is What Always Happens” by Khalid Mitchell / Astrolabe
• “Girl Locks” by Claudia Monpere / Split Lip Magazine
• “The Days the Cartoons Crept Out the TV” by James Montgomery / Micro Madness
• “Never Swim Alone” by Abigail Myers / JMWW
• “The Marionette” by Ivan Niccolai / Ink in Thirds
• “Swamp” by Catherine Niu / The Cincinnati Review
• “Messiah” by Kate O’Grady / Fish Anthology 2024
• “Little Flowers” by Gillian O’Shaughnessy / X-Ray Literary Magazine
• “The Lesson of Flash Floods” by Pamela Painter / Chestnut Review
• “Horsebroken” by Meg Pokrass / Fractured Lit
• “Small Towns” by Sam Rasnake / Bending Genres
• “Alternate Histories of El Salvador or Perhaps the World” by Ruben Reyes, Jr. / Bomb
• “Driving My Seven-Year-Old Nephew to Visit His Mother at Rehab” by Emily Rinkema / Bath Flash Fiction Award
• “Brittle Bones” by Belinda Rowe / Gone Lawn
• “Your Childhood Was Witchcraft” by Eden Royce / Cleaver
• “Crossing” by Thaddeus Rutkowski / Rathalla Review
• “An Inexhaustive List of Places Where You Grieved for Your Mother” by Debabrata Sahoo / Vestal Review
• “Daughter Fish” by Adrianna Sanchez-Lopez / The Citron Review
• “Concrete Worm” by Noémi Scheiring-Oláh / Hayden’s Ferry Review
• “A Trip to the Moon” by Nina Schuyler / Flash Fiction Magazine
• “Carnivorous Roads” by Robert Scotellaro / New World Writing Quarterly
• “Teddy Bear Pancake” by Chris Scott / Weird Lit Magazine
• “Roller Coaster House” by Kyle Seibel / Had
• “A Hole in the Glass” by Abhishek Sengupta / The Forge Literary Magazine
• “How Do Crows Say I Love You?” by Beth Sherman / Tiny Molecules
• “It Never Mattered What Happened at Home” by Sumitra Singam / The Forge Literary Magazine
• “What We Do on a Night Like This” by Rachel Smith / Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine
• “The Importance of Stems” by Cheryl Snell / The Dribble Drabble Review
• “Restless Coyote Pilfers the Night and She Does Not Need Your Judgment” by Sarah Sorensen / Jet Fuel Review
• “She Is There” by Eraldo Souza dos Santos / Inkfish Magazine
• “Pebbles” by Sarp Sozdinler / Atlas and Alice
• “The Aquarium” by Anna Stacy / Lunch Ticket
• “The Two Denvers” by Rebecca Starks / Craft
• “Clean Floors” by Dawn Tasaka Steffler / The Welkin Writing Prize
• “Psithurism” by Joshua Michael Stewart / Modern Haiku
• “Prudence” by Christy Stillwell / New Flash Fiction Review
• “Pupurangi Shelley” by Robert Sullivan / Hopurangi — Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka
• “Sister, Sister” by Ayotola Tehingbola / Split Lip Magazine
• “This That / That This” by Matthew Tomkinson / 3:AM Magazine
• “Jewel Bearing” by Adam Trodd / Banshee Press
• “This Thing in Our Chests” by Awo Twumwaah / Afreada
• “Always Tomorrow” by Cathy Ulrich / MoonPark Review
• “Bus Stop” by Rekha Valliappan / A-Minor Magazine
• “Memory / I Send Myself” by Wangũi wa Kamonji / The Decolonial Passage
• “Smoke and Ash” by Jesse Wallis / Hayden’s Ferry Review
• “Memory in Three Acts” by Shannon K. Winston / Jet Fuel Review
• “Splinter” by Didi Wood / Fractured Lit
• “Cliché” by David Yourdon / Atlas and Alice
• “Let Go of the Bones” by Yasmine Yu / Lost Balloon
• “Nascent” by Tara Isabel Zambrano / Identity Theory
• “Layered House” by Lucy Zhang / -ette Review
• “Heads” by Tina S. Zhu / Cease, Cows

Thanks to these authors for sharing their incredible work with us and for trusting us to share it with the rest of the world. Congratulations on the selections.

Announcement of the 2025 ‘Best Small Fictions’ Selections was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Essay by Rachel Toalson

Rachel Toalson discusses how we could enrich the lives of men and create a better society if we allowed boys to show emotion.

I saw a thread from a man I don’t know, a post that went viral, if you want to call it that. He was talking about the expectation placed on boys and men to hide emotion, which has been an expectation for quite some time — generations, it seems. Generations of men telling their sons, “Don’t cry about it.” Generations of boys becoming men who do the same. Generations of fracturing psychoses because of one piece of terrible advice.

The man was attacked for his declaration, which amounted to this: boys should be permitted to cry, too.

I had thought, apparently mistakenly, that we were shifting into a more enlightened recognition of the emotional lives of boys and men — which is rich and deep and undeniable. I saw dialogues popping up, books written by psychologists and specialists, people using their voices to shatter outdated expectations.

And yet here were the same old insults, the same old denial, the same old misdiagnoses of a man’s place in society:

Sure, if you want to be a wuss about everything, do it. Don’t expect me to do the same.

Men sure have gone soft in modern days.

What is this world coming to when men break down and cry about anything and everything?

Stop making us all look bad.

There was much worse, too, of course. The man had posted online, and online means anonymity, which means words can be arranged and aimed at will and random, without concern for the person on the other side of them.

It’s a new world out there. And yet it’s clearly not. I suppose it takes a while to change the direction of a ship that’s been moving through waters generations in the making.

I learned to apologize for my emotions when I was young, even though I was not a man. But it was worse for my brother.

For a while, during our childhood, we lived with our father, who did not believe in boys crying. In fact, I clearly remember the words, “Boys don’t cry.” Because he said them so often and because he seemed so annoyed by my own frequent displays of emotion, I carried that message deep inside, too.

We were children. We cried.

My father always had words at the ready:

Stop crying.

I’ll give you something to cry about.

Pick up your lower lip before you trip on it.

I taught you better than that.

I don’t blame my father for his errant teaching; it was only what he was taught as a kid. It’s not easy forging a new way. I know this, too.

When one of my sons is whining for the third hour straight, I often feel the itch in the back of my throat, the words of my father rising up, the fear that the boys will be less than they are supposed to be.

And what are they supposed to be? Strong?

What does strong really mean?

Being strong for my father meant stifling sadness. What this amounted to, for him, were explosions of anger — once he knocked the headlights out of a car because someone cut him off in traffic; another time he followed a man who had cut him off all the way to the bar where the man was headed, and my father got out of the car — where my mother huddled, terrified — said some words, and flung some gestures that caused the other man to point a rifle at him. The shooting was averted by an officer parked nearby — a giant dose of luck, my mother said later.

Would my father have been better able to handle this anger if he’d better handled his other emotions? It’s difficult to say, but research does suggest that when boys learn to cope with negative emotions — sadness, anger, disappointment, fear — they learn to cope better with them all, are better practiced at balance and regulation, and are less reactive and more responsive.

Are some more given to anger than others? Of course. Does that also mean some are more given to sadness? Of course. And when a boy is told he can’t cry, what else is there to do but stuff it down and let it fester, where it becomes a ticking time bomb?

What happens when the ticking time bomb becomes a grown man?

Years ago, a friend asked, “Why are they always male?” She was asking in the aftermath of another tragedy: bombs mailed to people around the country. We’d had bombs recently here in Texas, too, placed on the doorsteps of unsuspecting people. This local bomber killed two people, wounded five, and then took his own life.

“It is the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his life that led him to this point,” Interim Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said at the time, referring to a video the bomber had left for authorities.

Challenges that led him to this point: Could they have been discussed, confessed, healed if he’d only been given permission to speak? Perhaps even to cry?

What do we expect of our men? I often ask myself this when I am confronted by a moment of vulnerability from my husband. Do I, as a woman, expect him to be unswayed by the circumstances of our lives? Do I expect him to sit tall on that white horse and never slump in the saddle? Do I expect him to meet the storms head-on and never express his grief over a daughter who died, a dream that didn’t work out, a burden that feels much too heavy today?

One day, while we were driving in the car, I was saying something negative about a book of mine that was about to be published, and he was listening. At some point, he turned to me and said, “Why can’t you just believe you deserve something good?” Passion and sorrow tangled around his voice, and it cracked in places, but he kept going. “What happened to make you think you don’t deserve to be recognized for your efforts and your accomplishments? Why can’t you believe you are worth something great?”

My hands gripped each other. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him cry, but it might have been the first time I let myself watch. Not because it was a spectacle, not because he made a scene, not because I wanted to remember it so I could hold it over him later. No. I watched because, as many vulnerable moments as we’ve shared, it still made me feel the slightest bit uncomfortable, perhaps a little afraid. I have been conditioned, too. It is much easier for me to watch my young sons cry than it is for me to watch my husband, a grown man, cry.

And I wanted to do better. So I kept my eyes open and fixed on his face, and I let his vulnerability sink down into my deepest places and say, This is for you. He loves you this much. He feels strongly enough about your worth to let himself be seen.

Vulnerability asks for trust. He knows what I will do with his tears: cherish them. He knows what I will think of him once he is done: he is the strongest, bravest man I know. He knows what will happen next: I will reach for his hand, lay my head on his shoulder, and whisper, “You are my favorite.”

We’ve been here before.

Sometimes I think we’re doing better.

And then someone I love and care about loses a child, and in the delivery room, where he watches it happen, he turns his face away to cry.

As if he is still ashamed.

When boys are told it’s weak to cry, when they wall off the emotions that are distinctive to the human condition, when they shove their fear and anxiety and aggression and sadness so far down that another won’t be able to spot it, they get sick. Sadness turned inward is depression. Depression unacknowledged causes a whole host of repercussions, many of which we don’t want to recognize. It’s easier to ignore them and then wonder, “Why are they always male?”

When boys are taught to stifle their negative emotions because the feelings are inconvenient or uncomfortable for the people around them, the boys learn that they are supposed to do this for the rest of their lives — this is what’s expected, this is strength, this is called Being a Man. They must be stoic. Tough. Unbreakable.

It’s an impossible charge. Humans are never unbreakable, and life has a relentless way of proving it.

My son, early in his elementary school years, was flagged as a “problem child.” They didn’t use this term, of course. They used more technical words: “Needs help with emotional regulation.”

He had a stack of behavioral write-ups for frequent explosions in class, about which no one saw fit to tell me. I learned later — when a meeting was called between the school principal, the school vice principal, my son’s teacher, and me — that sometimes he would crumple up worksheets and throw them in the trash. Sometimes he would bolt out of a classroom, who knows why (no one thought it prudent to ask the question why). Sometimes his crying was disruptive, though I had never known him to be excessively loud (perhaps she meant “inconvenient”). Once, he threw a pair of dull-tipped scissors into an empty corner.

He was seven. He was acting out, yes, but he was seven.

I sat through a meeting with school administrators while they told me my son was out of control, that he needed some special help, that he would, at seven years old, be in school suspension. They didn’t know what else to do with him; he had to learn his lesson.

Two years earlier, my son had accompanied me to a doctor’s appointment, where I had promised him that he would get to see and hear the heartbeat of his baby sister. He didn’t get to see or hear that heartbeat because his baby sister died.

To this day, I wonder if it is my fault that he had so much trouble processing through his emotions — disappointment, sadness, fear (would it happen to him, too? A life there one day and gone the next?). Death is a difficult concept for a five-year-old to grasp. Maybe I had asked too much, though I had not known I would be asking anything at all the day I went to that appointment.

We have a script in our home for our children. When they are struggling with an emotion, we coach them to say, “I feel ___ when you ___.” We tell them it’s okay to cry, as long as that crying isn’t a screeching kind of crying (to preserve nerves). We invite them to feel their emotions in their entirety.

My son didn’t have the same freedom at school.

It didn’t take long to uncover the problem. We asked for help, engaged the services of a counselor, who took him through play therapy and unburied his emotions. He had already, at seven years old, begun picking up on the discomfort of a boy expressing emotions and had, as a result, begun stuffing them. He consistently burst with the effort of keeping his emotions hidden.

Behavior tells a story.

My husband has cried in front of our sons before. It might be one of the best gifts a dad can give his sons: to show them that he feels, too.

He cries sometimes when he’s telling them how much he wants something good for them; he cries sometimes when he’s reminding them who they are; he cries sometimes when he’s attempting, somewhat unsuccessfully, to communicate how much he loves them.

His tears, I think, say more than his words. And in his example, they learn a whole new way of being a man.

This way of being a man means they can feel and cry and become something greater than the small version they are expected to be by a world that doesn’t understand how rich the emotional lives of boys and men can be.

We have a mantra in our house. “Every emotion is acceptable,” we say. But there’s a caveat we’ve taught them since they were tiny: Not every expression of our emotions is acceptable. We have to do the work to find the right way to express what we’re feeling.

My sons know that hitting and kicking and destroying things is not an acceptable way of expressing emotion. They know that saying words that dishonor one another is not an acceptable expression. They know that stuffing emotions is not an acceptable expression.

Some people feel uncomfortable around a boy who cries. Some people cringe to see a boy walking side by side with sadness. Some people can’t stand to see a man barely able to crawl from his bed for the darkness hanging over his head, weighing him down.

All we do with our judgment is send it underground. We are responsible for the time bombs.

The boys in my home are full of emotions, and those emotions leak out one’s eyes when he’s told he can’t bring a book to the dinner table because this is family time. Those emotions climb out another’s mouth when his playing time passes way too fast and he’s not ready, not at all, for the clean-up time that follows. Those emotions hide behind frustration when another just can’t execute a flip as perfectly as he wants.

I know what the old ways of Being a Man would tell them:

Forget about it.

It’s not that bad.

We’ll give you something to cry about.

Man up, because real men don’t cry.

These are unrealistic expectations — asking men to curb their feelings instead of acknowledging them. Pretending denial means strength.

Men learn to turn from their inner lives toward stoic silence and solitude and cynicism. They learn to walk straitjacketed by the rules of manhood, so they don’t even know who they are anymore.

Society steals life from boys and men.

We hear it in the low murmurs:

Wow. He’s really sensitive. Dramatic. Easily upset by so little.

We hear it in the overwhelming shouts:

Be someone different.

We hear it in a thousand other ways: Men don’t feel because they’re men, hallelujah. They’re the strong gender, not the emotional one.

Wrong.

Real men do cry. Real men do feel. Real men talk and grieve and walk with vulnerable hearts instead of clenched-tight ones.

A man is not a man if all he ever does is hide behind a straw house of strength. A man is not strong if he never shows us weak.

What would happen if boys were given permission to be who they are, without being called names or labeled into a box or dismissed as something they’re not? What would happen if men were allowed to feel and cry and even sob (heaven help us) if they needed to?

We might see all that negativity poisoning a life leak from a clenched-tight heart in those tears. We might save him from not just a physical heart disease but an emotional one, too, because he feels understood and supported and highly esteemed, even in his crying. We might see, in a man naming the darkness following him, a release from the shame and fear and anxiety heaping his shoulders at the possibility of being found out, of being seen as weak, of forfeiting his membership in the club of Real Man.

We might see them all walk lighter for it.

And that could usher in a brave new world, a world where boys stand with an emotional vocabulary they aren’t afraid to use, where boys honor and value their emotional lives as rich windows into their souls, where boys unclench those precious, magnificent, fierce hearts.

Where men can be real men.

That is worth letting my son weep when he loses a beloved toy because it means a lot to him, and we all cry when we lose something we love. It’s worth permitting a good, healthy cry when it’s time to leave his grandparents’ house because he genuinely, wholeheartedly enjoyed the visit with people he adores. It’s worth holding him while he shakes out his sorrow about the trouble he had at school today.

After all, Rumi says that “teardrops are healers as they begin to arrive.”

And healing is always worth the risk and discomfort and work it takes to shift the philosophies of a misguided society.

The Rich, Emotional Lives of Boys was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Essay by Jean P. Moore

Jean P. Moore dissects familial discontentment, compromise, and negotiation in the kitchen.

My mother’s cooking was a disaster. Sunday chicken went into the oven plump and came out scorched. Tuesday liver was … best not to mention. Friday fish, smelly and unchewable. Less dire, but equally unappealing, were her overcooked meatloaf adorned with a frosting of ketchup; her mashed potatoes with unidentifiable lumpy streaks of gray; and any vegetable directly from the can, all metallic tasting and virtually impossible to swallow.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t cook. On the contrary, she had her specialties. Thanksgiving turkey and assorted sides, when she was in a holiday mood, brought Norman Rockwell to mind. And her spaghetti and meatballs were unrivaled. On Monday nights, the aroma of tomato sauce simmering on the stove in our Brooklyn apartment caused neighbors to weep with pangs of hunger. No, she could cook, all right. The problem was one of will. She simply hated everything that went with feeding our family of four, the planning, shopping, preparing, and cleaning up after meals.

To mitigate her abhorrence, she relied on timesaving conveniences. “Cooking takes too long,” she explained to husband and daughters, who, by the way, never thought of helping. This was the 50s, after all. It was pretty clear-cut: the woman of the house did the cleaning, washing, ironing, and cooking. The most the husband offered, other than being the sole family provider, was transport to the grocery store for the wife, who still hadn’t learned to drive.

For my mother, cans were the answer. Fresh food was too perishable, and frozen, while more pleasing, too expensive. “Food from a can, you can’t beat it. Cheap, and all you have to do is heat it up,” she explained to the hungry mouths greeting her around the table, as she placed before us carrots and peas, creamed corn, string beans, spinach, any number of dull, limp imitations of the real thing.

Canned vegetables, my mother’s salvation, were my nemesis. I simply couldn’t stomach the stuff. By the time I was seven, I was forced to remain seated until I “cleaned my plate” of every noxious morsel because it was a “sin to waste food.” This was the edict that turned me to civil disobedience, causing me to languish in the dining room until one or both parents took pity and released me from confinement.

Little did I know then that life (and my mealtime dilemma) was about to take an unexpected turn.

When we moved from Brooklyn to Miami in June of 1953 so that my father could find steady work on the hotels going up along Collins Avenue, my mother was miserable. She had to leave behind the life she knew and loved, including her parents and all her brothers and sisters.

“This place is uninhabitable,” she proclaimed that first summer in the southwest section of the city, pushing a dangling fishhook curl away from her damp forehead. She had just received a letter from her sister in Queens, my aunt Marie, saying the whole family had been clamming at Rockaway Beach.

She was a New Yorker through and through and saw herself as part of the 9-to-5 set, not as a housewife. Soon after she graduated from Eastern District on Driggs Avenue, she put on her high heels, her best working-girl dress, and took the L train from Williamsburg to Manhattan to find work as a secretary. Once she had clearly established her shorthand and typing skills, she started working for her brothers’ blanket distribution business in the Empire State Building, a job she stuck with until she married my father. That was when she took up the mantle of “housewife,” and how she chafed against it.

Before we left for Miami, I remember her taking me to the office to see where she had worked. My uncles took me to the window, pointing out all the cars and buses below that looked like toys. They told me what a good secretary my mother had been and that if I did well in school, someday, when I grew up, they would give me a job. That made my mother smile, but she couldn’t hide her sadness when we said goodbye.

For all her unhappiness, my mother did manage to devise one small advantage of the move — the excuse to curtail kitchen time. “I hope no one expects cooked meals in this godforsaken climate,” she announced, putting out plates of cold cuts, something she did most nights in our new home, an apartment not far from downtown.

I have to admit, I was quite happy with the new arrangement. Not a pea or kernel of corn in sight, except on Sundays when a charred chicken was required regardless of the heat. But even then, my mother let us know of her dissatisfaction with this one remaining family mealtime tradition. “You better get that fan and put it on high right here in the kitchen if you expect me to stay in this blast furnace,” she announced before lighting the oven.

By fall, it was surprising we were not showing signs of malnutrition. There is only so much processed meat a family can eat. My father finally decided it was time to save us. One night, as he pushed away the remains of a bologna sandwich, he said, “It’s getting a little cooler, don’t you think?”

My sister and I nodded, our mouths too full of white bread to answer properly.

“If you think 88 degrees as opposed to 95 day-in-and-day-out is ‘getting cooler,’ I guess,” my mother replied.

“Well, I was thinking,” my father continued, wiping his mouth with his paper napkin. “Maybe we could have cooked meals more often. You know, some more chicken and potatoes, or meatloaf?”

I swallowed hard and started coughing. I hadn’t minded the change in our diet, actually preferring nitrates and other preservatives to my mother’s meals. My mother started patting my back, each pat becoming harder.

“Okay, Mom. Ouch. I’m Okay.”

She pulled her hand away and glared at my dad. “You don’t like cold and refreshing foods in this hellish place you’ve dragged us to?”

My father began to back down, his guilt like another family member sitting at the table. “All I’m saying is … nobody makes spaghetti and meatballs like you, nobody since my mother, rest her soul.”

My mother’s chest deflated, her brow softened. Her guilt sat down at the table and began sparring with Dad’s.

This went on for a while. (Mom:) “I don’t know how I’ll be able to handle the heat if I cook spaghetti and meatballs.” (Dad:) “The kids and I sure love it when you cook my mother’s recipes.”

Then, rising from the table, my mother pushed back her chair and said, “Well, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but there may need to be some changes. Beyond the weather.” She picked up her plate and walked into the kitchen.

It appeared they were at a stalemate, but then my father did something remarkable. He took his own plate into the kitchen. My sister and I watched in amazement as he picked up the dishcloth. He was preparing to dry the dishes. We looked at each other and blinked and then returned to watching the two of them. Daddy stood closer now to Mommy, both with their backs to us, deep in conversation we couldn’t hear. Then he nudged her with his hip. She remained still, but soon she nudged back, and they laughed together — these two, who had been engaged in a cold war since the move to Miami, seemed to be on the verge of reconciliation.

The next day, I heard my mother rummaging around in the kitchen. She was leaning over boxes on the floor. When she stood up, I could see she was holding the spaghetti pot I hadn’t seen since Brooklyn. And there were other changes brewing, ones that would affect my sister and me. Some good: there would be an allowance of fifty cents a week. Some bad: my sister and I would have to keep our room neat, make our beds, and help with the dishes. This arrangement came about during one of the conversations our parents now shared routinely, like the one in which my father finally relented and said Mommy could learn to drive and look for a job. What had caused these dramatic shifts we were at a loss to discern. But there was a definite change in the climate in our home, if not outside.

Then came that Monday night in late October — and the heavenly aroma emanating from the kitchen. We were seated at the dining-room table when my mother walked in carrying a huge pot of spaghetti, doling it out to each of us, not saying a word. She slowly walked to the kitchen and came back carrying a smaller pot of steaming tomato sauce, the scent of which made me lightheaded. As she lowered the pot to spoon out the sauce, I saw half a dozen plump, juicy meatballs bobbing up and down, floating in oregano and delicate slivers of basil.

“Would you like some?” she asked, the steam forming a halo over her head.

“Yes, ma’am. It smells delicious.”

After that night, the air was a little fresher. My mother started turning off fans and opening windows to increase the “cross ventilation.”

“Daddy says the houses in Florida are all built to take advantage of it,” she told us.

“Moon over Miami,” I heard my mother lightly hum to herself one afternoon as she pounded flank steak. She then cut the meat into strips and spooned onto them a mixture of breadcrumbs, Parmesan cheese, spices, and raisins. Finally, she rolled the strips of steak around the mixture and secured each piece with toothpicks. Soon, the rolls would be simmered in tomato sauce, making my father’s favorite, braciole.

In our family’s first year in Miami, I learned that my mother’s finest skills were not the secretarial ones she had left behind, nor the culinary ones she chose to ignore. Her real talent was the art of negotiation.

Kitchen Diplomacy was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Book Review by Eric Shonkwiler

Eric Shonkwiler talks about lore, hauntings, and falling short in Gay’s novel.

William Gay
Fiction | Novel | 224 pages | 5.4” x 8.6” | Reviewed: Hardcover
978–1938103131 | First Edition | $15.99
Dzanc Books | Ann Arbor | BUY HERE

I was deeply saddened to hear of William Gay’s passing early in 2012. I’d enjoyed most of his work up to that point, and was looking forward to a novel, The Lost Country, which appeared to be caught in limbo, and seemed doomed to stay there once Gay died. I was cheered, then, to hear that Dzanc Books had acquired not only The Lost Country, but another novel, Little Sister Death.

Taking place on an interpretation of the real and supposedly haunted grounds of the Bell family farm in Adams, Tennessee, Little Sister Death intertwines the story of writer David Binder with the past encounters of the farmers and groundskeepers of the Beale property. Binder is a moderately successful literary author, stuck in his sophomore slump, when his agent suggests he write something genre to make a little paper. Binder considers this, remembering the tales of the Beale haunting from his childhood in Tennessee, and dives in, moving his wife, Corrie, and daughter to the Beale property itself, now mostly in ruins. What follows is at times a traditional gothic horror and, at others, a distant dissection of the same.

Little Sister Death cuts back and forth between past events and Binder’s tale, and it’s these chunks of old horrors that really seem to motivate Gay in ways his readers know. In particular, a longer section relates the latest encounter with the Beale specters in 1930, following a seldom-do-well farmer named Swaw, and his passel of children. Swaw’s section is the traditional horror portion of the story:

He told himself he wasn’t going to look when he passed the graveyard. If you don’t look, it won’t be so, he told himself. He looked anyway and there was a girl sitting on Jacob Beale’s tombstone, plaiting her long blond hair. She was watching Swaw with bold eyes out of a pretty, sullen face, and when she arose the pale fall of her hair swung behind her. She beckoned him.

Binder’s sections tend to move a little slower, with a kind of detachment that is perhaps evocative of Binder’s mindset but not of telling any story, or even getting close to a character. Binder researches, explores, occasionally envisions the spirits of the Beale property, but nothing accretes into a palpable arc, no real development of any character occurs. There is, at best, only Binder’s descent. In the book’s lovely introduction, Tom Franklin (Poachers, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter) calls these sections “chilling,” but there is a disconnect between Binder’s distance from his family — and, perhaps, from society — and the building horrors of the Beale property, which are, in fact, one method of connection between Binder and his family. One night, the Binders sit watching Winnie the Pooh, and the cartoon turns horrific for only Binder and his daughter, Stephie. This is one of the few truly ghastly encounters, and besides those, the days come on with a slow roll built for a much larger book. Corrie observes, in her stationary manner:

But mostly the way one day segued into the next, each the deadly same, the hot sun baking everything, the white dusty road empty as a broken promise, not even a Bible salesman or a lost tourist to break the monotony. Days came and they went and she forced the inevitable frustration out of her mind, almost physically pushing them away, thinking, it’s only for the summer, one summer out of all the summers of our lives.

Near the end of the novel, Gay eschews the Binders’ young daughter entirely, sending her away to relatives while Binder and Corrie finish the summer on the Beale property. This should precipitate Binder’s The Shining-style descent into madness, but that never quite comes. The haunting built up in the past sections of the book never strikes with the same power, leaving the reader waiting for a horror that is instead switched out with emotional distance — feeling like the payoff for an entirely different story. The climax of the book involves the injury of Binder’s brother-in-law by a copperhead, and from there the book essentially fades to black. An epilogue of sorts follows in the form of a straightforward telling of the lore of the Bell Witch. Gay’s horror story, at times genuinely frightening, jaw-clenching, finishes like the scrolling explanation at the end of a movie.

There has always been a sense about Gay’s prose that there exist dimensions that he’s never quite gotten around to exploring, and Little Sister Death is proof of that, showing the distant edges of those areas of thought, more clinical and clean than his familiar William Faulkner/Cormac McCarthy stomping grounds. Despite this, much of the artistry here comes in that easily-recognized form. Often enough, many of the poetic phrases can be traced back to one of McCarthy’s works, lifted almost wholesale. And while Gay has always had a knack for treading on the lower side of the road than those heavyweights, and working that territory to his advantage (Gay’s The Long Home is an eminently more readable version of The Orchard Keeper), here these McCarthyisms just feel watered down, absent-minded. Coupling that with a segmented story that never really gathers steam — let alone anything more material — Little Sister Death feels like an exercise, rather than a book. It’s unfortunate that Sister is the lead horse in Gay’s posthumous works, but readers should feel confident in looking elsewhere in his oeuvre, and continue to hope for what may come in The Lost Country, as well as a rumored third posthumous novel, Stoneburner.

This review has been moved from its original home on The Spark blog, where it was first published on January 11, 2016. The Spark is now defunct, and all features have migrated to The Coil for posterity.

Traditional Gothic Horror: On William Gay’s ‘Little Sister Death’ was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fiction by Kristen Holt-Browning

Wenfair Abbey, England, September 1370

Stone and dirt. Disappearing light. The door to the cell, behind me, closing. Heavy, carved from oak. The men are pushing it closed. I could still turn and flee. I could run back out of this cell, past all those men out there in their brown robes, up the nave and out of the church, down the hillside path, past the placid, grazing sheep, the whole world before me, my feet galloping over the grass, all the way back home.

But nobody lives there anymore.

The door is closing. The wall of the cell across from me, already dim, grows darker.

The light behind me — edged with red, filtered by the stained-glass windows of the church connected to this cell — pales, withers, and dies as the door keeps groaning across the ground. The final slip of light at my feet fades to pink, then shrinks to nothing at all.

The door is closed. Black everywhere. The dark is all. More dark than I thought there would be. How can such a small space hold so much darkness? But also, there is less: less air, less light. Less me. As if, already, I am shrinking to fit this enclosed place.

Scraping and shuffling on the other side of the door, its outline hardly visible within the stony wall. It is being bricked up again, enclosing me — no, us.

Joseph and all the other monks out there, all of them adding bricks to the rising stack, under the watching eyes of the abbot and the priest.

When my father first told me of his decision to send me here, as baffled and mad as I was, I also felt a seed of pride take root. I had been chosen for this weird fate, not my sisters, not any of the other girls in our village. Father said Mother had seen something in me, wanted more for me than farm life. I was afraid, but even so, that deadly sin, that haughty self-regard, sprouted in me.

But no longer. That foolish feeling has already wilted in this darkness. It is too late for me. As if I could tell my father, and the abbot, and the priest, even Joseph and the other monks: I confess my sin of pride, now please let me out. As if they would calmly accept the demands of a silly girl with her changeable mind. As if I have any say in the matter of my own fate.

Too late. No way out now. It is done. It is silent. The door has been closed, the other side of it bricked up again, and the monks have left, back to their endless little hours of prayer.

No, it is not full quiet: I hear the thud and rush of my blood beneath my skin, thrumming in my ears.

It is morning and the sun must be risen high, but it is like night in here. The window is set in the north-facing wall, and covered by a heavy hide curtain. A small, narrow slot cut in the opposite wall faces into the dim church, offers nothing bright.

I should feel holy, shouldn’t I? Favored by God, smiled upon. Holiness would be a warmth, I think, a soothing heat under and over my skin. But I am a cold beast, cut off, closed in. Untouched.

There is no handle on this side. Nothing to grab and hold. I am trapped. My blood so loud in my ears I fear it will pour out onto the hard dirt floor.

I hear her breath, but I can hardly see her. She is mere shape curled into a black fog. I am alone, truly. I know God is everywhere, but I cannot believe He is here. Which shows what a sinner I am. Which shows that this is where I belong. I can learn so much.

I wait for some sign, any message at all from God.

Nothing.

Last spring, a sailor came through Fossbury on his way to the coast, that place where the land ends and next comes only water, until there is more land again, he said, where people speak in strange tongues. Father offered him a place in the barn for the night. I stayed behind, after Margaret, Anne, and Mother climbed up to the sleeping loft — Mother swaying on the ladder, the baby still in her belly then. A single candle on the table between Father and the sailor, who spoke in the half-light. I sat in a dim corner; men deep in talk do not notice a scrawny, lurking girl. I could not stop thinking about all that water — what the sailor called the “sea.” I asked in a voice little more than a whisper, “How can water be so big that you can see nothing else?”

I was a child then. That was only a few months ago. How can that be? I am still twelve, and yet that was a different life, in another world, a warm and candlelit place, nothing like this cell.

“Imagine nothing but water and sky, no land, no village, no cottages or churches, just water everywhere you look,” the sailor replied. “The water goes on and on until it meets the low edge of the sky in the farthest distance. It seems a world unto itself. You must remind yourself, there is a new shore ahead somewhere — you must remember this when you are so far from home, and your destination can’t yet be seen. Otherwise, you begin to think the ocean has no beginning and no end, and that way madness lies.”

God has no beginning and no end. That is what Father Everard says. I do not understand that, either. I fear God ended when the door shut behind me, and I entered this stone room.

Dear Jesus, I do not need endless water and sky. Mother is dead, and the baby, too.

Father and Margaret and Anne are far away in the city, and I am locked in darkness. But I believe I could accept it all, if I could have a little more light, please.

Something in me flutters, rattles in my chest. There is no way into this dark place, and no way out, not anymore. They shut the door and covered it with bricks. I touch my face. The doorframe faint in the stone. My cheek quivers under my hand. The dark is in me. The devil is dark. I am buried alive. How can I serve God in here? Satan lives in the dark places, says Father Everard.

Rustling in the corner. A gray shape. A gown. A woman. My eyes are learning to see here. She is on the other side of the cell, in the corner, but I could reach her, I think, in just a few steps.

I should speak.

No, I should wait for her to address me; she is noble, and thus must speak first.

I should not be here.

I would very much like an open door.

I should pray. Holy Mary, guide me in all this dark.

Please.

Mother?

See me.

BUY FROM MONKFISH BOOK PUBLISHING COMPANY

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Chapter One: An Excerpt from Kristen Holt-Browning’s ‘Ordinary Devotion’ was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are thrilled to announce the winners and finalists for the 2024 Luminaire Award for Best Poetry! From more than 500 poems of all types, lengths, styles, and genres submitted to Alternating Current Press for the book prize, we narrowed the reading down to this shortlist of winners and finalists.

The Luminaire Award for Best Poetry is Alternating Current Press’ annual writing award to recognize the best poetry and hybrid work submitted to the press. First place receives $100 (upon publication), the top-5 pieces receive publication in the triennial print anthology, and all selections (including finalists) receive publication on The Coil.

Congrats to all these amazing authors, who made our job in deciding very difficult. We look forward to seeing these pieces on The Coil throughout the year.

First Place

“First Aid” by Philip Andrew Lisi

Second Place

“Bin ich dein Neger?” by Tara Campbell

Third Place

“That Woman” by Kate Segriff

Fourth Place

“[sic]stemic” by Dean Gessie

Fifth Place

“Cleaning the Orphanage” by Raymond Luczak

Finalists

“Three Photographs” by John Peter Beck
“Like HeLa Cells” by Kenny Bradley
“The Trouble with Pronouns” by Tara Campbell
“The Necessary Bodies of Others” by Kimberly Hall
“The same way” by Brandy Reinke
“Cherokee Nation as an Asheville Footnote” by Savannah Wade
“Know Your Blood” by Loren Walker

Announcement of the 2024 Luminaire Poetry Award Winners & Finalists was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are thrilled to announce the 2024 Front Range Book Prize winner and finalists! From more than 100 manuscripts of all types, lengths, styles, and genres submitted to Alternating Current Press for the book prize, we narrowed the reading down to this shortlist and selected a winner.

The Front Range Book Prize celebrates Colorado authors and themes, and our winner, Krista Hanley, is a native of Colorado with a uniquely Colorado story that needs to be told and retold and retold: a memoir of the 1999 Columbine school shooting and how to survive everyday life after collective mass trauma. Hanley receives $1,000 + publication at Alternating Current Press, including full publicity, worldwide distribution, and a Colorado book tour of readings and signings throughout the state.

Congrats, as well, to our finalists, who made our job in deciding very difficult, and whose manuscripts deserve additional commendation and recognition.

Winner!

How to Survive a Mass Shooting by Krista Hanley

Finalists

Beam of Life by Sarah Kozloff
Dragon Year by T. Dallas Saylor
Riverine and Other Tales of Terra Mater by Kayann Short

Announcement of the 2024 Front Range Book Prize Winner & Finalists was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are thrilled to announce, on behalf of guest editor Amber Sparks, who selected the winning pieces, that the featured spotlighted stories for the 2024 Best Small Fictions anthology have been announced! These 10 stories will kick off the 2024 Best Small Fictions edition at the beginning of the anthology and will be discussed in an introduction by Amber. Congrats to the spotlighted authors!

• “And the Crowd Goes” by Phoenix Alexander / Arcturus
• “The Year of the Flood” by Sudha Balagopal / Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
• “The Matchbook” by Aimee Bender / Matchbook Stories
• “Red Pilgrims” by Renee Chen / Trampset
• “The Moon Is a White Corn Tortilla, the Night a Sizzling Comal, and the Stars Are Parmesan Cheese Because God Loves Quesadillas with His Nightly Cafecito” by Moisés R. Delgado / Split Lip Magazine
• “Love 1992: A Catechism” by Deesha Philyaw / Fractured Lit
• “Lipshine #18 Champagne Gold” by Val Rigodon / Fairy Tale Review
• “Were” by Kathleen Rooney / Heavy Feather Review
• “Timetable for Learning to Eat Alone” by Lauren D. Woods / Moon City Review
• “When You Visit Manhattan on Saturday and Your Boyfriend Who Lives in Queens Says He Can’t Come” by Nathan Xie / Craft

Thanks to these authors for sharing their incredible work with us and for trusting us to share it with the rest of the world. Congratulations on the selections.

Announcement of 2024 ‘Best Small Fictions’ Spotlighted Selections was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Book Review by Al Kratz

Al Kratz talks about character, pace, and conflict in Karas’ story collection.

Steve Karas
Fiction: Stories | 242 Pages | 5” x 8” | Reviewed: Paperback
978–0996717502 | First Edition | $14.00
Tailwinds Press | New York City | BUY HERE

Toward the end of 2015 came one of my favorite books of the year, a short-story collection called Kinda Sorta American Dream, written by Steve Karas. Of the 14 stories included, ranging in length from 2 pages to 50 pages, there wasn’t a story in the collection that I wasn’t grabbed by, or that had a character Karas failed to bring to life.

The stories have a wide variety of setting and conflict, and, yet, somehow they work perfectly together to form a consistent theme implied by the title that there is something just out of reach in our current lives, something short of the classical American Dream, yet also short of a complete American Nightmare. These are some of the people in Karas’ America: A 27-year old still living with his mother and on the brink of being left behind by his parents’ new lives. A middle-school girl in love with her Syrian pen pal. A middle-aged man-turned-grandfather who is worried about his descendants’ futures. An unemployed man forced into enrolling in a shopping-mall-Santa school. A middle-aged man discovering the world of Facebook.

The characters often face similar endings that are somewhat open. Their only change might be the realization that their situation hasn’t or won’t improve. That this is the best it gets. Kinda sorta. Karas still manages, however, to bring this out with some form of optimism. Maybe that’s my optimism coming through, but there seemed to be a subtext message that the American Dream might not come true, but we’re all going to be okay. Even if some things are more screwed up than ever, even if our lives are slightly defective, we’re going to be fine … ish. Sorta.

In a great mixture of pace, some of these stories do have sweet and positive endings for the characters. Some of their dreams do come true. Sometimes, intimacy is possible. Sorta. Intimacy is often out of reach of these characters, but it also can be the grace they find in the end. The story “Hold On” goes to the future to explore this. In the 2040s, our main character works in a human-touch center, which is the only place people can go to feel actual human contact. It’s a world normally lacking intimacy, but somehow the main character finds it in an unexpected source. The character in “To Abdo, With Love” has a moment of reflection that is simultaneously connected and disconnected:

I can tell she’s thinking, You’re just a kid, you don’t know how the world works. She’s not saying it, but I can feel it. One day you’ll be all grown up, you’ll understand.

(p. 19).

This girl is distant from her teacher and yet somehow has connected insight and receives an important message.

Karas gets this across with an astonishingly diverse range of voice and character. My favorite moments of his stories were the introductions of his first-person narratives and finding out who we were now. Given the strength he had for capturing unique voices, I was a little surprised third-person stories outnumbered first-person narratives 8 to 6. The writer went from a 27-year-old man-kid, to a middle-school girl, to a middle-aged grandfather, to the mother of a dead Marine so seamlessly and effectively that it showed the power of literary empathy. None of the characters felt like exercise; these were full instantiations of voice. The only one that I sensed a slight break in the dream was in “Blue,” where the main character was a Black police officer named Jaylen. Even this wasn’t necessarily an issue of character. At times, it felt like “Blue’s” overall political message was larger than the story. I’m not sure even that criticism is fair, but it’s certainly a question I didn’t have on the other sociopolitical stories of the collection.

Most of the stories are around 13 pages long, but “It Takes a Village” comes in at 50 pages. It’s almost novella-length but still maintains effective short-story scope. It’s a very realistic story of a school social worker facing difficult teens, difficult bureaucracy with threats of layoff, disengaged colleagues, and administrative roadblocks to his desire to make a difference. This story demonstrated a style that is in control of pace and the ability to show a turn without forcing it. The following two sentences are the end of one long paragraph and the beginning of another:

… He wondered if he’d ever need to sleep again.

By mid-morning the next day, Andrew needed a nap. …

(p. 67).

This type of turn is also effective in the opening story, “Ain’t Like the Movies,” where the main character tells us about suppressing his desire to tell his dad to go fuck himself, only to do exactly that three pages later.

Karas certainly puts his characters in a tree. He throws a lot of rocks at them. But somehow he does it with kindness. It seems his characters understand. They know he has to throw at them, and they know it will hurt. There is acceptance from the first few sentences:

I’m sitting at the kitchen table over a bowl of soggy oats, hives crawling up my neck, eyes watery and itchy. It’s the cats; I’m deathly allergic. My mom brought home three last night.

(p. 1)

to the last few:

Hank blew smoke rings at the sky, out to space. He blew them at the giant black holes out there waiting to swallow Planet Earth, at the asteroids preparing to slice through Earth’s atmosphere. He blew smoke rings, small ones then bigger ones, at the great unknown inevitably on its way.

(p. 226).

This collection is heavy and light like Led Zeppelin. Hard and soft like Nirvana. Here, we aren’t okay, yet that’s okay. This collection is not kinda or sorta a work of art — it is definitively one.

This review has been moved from its original home on The Spark blog, where it was first published on January 14, 2016. The Spark is now defunct, and all features have migrated to The Coil for posterity.

Literary Empathy: On Steve Karas’ ‘Kinda Sorta American Dream’ was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are thrilled to announce that selections have been made for the 2024 Best Small Fictions anthology. Congratulations to these amazing pieces of short fiction by these terrific authors whose work will be included in the annual anthology. The 2024 edition will be available from Alternating Current Press this fall.

Best Small Fictions is the first-ever contemporary anthology solely dedicated to anthologizing the best internationally published short hybrid fiction in a given calendar year. Now in its tenth year of existence, Best Small Fictions features the best microfiction, flash fiction, haibun stories, and prose poetry from around the world.

• “The Good Prizes” by Daniel Addercouth / New Flash Fiction Review
• “And the Crowd Goes” by Phoenix Alexander / Arcturus
• “Swings and Roundabouts” by Mikki Aronoff / Emerge Literary Journal
• “Tonight, I Might Commit the Most Grievous Crime” by Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arówólò / Anmly
• “Back When I Was Drinking” by Tom Bailey / Ploughshares
• “The Year of the Flood” by Sudha Balagopal / Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
• “Tijuana” by Victoria Ballesteros / Your Impossible Voice
• “Carve” by Allison Field Bell / The Bridport Prize Anthology 2023
• “The Matchbook” by Aimee Bender / Matchbook Stories
• “Cuttlefish” by Patricia Q. Bidar / Scratching the Sands: National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2023
• “There Are a Million Ways to Say Goodbye, and How Can I Possibly Choose?” by Lindy Biller / The Welkin Writing Prize
• “Eight Story Ideas” by T. J. Butler / Dating Silky Maxwell
• “Like Real Women Do” by Avitus B. Carle / Okay Donkey
• “The Pink Rats inside Us” by Meg Cass / Anmly
• “In the Blink of an Eye” by Christine H. Chen / JMWW
• “Red Pilgrims” by Renee Chen / Trampset
• “Bushfire” by Sherryl Clark / Flash Frontier
• “Something” by Dan Crawley / Flash Frog
• “The Moon Is a White Corn Tortilla, the Night a Sizzling Comal, and the Stars Are Parmesan Cheese Because God Loves Quesadillas with His Nightly Cafecito” by Moisés R. Delgado / Split Lip Magazine
• “Tunneling” by Josh Denslow / Electric Literature
• “Quiet” by Cristi Donoso / The Citron Review
• “Year of the Farrier” by Lynn Edge / MacQueen’s Quinterly
• “The Whirlpool Duet” by Becky Ellis / Northwest Review
• “First Generation” by Olivia Fantini / Ecotone
• “Pears” by Jennifer Fliss / Ruby
• “Perpetual Motion” by Thaisa Frank / Gargoyle Magazine
• “Cancerous Sneak” by Helen Freeman / The Ekphrastic Review
• “Sellinger” by Scott F. Gandert / Apple Valley Review
• “Body” by Scott Garson / MoonPark Review
• “Nice Little Girls” by Jo Gatford / Cease, Cows
• “Boilermaker” by J. W. Goll / New Flash Fiction Review
• “Penny, Barbara, Ruth, Irene” by Amy Grote / Craft
• “The Last Goodbye in the City of Electric Longing” by L. M. Guay / Small Wonders
• “Ojuju-Kalaba” by Ola W. Halim / SmokeLong Quarterly
• “The Times I’ll Trade Time with the Crows” by Joel Hans / Atlas and Alice
• “The Abortion Clinic for People Caught in Folk Tales” by Pauline Holdsworth / Pithead Chapel
• “I’ve Never Heard of a Wind Stone” by Jonathan Humphrey / Contemporary Haibun Online
• “Already among the Clouds” by Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim / Necessary Fiction
• “As in the Days of Noah” by Bethany Jarmul / Cease, Cows
• “Unprecedented Weather Patterns” by Bethany Jarmul / Gone Lawn
• “Uncle Soul” by Andrea Jurjević / Centaur
• “Daily Pilgrimage” by Angie Kang / Sundog Lit
• “Motherland” by Volha Kastsiuk / At the Bay / I Te Kokoru
• “Spaceship in a Bottle” by Robert P. Kaye / Moon City Review
• “Rehydration” by Sean Wai Keung / Sine Theta Magazine
• “Before I Used Chairs” by Max Kruger-Dull / Quarterly West
• “A Door Is a Secret, Revealed” by Kathryn Kulpa / Fictive Dream
• “Bog Iron” by Shane Larkin / New Flash Fiction Review
• “Imagining the Woman Known Only as Wife on This Eroded Tombstone in the Old Butler Cemetery off Route 194” by Janice Leadingham / Reckon Review
• “The Wedding Photographer Photographer” by Matt Leibel / Aquifer: The Florida Review
• “Seventeen” by Joshua Jones Lofflin / The Baltimore Review
• “The Buddha Who Couldn’t Feel and the Fish on the Floor” by Emily Lu / Heavy Feather Review
• “Amen: The End of Men” by Owolusi Lucky / Reckon Review
• “The Oomancer” by Lorette C. Luzajic / Litro Magazine
• “At Weekends Mama’s Carnivore” by Rosaleen Lynch / Ruby
• “Buoyant” by Avra Margariti / Lost Balloon
• “House Story” by Michael Mark / Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
• “Whale Song” by Jeff Martin / The Masters Review
• “Eminent Domain” by Jolene McIlwain / Belt Magazine / Sidle Creek
• “Fulfilling” by Fiona McKay / New Flash Fiction Review
• “Sabine” by Catherine McNamara / Fictive Dream
• “And Eat It” by Faith Merino / Sundog Lit
• “Solar Flare” by Claudia Monpere / Atlas and Alice
• “Leap” by Sarah Fawn Montgomery / Necessary Fiction
• “Demolition” by Will Musgrove / Identity Theory
• “Into the White” by Gillian O’Shaughnessy / Fractured Lit
• “Midwest Oasis” by Briar Ripley Page / Traveler’s Tales / Ice Queen Magazine
• “Of Foliage” by Mandira Pattnaik / Birch Bark Editing
• “Hatching Moths” by Emily Pegg / The Masters Review
• “You-Are-Not-Mad Lib” by Jennifer Perrine / The Maine Review
• “Love 1992: A Catechism” by Deesha Philyaw / Fractured Lit
• “The Bread of Life” by Katherine Plumhoff / Heavy Feather Review
• “Once upon a Time in West Auckland” by Hayden Pyke / Flash Frontier
• “A Dog Story Doggedly Told” by Philip Raisor / Midway Journal
• “Lipshine #18 Champagne Gold” by Val Rigodon / Fairy Tale Review
• “Were” by Kathleen Rooney / Heavy Feather Review
• “When You Receive the Notice to Policyholders Regarding the Liquidation of Your Insurance Company” by Colleen Rothman / Maudlin House
• “The Replacement” by Paul Rousseau / Craft
• “Northbound Highway 101” by Chi S. / Longleaf Review
• “Close Calls” by Robert Scotellaro / Quick Adjustments
• “The Selkie of the City Tells All” by J. D. Scott / Fairy Tale Review
• “A New Kind of Dan” by Kyle Seibel / Trampset
• “That Summer” by Helen Sheehy / Wrong Turn Lit
• “This Town” by Jeanine Skowronski / MoonPark Review
• “Feeding Time” by Jen Soong / Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away
• “All of Us, Shaking” by L. Soviero / Emerge Literary Journal
• “Googling Liver Failure While Adeline Pours Another Whiskey” by Jenny Stalter / Ghost Parachute
• “My Landlord and I” by Michael Hugh Stewart / The Cincinnati Review
• “Three Ways Out” by Adam Straus / Trampset
• “Lanternfly” by K. P. Taylor / Scrawl Place
• “The Girl with the Third Leg” by Christina Tudor / Gargoyle Magazine
• “I’m Learning How to Die Out” by Deb Olin Unferth / The Hopkins Review
• “Möbius Band” by Jie Wang / Bone Parade
• “Life Cycle” by Max Wheeler / Astrolabe
• “Gabapentin” by Tom Williams / Revolution John
• “Toy Collector” by Rebecca Winterer / Identity Theory
• “Timetable for Learning to Eat Alone” by Lauren D. Woods / Moon City Review
• “No Clubs” by Joel Worford / Hayden’s Ferry Review
• “When You Visit Manhattan on Saturday and Your Boyfriend Who Lives in Queens Says He Can’t Come” by Nathan Xie / Craft
• “Last Day Cupcakes” by Jeffrey Yamaguchi / Okay Donkey
• “There Are Hundreds of Beautiful Asian Women Waiting to Meet You” by Tessa Yang / Craft
• “Tea and Seeds” by Yasmine Yu / The Cincinnati Review

Thanks to these authors for sharing their incredible work with us and for trusting us to share it with the rest of the world. Congratulations on the selections.

Announcement of the 2024 ‘Best Small Fictions’ Selections was originally published in The Coil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.