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Winner, 2011 Short Short Contest. Isabel would attribute her undoing to that summer in Crete. She would recall how she was minding her own business, reproachlessly conducting research on the iconography of 14th-Century frescoes, when she found God…
Winner, 2011 Short Short Contest. “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” That was the creed of the Stone family, proclaimed like God’s own truth by Mr. Stone all through the two boys’ school years…
Second Prize, 2011 Literal Latte Fiction Award. A black cab dropped them off at his family’s London townhouse in the middle of a side street smashed between Notting Hill and Kensington. They stepped out….
First Prize, 2011 Literal Latte Fiction Award. When Emily entered the kitchen that evening, she wasn’t surprised to see newspapers spread all over the floor, the counters, the table. There seemed to be less than yesterday….
Winner, 2010 Literal Latte Short Short Contest. The bulldog squats on the mantel, smug in his silence. Inside the mirror a man is noosing his blue tie through the collar of a yellow shirt. The dental work crowning the wainscoting empowers the room to speak for everyone….
Winner, 2010 Literal Latte Short Short Contest. I am already dreaming about you, Russell Edson, wondering where you are, if you’re still tinkering with the language, leaving surprise packets in the unguarded provinces of our groins…
First Prize (tie), 2010 K. Margaret Grossman Fiction Award. I am still attracted to quiet. Even when Estelle was frenetic, I sensed an interior calm. She had combed her raven hair; her hands could sometimes be still. And her name held a promise: diamond pinpoints of light hanging still in a dark, black winter sky…
First Prize (tie), 2010 K. Margaret Grossman Fiction Award. In the shadows of early afternoon, on a day of breakthroughs, I’m standing with Smitty and Sonya in front of the Kansas Asylum for the Insane in Topeka, where we’ve come to visit Monica. It’s June, 1940. We graduated from high school last week — our ceremony cancelled because of the tragedy — and already we’re feeling old.
Mrs. Ruzicka’s seat in an orchestra box to the far right of the concert hall allows her to look directly into the face of the concertmaster. She thought she had fallen in love with him during Dvorak’s Symphony No. 6 in D, but now that the orchestra has begun Dvorak’s Serenade for strings, she is sure of it. The grace of his bow splits her chest like a surgeon’s knife[...]
From his usual spot at the counter, Carter Bingham followed the waitress as she made coffee, first shaking the contents of a metallic pouch to one end, then ripping it open with the bright colored talons of her fingernails. Lime green today, a color that reminded him of antifreeze.