Announcing our 2021 Best Small Fictions Nominees
great weather for MEDIA is delighted to announce our nominations for the Best Small Fictions.
These nominations are for work under 1000 words published in 2020. They were chosen from our anthology Escape Wheel.
Congratulations and best of luck to all our fabulous nominees!
Aileen Bassis - The Last Time I Saw Karina
Allen C. Jones- Imperial Footnote 1815: It’s Unclear Who Lost the Pinky
Merle Kinney - total_bilateral_mastectomy.exe
Nicholas Powers - To Kiss a Tree
Phillip Sterling - Pressure Canning
Want a taster? Here are the first few lines...
“music slips restless fingers into pockets of conversation as we listen
to Karina speak without a pause / her pale-egg face crushed beneath
black hair streaming away like her kiss that missed my cheek / ”
“It is said that during Napoleon’s exile on Elba, when the local theater group staged the then wildly popular ‘Le Chien de Montargis,’ a melodrama by Pixérécourt featuring a trained canine, when the heroic ‘chien’ of the title signaled the true assassin by ferociously attacking him—thus saving the falsely-accused mute Eloi—and was, in turn, run through by the villain’s sidekick, it is said that Napoleon laughed.”
“The group chat knows I have tits. They’ve seen my face and can draw the conclusion that my genotype hosts two little Xs stooped like gargoyles next to the familial predisposition for colon cancer and freckles.
We’re an anime group, but a classy one—less into the yelling teenagers stuff and more into the deep character development stuff, the complex sense of place stuff.
’new TS episode toniiiiite :P’ says Mixmax, whose profile picture is a watermelon with Keanu Reeves’ face photoshopped onto it.”
“‘Tree,’ I say and lean over so my son can touch it, but he doesn’t touch a word; his fingers caress things. Rough bark. Waxy leaves. Dirt. For him, everything floats in, through, and back out of words as if they were soft, gelatinous bubbles.
He says ‘tree,’ and the sound reflects the moment then pops. He speaks everything new. A falling leaf is a miracle. God was this for me, once, a diffused overwhelming wonder.”
“The day we heard, my mother sent me out to pick tomatoes, the ones that were ready—‘RED-y,’ she’d have said on any other day—but on the day we heard, the pinch of her lips had no more desire to hold a pun than a popsicle.”
Escape Wheel is a dynamic collection of contemporary poetry and fiction from established and emerging writers across the United States and beyond. The anthology also contains an interview with Cornelius Eady. We accept poetry and prose submissions for our annual anthologies from October 15th to January 15th.