Report from our judge, Sarah Freligh

There’s a famous story about United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, when asked to describe his test for obscenity in 1964, responded: “I know it when I see it.” I admit that I was hoping for the same regarding the fifty longlisted stories Jude Higgins sent my way: that the top five stories would magically present themselves with a trumpet fanfare and a chorus line of high-kicking dancers so of course I would know the winners when I saw them.

Truth is, it was a little (read: a lot) more complicated than that, especially when the entries felt so much like snowflakes, each of them unique and beautiful and entirely original in their execution. I read stories drawn from “real life” while others were anchored in a speculative world; stories that commanded attention from a fist punch of a first sentence and others that started quietly yet stealthily and accrued power and tension with each sentence. So no, I didn’t “know it when I see it,” but the five stories I’ve chosen out of the fifty on the longlist impressed me with their attention to craft and fealty to story.

I should say here that I’d be remiss not to give a shoutout to a couple of shortlisted stories I can’t stop thinking about, among them: The Body Is Capable of So Many Hungers (for its deep-dive into the many iterations of “hunger”), Breath and Bone (for its poignant exploration of obligation and love, even when its hard) and One Sugar (for its terrific narrative voice).

Writing about the short story, Edgar Allan Poe argued for the necessity of a “unity of effect,” i.e., how each choice an author makes during the drafting and revising of a story must be deliberate and intentional, in service to the story’s conflict, characters and themes. Ultimately, that’s the yardstick I used to decide on the five finalists. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.

Highly Commended: Forgive Me Martha
I love how the author takes the convention of a confession, the sacrament of penance, and knocks it on its head. There’s just enough of the confessional to be recognizable here and yet the writer alters it in enough ways as to create something new and fresh. That’s evident from the very first sentence, with the “Forgive me Martha,” a conceit that’s held aloft until the final – wonderful!— word “Amend.” The point of view of a first-person narrator addressing another character can be such a high wire act, so easy to take a misstep and tumble into the land of exposition for the sake of the reader, but the writer avoids that by gradually raising the stakes of the narrative with each stated truth, alternately poignant and hilarious, eventually revealing the reason for what’s brought them here to the “confessional.”

Highly Commended: How to Fold a World Map
I’m a sucker for “how to” titles for the bit of mystery they present and the suggestion that the story will answer the implicit question that’s raised in the title. This one amazed and surprised me with its bit of misdirection in the first sentence, which is not the voice of instruction as so often is the case with a “how to” title, but something else altogether. The situation – someone from the ICU is calling – and the odd action—“. . . I was folding Mongolia” – is a knockout combination for a first sentence: a character, a conflict and a bit of mystery. Reading this, we come to understand that the act of folding those maps is a coping device for the narrator, actions that they repeat in order to distract and deflect them from situation in front of them: the unnamed “you,” a loved one in an ICU bed and their impending loss. It’s a stunning capture of a few moments in these characters’ lives, an intersection during which so much changes.

First Place: Like Dynamite

Of all the definitions out there of “story,” I think my favorite is that it’s “a container for change”—a requisite element for a novel or a standard-length short story, but so very hard to pull off in a micro of three hundred words or fewer. But my first-place choice, “Like Dynamite,” does this brilliantly with each and every word, image, action and – yes – even and most especially the punctuation. This writer understands the power of words, not merely their meaning in a sentence or an image, but the sounds and cadence of each and every syllable. Essentially, the story is one long sentence, but a sentence parceled out by semicolons, each phrase alluding to a different “time” and a different action in which these boys, Ben and Mark, try to obliterate themselves and their need. Rather than the breathlessness of no punctuation, the semicolons underscore the boys’ starts and stops, each try and fail, until the last “time” when “they sprinted clean past the parking lot and on down Rutger Road” and the prose, unfettered, rises and pushes us and them toward that amazingly powerful and haunting ending. Throughout this story, the anaphora of “the time” is a drumbeat accompanying the rising story arc, each time bringing them – and us – closer, closer to that inevitable end.

Truly, it’s like dynamite.

Second Place: Pack

Everything in this story – from the title to the last words – establishes and then supports the conceit of these teenage girls as something feral and predatory, something to be feared and obeyed or else: “our power a warning, a thirst, a howl echoing in the sky.” The title “Pack,” with its evocation of survival in numbers, sets the table so effectively for the feast that follows and the plural first-person point of view of the collective “we” is the perfect vehicle to drive that notion. Paired early on with verbs like “prowl” and “scuttles,” the reader is immediately dropped into a world of mock-or-be-mocked and each repetition of “we” and what they do to maintain their place in the pecking order raises the stakes and deepens and expands the characterization of this group. I love, too, how, in the last paragraph, the girls finally morph into animals with their “tuffs of down, thick as cream”—I swear I can smell the blood on their whiskers! Above all, there’s something universal at work here, something that speaks uneasily to the present day where cruelty rules and kindness is something weak, an underbelly to be attacked for its hopeful vulnerability.

Third Place: Eloise Writes as the World Burns

The title is such a fabulous tip-off to the meta-ness of this story, its allusion to the overriding theme of writer as god. I love how the first sentence of the story drops us immediately into this situation—a bomb is dropped “on the fictional McElroy farmhouse”—and reading this, we both witness and understand the ability of the “author”—Eloise—to wreak havoc or spare characters with a few cross-outs or keystrokes. There’s a sense early on that Eloise as author is in charge of this world—in essence, “playing God on paper”—which shifts into something else by story’s end, something that’s grown beyond her authorial control. A church is bombed and “she plucks the Browns’ youngest from the pew,” but despite sending “more ambulances, more fires brigades, more volunteers” . . . “the city still burns and burns.” The conflict, then, becomes the story itself and the author’s struggle to maintain control and direction of the story to the point where she “gathers them – the Browns, the MacEwans, the McElroys” nightly and hides them in safe places, in “hopes her family will benefit somehow from this authorial benevolence” – a suggestion, perhaps, that at some point, our stories take the wheel and we, as authors, are just along for the ride.