Short Story Finalist: The Long Haul
By Patricia Malcom Rosenleaf Vivian sat by her dying boy’s bed, nodding, starting awake, nodding again. She’d been here with him from almost the beginning of this hospital stay because somehow she knew in her heart, he wouldn’t leave — at least alive. She and Floyd, her husband and Mike’s father, had taken turns to [...]
Short Story Finalist: The Reader
By Imtiaz Akhtar Read only those books that inspire suicidal thoughts in you. Books, as I have always believed, are more dangerous than an atomic bomb. A bomb can only kill or maim you, unlike books, which alone can transform you. They can transform you from something baser into something nobler, something higher. A great [...]
Short Story Finalist: The People’s Choice
By Madeleine McDonald A nervous titter ran round the bar. It seemed tactless to laugh at the scurrilous satire show when one of the cavorting latex puppets on the television screen was there in the flesh, staring straight ahead without the glimmer of a smile. The socialist candidate for the French presidential election, for it [...]
Hooked on Life: An Ecological Folk Tale from Haiti
About the story. “Tezen Nan Dlo” is one of Haiti’s most popular folk tales. The Créole “te” indicates the past tense, and “zen” means “hook.” It is about hooking and being hooked. The enticements of love, family, and the natural world. It is also a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl in Haiti, where a [...]
Submit Your Short Story to a News Junkie Post Competition
Short Story Competition Dear Readers: As part of an update to News Junkie Post, we will soon replace our Entertainment section with a Literature section that will present the original works of talented authors. We invite writers to submit short stories to us that are approximately 1,500 to 3,000 words long. Please submit your story [...]
