The Shortlist: March 14, 2025

This is a weird one and I don’t want to spoil anything. It’s about clones:

 I hope Jim-Prime is asleep, so he can’t ruin this like he usually does.

But no. The door creaks behind me—an irritating noise that Jim-Prime keeps asking me to fix, like he can’t figure out how to operate a can of WD-40 when he’s supposedly a genius. Jim-Prime emerges beside me—somehow even his shadow seems to judge me.

“Holy shit.” Gavin’s eyes bulge. “Twins?”

I fish cigarettes from my pocket and sink to the steps. I already know how this will go.

Creepy house in one of the toniest parts of Toronto? Perfect. This story made me late for a meeting.

The narrator is alone in her husband’s family home, and smells gas. Things start to get creepy:

Darius had been away for a week when I started smelling gas in the kitchen of his parents’ house. We’d been staying there the past six months, tending to their new property while they took care of business in Iran. Once I checked that the burners were turned off, I asked him whether I should call the gas company. He told me to ignore it. The neighbours were building a new house, uglier somehow than the other ­McMansions lining Forest Hill, and Darius said the smell probably had something to do with their construction.

It’s a slow burn but once it gets going it won’t let you go.

All and Sundry is told in the second person about losing a child in a huge retail store. Like galactically huge. Then things get interesting.

Do not let your children stand in the shopping cart. Do not let them ride in the bottom of the cart, where pigtails or small hands could get trapped in the filthy wheels. And never — never — leave them unattended in the store.

You will linger while looking for the price of party-size packs of gummy bears or thumbing through a book on string theory, and then she will be gone.

A surgeon has a troubling way of letting off steam from the stresses of work. I was not at all prepared for the body horror in this story, but it was just riveting, impossible to look away from.

Given her line of work, I didn’t think she’d understand what it was like needing something to cover over your crawling skin. The paint so bright and garish, like it could burn away the tension that was trying so hard to come out of my body. She’d always ask me about my shift, but I could tell by the look on her face that she only wanted the smoothed-over answers. To be fair to her, I don’t think even I completely understood what I’d been building toward at the time. 

El Amarre is a curse binding one person to another through forever.

The narrator of the story wants her love to desire her forever, and seeks out some witchcraft to make it happen. This is one of the most gripping things I’ve read in a long time.

Yes, that is what I wanted—balance—a twisted one. I desired Marco to be enslaved to me as I was to him. To ache as I did. I craved to be a ghost in his veins, an addition he couldn’t quit.

Yet I wouldn’t dare to say it aloud.

Doña Itzel leaned closer. “Would you let someone hollow you out? Make you a puppet?”

Her words resonated with me. That was how I felt—hollowed out, a puppet in his games.

Another banger from Phano. Manners’ story is about climate change and inequality, and what happens when a wealthy couple looking for refuge wreck their boat on a reef trying to find an escape from hell on Earth.

Ocean currents are still changing all the time, as the last ice shelves calf town-sized chunks into the ever-warming waters. And plenty more cities have vanished beneath the waves in recent years—places like Amsterdam, Miami and Tokyo get all the attention, but Dhaka, Lagos and Jakarta slipped under with barely a whimper from the world press.

A drama about a struggling mother and her son trying to make ends meet. Svoboda writes the mother’s character so clearly, the story broke my heart.

But sadness and admonishment will not get you supper. This was the saw I was reciting when down on the street in search of groceries. The Apple Lady, just then packing her wares into her double shopping cart with only three good wheels, stopped us with an offering of free fruit in full knowledge of our food-stamped life, and insisted we take it.

Bri and Andrew are broken up, but she can still hear his ridiculous catchphrases as she gets up for the early shift at the bakery. Bri’s character is quite relatable, until, well, read the story.

Throughout their six-month relationship, Andrew used to crack a joke about making the doughnuts at least once a week, always in a silly little singsong voice. Getting out ingredients to make dinner? Writing a thank you note for Gammy? Running to Target for cat food? Better go make those doughnuts. For Andrew, the line was a pep talk for anything.

Roger’s life is falling apart, and he’s betting everything he’s got on a big turnaround. Stories told in this format often feel gimmicky. Vetter’s story doesn’t get that way for a second – every reveal hits like a hammer.

A is for Acorn.

The list always started with Acorn; that was one of the rules. For Linda, an acorn perfectly represented nature: clean lines, so compact. She could fill her pockets with them on an afternoon walk. Roger liked how they reminded him of aroused nipples, taut and hard. Irresistible.

The game was a holdover from the early days before Linda stopped loving him. 

This story about a lost love has followed me around all week. It’s a short, simple story with an ending that brought a tear to my eye.

All summer, we danced with daisies in our hair, and when the evenings started to shorten and the start of the new school term lurked like a demon sapping our fun, you kissed me.

I was fourteen. I didn’t understand. I’m sorry.

A hitman finds a kid in the back of his getaway car, and it’s the beginning of an unexpected adventure for both. This could be the basis for a full novel, it’s fantastic. The protagonist is the kind of low-rent crook you’d find in a Leonard or Lehane novel.

For a job to go right, all the pieces have to line up. For a job to go wrong… The possibilities are endless.

Max knew. He’d been at it for a quarter of a century. Longer, if he added the New Jersey years that he didn’t want to be reminded of. He was a goon in training then, expendable, a low-ranking gunslinger in a cheap shiny suit.