The Shortlist: April 4, 2025

A little girl has concerns about an old woman in a creepy house on the walk to school.

It’s the tiny details in this story that make it feel so real. The pet names, Ginny calling her mother by her first name for a spell (and the echoes of it later in the story), the constant presence of Underbite the lion.

…I’d got round the Scary Walk to School by holding Mum’s hand until the very last possible moment, then letting go of it just long enough to skip as fast as I could, past the rusty gate of the bungalow next door to the school. That way I wouldn’t ever again have time to see the aproned figure in the peeling turquoise porch, or notice the red clotted velvet curtains parting around that slow smile of sweetcorn dentures; the chicken fingers rippling a slow wave; the American Tan knees wide apart like open sesame.

Fourth Step is about generational trauma. Garcia’s narrator is a recovering alcoholic who wants to make things right with his equally messy mother. The way Garcia writes dialogue – no line breaks to create momentum, followed by short paragraphs for impact – is extremely effective.

I need to see you. Where? she said. You call it, he told her. He hated to allow her that much power but he knew he would stand a better chance of her showing up if she chose the spot. Harrington’s, she said. He laughed. Just like her to say she had quit drinking and then suggest they meet in a bar. Not drinking, huh? he said. I’m a functioning alcoholic now, she said. That’s quitting to me.

The narrator of this story is the Chinese-American daughter of a single mother, trying to fit in with the cool kids at ballet camp. Her adventures are painfully awkward and relatable, and as the story goes on she gains a new understanding of her mother’s story.

Each morning, I rose at six to dress before Quinnie came. The sun was already above the trees, and I awoke sweating. Ma didn’t like to use the air conditioning at night. We didn’t grow up with air conditioning in China, she said. We slept outside sometimes on rocks to stay cool, she said, which sounded like something she’d made up just to see if I’d believe it. Ma hadn’t bought me new underwear in years—she never mentioned bodies, breasts, hair, periods—so each morning I ripped off one of the fraying pairs I’d worn since the sixth grade, and pulled on my tights and leotard, before the sun had fully risen, before Quinnie could come and be cruel. 

Driverless is just barely speculative fiction, a kind of 15-minutes-into-the-future story about the AI driver of a remote-controlled delivery van that encounters an unresponsive person at night.

Envoy’s cameras picked up rhythmic torso movement, but a mask obscured Pedestrian Obstacle’s face. There was no blood or bodily fluids. The only identifiable data I could capture was weight of approximately 129 lbs. based on volumetric interpolation for measuring over-sized packages.

Winner of the 2025 Disquiet Literary Prize for Fiction, Perrin’s story is a slow reveal of a relationship gone wrong between two women. I love the gradual unwinding of their history, and the ending is perfect.

Three weeks ago, I left the city. I’d planned to knock on Jane’s door, to try and reconnect, to repair what had been broken. But as I was pacing this street, working myself up to it, I heard a garage open, and there she was. I ducked behind the neighbors’ hedges and watched her walk down the driveway. Through the boxwood, I could tell her hair was several bottles blonder. She looked like she’d gained weight. Her eyebrows were thicker, darker, maybe laminated. She was wearing a pink sundress – she hates pink – and I realized as she picked up the newspaper how much time could pass in a year. It occurred to me that I no longer knew her.

Happy as a Clam is a pretty melancholy story about the relationship between a young guy who drives his troubled older coworker to work in exchange for breakfast. Prokesch slowly turns up the intensity as the relationships become more complicated:

Occasionally I’d hear a diesel engine pass from the street—either a semi driving to P-Town or a greedy oyster farmer headed to the flats early. She’d stop stirring the grits and open a slit in the blind and glance out at the road and sigh.                                                     

“Thank God it’s not him.”                             

I don’t know that I’ve read a story by Rinkema that I didn’t love. This one is short and still broke my heart at least three times.

On our way to the water park the morning after his eighth birthday, my son Kyle gives us roles.

“I’ll pretend to be a boy called Jesse,” he says from the backseat. “And you pretend you’re not my mother.”

I cough to hide the sound that escapes my chest. I want today to be easy, for there not to be fighting. He’s always so mad. My mother blames the divorce, which means she blames me.

It’s a single paragraph that packs a wallop.

Most evenings, my father sang in his chair in the living room, even though he often didn’t know the words to the songs he was singing. He’d hum the melody or sing nonsense syllables to replace the words.

…just go read it, that’s like 25% of the story right there.