Special Issue: Anton Chekhov Award 2019
Something Like Drowning by Gaynor Jones

We always planned to take my Barbie, the one with the match-burned hair, and toss her into the silo. We bent her arms, shrimp-pink and puckered from the hiss-press-melt of our games, high above her head, a contorted synchronised swimmer.

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Urineworts by Bruce Meyer

When we were living in the mining community, a place that is now a ghost town with nothing left to show for everyone’s hard work except curb cuts for the long-lost driveways and a pine tree that has grown up between the arms of a carousel clothesline, I was told to stay away from the ditches.

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Prudence by Christy Stillwell

They put the shock collar on the boy and that was it for the nanny. First they put the collar on one another. They were professors in English and Philosophy, all of them smart people.

Gallows Pole by Kathy Hoyle

In the dead of summer, while the whiptails hide in sagebrush shadows, and everything blisters in the amber heat and there ain’t nothin but buzzards hummin for miles around, a hanged man dances on a gallows pole.

Mom’s new boyfriend is a liver fluke by Cole Beauchamp

He attached quickly (can I buy you a drink, let’s hook up, sure I’ll meet your kid), slid into our house unnoticed (toothbrush here, pair of socks there) and two months on, here we are, host and Fasiola Herpatica.

Pet Shop Boys by Tim Craig

Dayne’s on-off-off-on stepdad, Kel, says stay away from that new pet shop.

Carry On by Lucinda Kempe

Once there was a man who loved his donkey, but his donkey didn’t love him back. The donkey loved an eggshell, but the eggshell didn’t love it back.