Announcing the 2015 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest Winner

Selected by judge Ruth Ozeki.

At the Birthplace of Sound

There Was a Fox in the Bedroom

What Happened to the Bird People

Two Shorts

Severance

Winner of the 2014 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest

Autumn Leaves

Mother Issues

Seascape

My girlfriend has a third eye. It’s in the middle of her forehead. It was hidden underneath her bangs.

Cop and Robber

It was the canal. He’d broken through, broken it, and let it in. To his mother’s backyard. Run, Tommy! 

Three Shorts

Its brilliant mirror-surface buildings seem to belie it. Streets vibrant with history. But the city doesn’t exist.

Deer

I forgot for a while that happiness is fragile, that life is made of glass. Maybe I chose to forget those things or needed a rest from knowing them. Once I was reminded, I never forgot again.

There Are Two Pools You May Drink From

Winner of the Aura Estrada Short Story Contest

The Forgetting Shiraz

‘He wanted to forget the brutalities he’d seen, start a vineyard, a winery. The shiraz seemed an appropriate place to start.’

The Ghost of Berries

Tayopa

"Here beat the true pulse of the New World. Here its promises of happiness were given the lie."

It’s a Small World

If it hadn’t been for Mickey Mouse, I wouldn’t be alive.

Pirouette

Dispatch hates it when we go rogue.

The Well

The well is poisoned, he says on the phone one week; then, another week, it’s drying up.

The Gulf

In later years I will come to avoid him, but for now, I am eight years old, and the man everyone says is my father is sitting in the living room.

Summer of ’76

The Harper brothers acted as if they didn’t see Lola or her car, right in front of them, plain as day.

Mutts

Duchess, the dog that Jack and his dad brought home, is sitting by the kitchen table in a pair of women’s underpants.