Best Microfiction Anthology Nominations 2022

The Ekphrastic Review extends hearty congratulations to the six nominees for the Best Microfiction Anthology Awards 2022, six microfiction stories published in our online pages in 2021.

This will be the fourth Best Microfiction series anthology, founded by microfiction luminaries Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke to honour the form of very small stories.

Last year, one of our nominees, Cyndi MacMillan, made it into the anthology with her story, When Alice Became the Rabbit. 

Congratulations to this year's six. Read their microfiction below. (Click on the site link to see the artwork that inspired them.)

Without further adieu, our nominees this year are:

​Star Swallowed, by Olivia Wolford
Hollow, by Christina Pan
Lost Rivers, by Jamie Brian
The Moon Practises the Art of Night Photography, by Marjory Woodfield
Elusions, by Kerfe Roig
At the Pool Party for My Niece’s Graduation from Middle School, by Nancy Ludmerer

Bravo to all of you!!!!

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​Star Swallowed, by Olivia Wolford

https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/star-swallowed-by-olivia-wolford

Her white dress was the only detail that stayed consistent in the retellings, how it shone in the dazzle that poured down. Most said her dog Cricket was taken up with her, though others claimed he still frisked the edges of their fields, pissing off barn cats. Either way it was agreed he was an inky, yippy little thing, one they preferred out of sight. Come to think of it, they preferred her out of sight too; she’d been a hazy child, more curtain of water than girl. Her brothers wouldn’t speak for seven months after, and they weren’t boys of many words to begin with. “She was swallowed,” one had confided, “by stars.” Truth was, they’d both been bowled clean over by the dazzle, witnesses only to the insides of their eyelids. It was said the cows minded their business while she was taken up. The horses, of course, watched the whole thing. They saw her bathed in moonbeam certainty, head upturned, swimming with clean strokes to a place beyond all light. 
 
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Hollow, by Christina Pan

https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/hollow-by-christina-pan

Egon handed him a scalpel. It had a slender grip, a sharp blade that slid upward. He thought about people in horror films, fates at the hands of a monster. How many lives could be saved with this scalpel? How many girl-eating goblins gutted, dragon-toothed piranhas slashed, brain-starved zombies decapitated? He wondered. Carve out your collarbones, Egon told him. He drew one smooth arch in the air. Like this, Egon said. But he knew it would take more than one cut. That night, facing the mirror, he took off his shirt. He placed the scalpel on his shoulders and slanted it inward, away from his neck. He moved the blade in then out, ending a breath away from his sternum. The severed skin looked nearly egg-like, lower flaps bloated with yolk. Red dots stained skin like seeds from a gashed pomegranate, little cracked milk teeth. He faced his reflection, jutting his torso open. He could see the cabinet from the mirror, the bottom of a spinning music box. The tiles started to sog under him. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. From his window he could see the cutting board on the table with slabs of a fish carcass dangling from rope. The belly had shrunk to half its size, molding the fat and sangria flavour. So much to lose, he marveled. He slit up the other collarbone, his hand more practiced, the cuts smoother. He looked through the hollow of his collarbones again. This time, through the hollow, he could see the entire music box. It sputtered out a small note. He withdrew the scalpel and slipped it back inside the cabinet. The hollow seemed to be getting bigger as blood trickled out. How much blood can the body lose before it fails? He wanted to ask Egon. But Egon had left already, as he always did. He arched his head downwards and fitted his index finger between his collarbones. Neither his finger nor his knuckles touched the wounds; the hollow was not even as wide as the scalpel blade. But he felt like he could be chewed into the opening, spit back out, find himself no different from when he started. He faced his reflection again. From the depths of the mirror, he could only see the hollow in place of a human, the mouth shaped like a black hole. 
 
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Lost Rivers, by Jamie Brian

https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/lost-rivers-by-jamie-brian

Everything feels wrong. Heavy. These hands do not feel like her hands. Where did the lines on her skin come from, these rivers that separate who she was from who she is? Once, she was a river running freely to the sea. Now, her feet ache from standing still in hospital rooms.

Kicking off her slippers, she walks to the bathroom and kneels beside the bathtub. She twists the faucet and runs the water until it is so hot that it steams the glass of the window. She has always associated water with clarity. When she was young, she and her grandmother would walk to the bath house on Saturday mornings, take off their starchy clothes, and sink deep into the spring water. She sat still as her grandmother scrubbed her back with soap and kneaded the muscles of her shoulder blades. This ritual soothed her mind and cleansed her soul. 

Over time, those quiet moments have become harder and harder to find, but she needs them now more than ever. She removes her nurse’s uniform and lays the pieces on the floor one at a time. Slowly, she lowers herself into the water. It covers her knees, then her thighs, then she is submerged to her chin. She takes the first deep breath that she’s been able to savor in months. Here, there are no late-night phone calls, no ambulance sirens, no ringing of heart monitors.

Exhaling, she taps a few grains of bath salts out of a vial her mother sent her. The cypress scent of her childhood fills the room. She can almost imagine her baa-baa sitting beside her, tracing the lost rivers along her spine. The water soothes the soreness in her calves and eases the tension in her wrists. She sinks deeper into the bath, until her hair fans out behind her. Gradually, she relaxes into the unraveling.
 
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The Moon Practises the Art of Night Photography, by Marjory Woodfield
 
https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-writing-challenges/selected-challenge-responses-garabet-yazmaciyan

1. He leans into a sea-green sky. Soft focus.

2. Leander’s Tower. Foreground, midground and background: Straits of the Bosphorus.

3. Beyond Sultanahmet men sit in winding streets, play backgammon and drink small glasses of z’atar tea. Cats slink into shadow. Panorama. Pan from left to right.

4. In Beşiktaş a young woman stands, watches as mourners lift her mother’s bier into a waiting carriage. Amber beads twist through her fingers. Point of focus: the daughter.

5. A single boat with quiet oars. To avoid noise lower the ISO.

6. The muzzein calls the hour for morning prayer. The moon shutters the lens, slips away.
 
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Elusions, by Kerfe Roig

https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-writing-challenges/selected-challenge-responses-garabet-yazmaciyan

And yet there were two sources of light.  Each beckoning, calling, asking me to recognize their silhouettes of darkness as the true patterns showing me how to reach my journey’s end.  Inviting me to join their respective circles, to choose a side, in or out. To open the channels between sea and sky or to burrow into the ashes of earth and fire.
 
What did I know of my destiny?  I sailed an empty vessel waiting to be filled, navigating between the spaces held by promises.  Whispered words and ghostly hands extended towards the edges I straddled,  balanced on the verge of both inhaling and exhaling.
 
My breath could not tell which way pointed to certainty.  I tried to recast my shadow onto something else, but I was suspended too tightly inside the directionless void.  Everything was impending, flickering like a candle carried by the whims of the gods and goddesses that saturated the water and air. 
 
If I held out my arms would they become fins or wings?

 
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At the Pool Party for My Niece’s Graduation from Middle School, by Nancy Ludmerer

https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-journal/at-the-pool-party-for-my-nieces-graduation-from-middle-school-by-nancy-ludmerer

I’m a goner even before Leah, my brother’s new colleague, tells me her psychiatric specialty (“evaluating sexually dangerous people”), and when she reappears, resplendent in a golden-brown one-piece, I drown in desire. While Leah swims laps, I descend the ladder at the deep end, figuring I can hang on to the side faking it, never letting on I can’t swim, my eyes on the prize. Marisa, my niece’s best friend, swims up and asks if she can practice life-saving on me; Leah is watching us, and I’m figuring kindness to children is always a plus. But Marisa loses her grip and then I’m grabbing desperately at her orange bikini top and she’s yelling. By the time I reach the metal ladder, my coughing subsided, my snotty nose wiped clean, everyone has gone inside for cake. A dead bug floats on the surface, and I wonder who will save me now.