Excited to have a ‘Distinguished Story’ in The Best American Short Stories anthology for 2025. What’s this mean? The story is not published in the anthology.

“Bullet List for My Aged Kidnapper” begins with a gun and ends with a song. With a list form, Patricia Q. Bidar leads us down the long dark alleyway of time, where traumatic recollections ricochet …

Welcome to The Burning Hearth! I’m so happy you’ve stopped by for this interview with my friend and writing group fellow, Al Kratz. Al and I met several years ago via an online Bending …

My brother and I attempt awkward conversation at a Chinese restaurant near the dive motel where he lives. I try not to stare at his teeth: gray, chipped, missing. Dark, square caves in his mouth. H…

Always the wind, the wind that tried to bend us, break us in this new development so unlike where we’d lived, that outer-city of bungalow, alleyway and asphalt grid where the wind dismembered itself to get around edges and corners, and now here, on this parcel only just prairie, where our fathers signed the realtors’ contracts on muddy paper-roads over bottles of pop, our fathers who craved natural forces to thrust against after desk-job days, under-the-hood weekends, here, the wind sneered at the bi-levels and stiff lawns and measured side yards, the barefoot volleyball and circle games, contorted the smallest of us into unnatural shapes, plastered our dress-up to our limbs, fed on our brains in our dreams, the wind, hating our mothers for their foul dishes, bagna cauda and deviled eggs and creamed chip beef, smells like the crotches of underwear, that clung to our mothers’ shifts and pixie cuts, our mothers who stuck cotton in our ears and told us to get used to it, the wind, mourning the lost soft stalks we learned in school, Big Bluestem and Indianagrass and Dropseed, the wind, hating our parents for their heavy drapes and blocky ashtrays, their smoky abstraction on living room couches, their fancy wrapped candies with liquid centers like tailpipe exhaust, the wind, hating our fathers for their astronaut haircuts, their belted slacks and undershirts, their guffaws and cans of Hamm’s and pinches of other wives’ asses, hating them so much that it took one on a Saturday afternoon in March, knocked him from a ladder as he was fixing a gutter, as he reached from the top rung, a rogue gust, and his body falling straight, like a felled log, as if he were telling the wind it might break him but he would never, ever bend.       --- Eileen Tomarchio lives with her family in New Jersey, where she's worked as a librarian for 18 years. You can find links to her publications at https://eileentomarchio.webnode.page/.

Amma told me not to eat almonds whole lest my skin got browner. She blanched them perfectly so that the white oval nut popped easily from its brown skin to be tossed away as she slivered the innards for cooking. Thankfully, she didn’t know I rubbed in tanning oil, whose bottles were as dark as I hoped to become. Didn’t know I soaked in the New England summer sun like my friends, showing skin that was supposed to be covered. Poolside, girls compared tans, and I was told how lucky I was that I didn’t burn. Yet I secretly envied the joy of peeling off sunburned skin and the warmth that emanated from their bright red skin all slathered with aloe. My aunt, visiting from India, wondered why we tried so hard to get dark when they advertised lightening creams there. India, a country I imagined, kept girls so sheltered that their skin blanched ghostly white. Here, I worked hard to forget my roots, though my skin became darker daily, an inheritance skin deep. A child of the Americas whose cultural identity teetered on the balance beam of Marvel Comics and Amar Chitra Katha. Never understanding who people wanted me to be. Never knowing the real me and not sure who I was becoming. Hiding that I was white underneath all my brown only to be continually exposed, bisected, transected, chopped to pieces like that sliver of almond perched precariously atop my Amma’s carrot halwa.   --- Nina Miller is an Indian-American physician, epee fencer, and creative. She loves writing competitions and nursing cups of chai. Wigleaf Top 50 for 2024. She is a contributor for The Pride Roars blog and author for Sci-Fi Shorts. Find her @NinaMD1 or ninamiller.bsky.social. Read more at ninamillerwrites.com.

We never walk alone at night. Never. Only stupid girls ignore that rule and we know what happens to them. If we need reminding, all we need to do is watch Dateline and listen to Keith Morrison, watch breaking news in any state any city any day. We never forget the girls’ faces. Their Bambi eyes, their yearbook grins, hair shiny as rearview mirrors. We click deadbolts, check them twice. We lock our bedroom doors at night—a lock inside of locks. We never take cocktails from strange men. We travel in packs, never leave a girl alone, never drink more than two martinis. We remember the girl who went missing last month, the ghosts of her eyes, her Chiclet smile stapled to a Starbucks bulletin board. A girl who broke the rules. It won’t be us, we say. We never walk to our cars without our keys in hand, nails flashing Kick Ass Red, metal splayed through our fingers like weapons. We are cortisol-flushed, animal eyes alert. We are ready. We never forget the rules. Until our keys are hung, our pajamas on. Until we’ve turned locks upon locks upon locks. We never see them coming. Until their whiskey breath runs hot down our necks. Until their arms slip around us, familiar as locks. Until we remember Keith Morrison, his baritone warning, it’s always the friend, the boyfriend, the husband, it’s always someone you know.   --- Kelli Short Borges writes from her home in Phoenix, Arizona. Her fiction has appeared in Peatsmoke, Moon City Review, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. Recently, Kelli's work was chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist and the 2024 and 2025 editions of Best Microfiction. She’s currently working on her first novel.