Editor: Grant Faulkner

Series editors: Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke

Pelekinesis

Producing an annual volume of the best anything is daunting—how many works? what criteria?—but Best Microfiction has once again pulled it off: 84 stories under 400 words that beguile, amuse, and terrify.

We’re a storytelling species, and some pieces here form shapely narratives: Félix Terrones’s “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (trans. Andrea Reece), in which an importuning beggar metamorphizes; or Jude Higgins’s “Spinning,” where a woman whose husband has left her is willing to connect with even a telemarketer.

But given microfiction’s constraints, the most popular mode here is the prose poem: a lyrical movement rising to a crux of tension, often ending in a magnificent run-on, yet here are a couple of shorter finales: “We isolated every pet, watching for remnants of fierceness. From then on, we watched each other” (“Dog People,” Abbie Barker). “I was left sputtering, stiff and graceless before my wounded husband, my heart beating like clapping hands, urging the show to begin” (Keith J. Powell, “Contortionists”).

Cool setups also work well, the kinds used for successful anecdotes: proposition, extension, payoff. Consider Judith Osilé Ohikuare’s “Spin Cycle,” which starts with laundry and moves beyond; or Ruby Rorty’s “Yarnidermis,” which posits a woman made of yarn. Kelli Short Borges’s “Parallel” uses a what-if question until the answer is tragically clear.

Perhaps because of the times we live in, many stories evoke the lost and the dead, as in Alexander Fössinger’s “Father,” Kip Knott’s “Genie,” and Eric Scott Tryon’s “Last Seen.” The epitome in this direction is Matthew Jakubowski’s “Ghost Story,” which exhausts all metaphoric possibilities, including a tired ghost and a ghost of good luck. Elegies haunt this collection.

Two mild observations: There’s not much real genre fiction here, except for some light fantasy; also little that’s laugh-out-loud, though some of the titles are great starts: “After Steady Work Dries Up, the Aging B-Movie Queen Reconsiders Fright Night” (Alyson Mosquera Dutemple); “When the Cowbirds Come to Carry Your Sister Away” (Audra Kerr Brown); “Lovesong for the 0% Finance Toy Size Mattress” (Jo Watford); Frances Klein’s “The Angel Gabriel Says It’s Not a Booty Call If He Doesn’t Have Genitals”—he doesn’t even know how to kiss.

Other pieces that stood out include Shih-Li Kow’s “Sibling Parenting,” with its algebraic definition of “love as a slow thing formed with time, the x’s and y’s expanding within the embrace of the parentheses like a plant in a bottle garden”; and Lydia Gwyn’s “Lace in Your Hands,” which is pure poetry: “We saw all the stars in tiny bowls on the side of the road. Tasted the grammar of ashes. But I returned alone, stained and cold, balled in a fist. For a long time, there was a braid of anchors inside me.”

In “Why I Write Short,” one of the six end-reflections, Suzanne Hicks writes, “I’m a flash writer, and the micro is my sweet spot.” This year’s Best Microfiction hits a lot of those sweet spots. Apologies to those we haven’t enough space to congratulate.

* Full disclosure (in small footnote type, sneakily not included in the 500-word count): Vestal Review has two wining stories in the collection: Nicole Brogdon’s “Pastels” and Keith Hood’s “One Fell Off”; there are two from our editorial staff: Chris Notarnicola’s “College Boy and the County Fair” and Mandira Pattnaik’s “In Leaping”; and we’ve published other material by winners Brett Biebel, Lindy Biller, Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Christine H. Chen, Dawn Miller, and Francine Witte.