Submission deadline: December 1, 2026

Theme: Neighbors

Prompt: We often think of neighbors as the people who live next door.

But proximity is a curious thing. We can share a fence with someone for decades and never truly know them. We can become unexpectedly close to someone on the other side of the world. We may find ourselves living beside people whose values, histories, dreams, or fears are vastly different from our own. Sometimes neighbors become family. Sometimes they become rivals. Sometimes they remain strangers separated by little more than a thin wall.

For this issue, we invite short fiction that explores what it means to live alongside one another.

Your neighbors may be literal, metaphorical, or entirely unexpected. They may live across the street, across the border, or across a plane of physical existence accessible to our world. They may be people, cultures, nations, species, memories, or even different versions of ourselves. What matters is the relationship created by nearness—chosen or otherwise.

Writers might approach this theme in many ways:

• Two neighbors whose lives quietly intertwine over the years.

• A feud that has lasted generations.

• Unexpected friendship between people with little in common.

• Communities divided by a fence, a river, or an invisible line.

• New arrivals learning what it means to belong.

• Neighbors who never meet but profoundly affect one another.

• Rival kingdoms sharing a fragile border.

• Apartment dwellers connected by overheard conversations.

• Creatures forced to coexist in unfamiliar territory.

These examples are merely starting points. Surprise us with your interpretation.

Whether your story is literary, speculative, historical, humorous, mysterious, or quietly reflective, we're interested in the tensions and connections that arise when lives exist side by side. The strongest stories will reveal how closeness can breed compassion, misunderstanding, conflict, love, resentment, curiosity, or unexpected grace.

As always, we value memorable characters, thoughtful craftsmanship, emotional authenticity, and stories that linger long after the final page. In a world that often asks us to choose sides, we're interested in what happens when people must simply learn to live beside one another.

After all, every story begins with someone standing just on the other side of the fence.

Submission deadline: March 1, 2027

Theme: Small Acts

Prompt: We tend to imagine the moments that change our lives as large ones.

But often, they aren't.

A door held open. A lie left uncorrected. A few dollars slipped into someone's hand. A phone call answered—or ignored. A stranger choosing to intervene. A kindness no one else notices. A cruel word spoken without much thought. A decision that seems insignificant at the time.

Small acts have a way of becoming larger than themselves.

For this issue, we invite short fiction that explores the consequences of the seemingly insignificant things we do, or choose not to do.

The act at the heart of your story may be deliberate or accidental, generous or selfish, courageous or cowardly. Its consequences may unfold immediately or remain invisible for years. A momentary kindness might alter the course of someone's life. A minor betrayal might fracture a family. A quiet refusal might become an act of rebellion. Something done without a second thought might be remembered forever by someone else.

Writers might approach this theme in many ways:

• A stranger's small kindness changes the direction of someone's day—or life.

• A seemingly harmless lie grows into something impossible to contain.

• Someone breaks a rule for the first time.

• A character discovers that something they barely remember doing meant everything to someone else.

• One small act of defiance begins something much larger.

• A person chooses not to intervene and must live with what follows.

• A forgotten favor is unexpectedly returned years later.

• An ordinary gesture takes on extraordinary meaning during a crisis.

• A seemingly insignificant decision changes the course of history.

These examples are merely starting points. Surprise us with your interpretation.

Whether your story is literary, speculative, historical, humorous, mysterious, or quietly reflective, we're interested in the distance between an action and its consequences. The strongest stories will look closely at moments that might easily be overlooked and reveal the weight hiding inside them.

As always, we value memorable characters, thoughtful craftsmanship, emotional authenticity, and stories that linger long after the final page. We're especially interested in stories that resist the temptation to make the act itself enormous. Sometimes the most consequential thing a person does takes only a moment.

After all, it doesn't take a grand gesture to change a life.

Submission deadline: June 1, 2027

Theme: BS

Prompt: We all know it when we encounter it.

The rule that exists for no apparent reason. The form you need in order to obtain the form you actually need. The machine that accepts every card except yours. The good deed that somehow leaves you worse off than if you'd done nothing. The person who insists, with absolute confidence, that the obviously broken thing is working exactly as intended.

For this issue, we're looking for short fiction about life's absurdities, frustrations, contradictions, and situations that simply don't make sense.

This is not an invitation for stories about politics, partisan divisions, divisive social issues, hot-button topics, or red state versus blue state. Those submissions will be rejected. We're interested in something more universal: the everyday nonsense that makes reasonable people stare into the middle distance and wonder how things possibly came to this.

Your story might involve a bureaucracy that seems designed to prevent anyone from accomplishing anything. It might begin with a simple task that becomes inexplicably complicated. Someone might do exactly what they're supposed to do and discover that this was somehow the wrong thing to do. A character might find themselves trapped by contradictory rules, impossible expectations, circular logic, or a system everyone else accepts without question.

Or perhaps something just isn't right—and your character is the only person who seems to notice.

Writers might approach this theme in many ways:

• A character spends an entire day trying to correct an error that everyone agrees is an error but no one is authorized to fix.

• Someone follows the instructions perfectly and creates a disaster.

• A good deed produces consequences no reasonable person could have anticipated.

• A simple errand becomes an increasingly absurd ordeal.

• An employee discovers an office procedure that makes absolutely no sense but has been followed faithfully for decades.

• A character is punished for breaking a rule they were never told existed.

• Someone discovers that two different authorities require mutually impossible things.

• A machine, institution, workplace, family, or community operates according to logic everyone understands except the protagonist.

• Something obviously strange is happening, but everyone else behaves as though it is perfectly normal.

These examples are merely starting points. Surprise us with your interpretation.

Your story can be funny, infuriating, surreal, tragic, mysterious, speculative, or painfully ordinary. The BS itself might be a minor inconvenience or the engine that drives the entire story. It can arise from institutions and rules, but it can just as easily come from social conventions, relationships, workplaces, technology, traditions, misunderstandings, or the peculiar ways human beings make simple things unnecessarily difficult.

The strongest stories won't simply tell us that something is ridiculous. They'll put us inside the experience. Give us the escalating frustration, the circular conversations, the inexplicable obstacles, the moment when your character realizes reason has left the building—and perhaps the even stranger moment when they realize everyone else is perfectly comfortable without it.

As always, we value memorable characters, thoughtful craftsmanship, emotional authenticity, and stories that linger long after the final page. Make us laugh. Make us groan. Make us recognize something we've experienced ourselves. Make us wonder how anyone could possibly think this makes sense.