Anne Shillingsburg

“Time in a Bottle” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #218

For Gemini the idea of motherhood, maybe womanhood itself, lives in one memory: hovering around her mother’s legs, crossed at the ankles, while she sat at her vanity table in her dressing gown. The bottles and tubes--5 creams for after bath, a different one for feet, legs, hands, face, and eyes--each had its smell: thick and oily in the pot, the light, close smell of safety and acceptance on the skin, for, just occasionally, while staring adoringly up at the process of transforming steaming, damp, prettiness into elegant perfection, Gemini g...

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“North Anger, Abby” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #217

Dr. Conway wore her hair like she expected the universe to speak to her. And it did. Her sister bought a dilapidated property in Salem, Massachusetts to remodel and flip just when we were reading The Crucible in her concept class on recreations and reimaginings of classic tales. Like the external structures of the ear amplifying regular sound waves, Dr. Conway’s center part and curtain of waves funneled straight to her soul the clarion call of fate beckoning our class on a field trip.Emma and Clueless, Taming of the Shrew and 10 Th...

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“Parler Tricks” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #216

“If I offered you a bet” William said, proffering the die in his hand, “put a dirham on odds and if you win you get nothing, or put a dirham on evens and if you win, you get twenty dirhams. Which one would you bet on?”It was a rhetorical question. Hicham just shrugged his shoulder, no more interested in this American Christian’s persuasive gymnastics than those of the Muslims he’d avoided all his life. He wet his lips at the glass of ebony liquid in front of him and watched the bustle on the street: greener than Casablanca, fewer dusty cats....

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“No Longer a Unicorn” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #213

My grandmother’s breath nearly knocked me down as I pulled her into my arms, hoping that my voice and warmth would spark recognition. It was almost a dead animal smell, a smell that sent me straight back to this moment when I caught it again in the crusted fluid that had run down my fevered son’s face when his eardrum burst: rotting bacteria left to fester in a closed a body space, a reminder of how thin the membranes are that hold us back from death. But this is not a story about the frailty of bodies.I was twenty-one. I’ll probably mention...

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“Something Actually Magic” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #208

Clare Maple was born feet first and struggling, her tiny hand clenched fast about the cord as about a life line, seeming to fight to stay inside that warm closed dark. That was the first time her parents believed her lost, an experience which was to recur continually until finally it became an accustomed part of their daily being, as ordinary as eating or breathing, until at last she was gone, really and forever.From that first day when she did not howl like other babies but simply fought not to come into the world until she found she h...

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“Just Wrong and Sorry” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #207

When Cristine walked into their mother’s kitchen, Camille’s stomach lurched like a lilypad abruptly abandoned by a colony of frightened frogs. The sounds of the Bastille Day party came in with her from the garden, where Maman’s friends talked ever louder as their wine glasses drained either down their throats or onto the flagstones as their barefoot grandsons raced by, bumping their elbows. Camille knew Cristine was coming to mend fences. Still, without knowing if she should now expect a tepid truce, a bitter reckoning of past sins, or ...

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“Eid Mubarak” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #204

CW: Description of animal slaughterThe countryside is not exactly green at home, but the dusty cedars and holm oaks, the upland cherry orchards and irrigated fields of young wheat in oblong patches flanked by the piled boulders dug out to make them possible are some kind of midpoint between the lush Appalachian onslaught of unrestrainable vegetation of my youth and the red-dune Sahara we’re driving into. As we slide out of the forested hills, we go through a spectrum: the fruit-tree green turns to graying olive as the red-tiled roofs become ...

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“The Dawn Stadium” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #201

CW: police aggression, bad language “Where are you from?” is Jason’s favorite question at these business functions. With his height and his perfect charcoal suit, the dust of gray at the temples of his fifty-dollar haircut, “Mississippi” always catches them off guard and produces just the effect he wants. Now he’s not just a commanding presence. He has also overcome.  He was never ashamed of where he was from, but when he said it on family vacations, people loved to answer “oh, do you guys wear shoes there?” which he found annoying. App...

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“From the Fourth to Bastille Day” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #200

Leo’s grandmother’s is as French a garden as ever existed in backwater Kansas. Leo will go to southern France in the coming year; his grandmother will likely never go to her ancestral home, but that has not stopped her from putting on Bastille Day in force every year. When he was little, the annual vacation was a family reunion that spanned Fourth of July and Bastille day. Streamers of red, white, and blue flew instead of flags for the Fourth so they could serve dual purpose ten days later, when hot dogs were traded out for croque monsieurs ...

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“The Time and Space Furnace, Episode 2: Camel” by Anne Shillingsburg

The key to riding a camel is to take the rocking in your hips so your head stays straight. It’s like a baseball bat: you swing your arms this much, but the bat’s farther away and it swings more and harder. The camel’s so tall that every step it takes sends your head swinging everywhere and you need to throw up. You can’t explain stuff like that to Dewan. He only gets it if he reads in a book that says “center of gravity” or “angular momentum” or whatever. So I said, “Dewan, center of gravity. Think about angular momentum” because his he...

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“The Time and Space Furnace, Episode 1: Sanlun Che” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #196

“But did it even really happen?” Dewan wants to know. “We both remember it, so it must have, right?” Mindy answers, kicking up some dirt with her worn sneaker. “Are those the rules?” He shrugs with sweeping hands. Mindy’s face looks blank with just a hint of “you’re supposed to be the brainiac, why isn’t it obvious to you?”  “What I mean is, teleporting tricycles and stopped time are not part of the regular rules, so what’s to say that those things happened and not this other thing that breaks the rule, where we remember the same thi...

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“Bottled Time” by Anne Shillingsburg

Submitted to Contest #196

The perfume jars started accumulating before Gemini’s birth, an accidental collection in which Francine felt no real interest for many years. The first was a gift from Francine’s college roommate, who brought it back from a trip to Egypt on the mistaken impression that anyone as interested in her appearance as Francine would also love perfume. She did not. To her it smelled like a chemistry lab and gave her headaches, but the little glass jar was pretty and she couldn’t smell the contents when the stopper was in. She hadn’t meant for it to b...

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“AITA? or WWMD?” by Anne Shillingsburg

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #195

To Mr. R. Walton, St. Petersburgh, June 10, 17__My Dear Robert,  It was with tremendous satisfaction that I received your copious packet of letters sent from St. Petersburgh. I am greatly relieved that you have returned to civilization intact. You were perhaps apprehensive that I would not credit your amazing tales, but you may rest assured that I do not imagine you could have made yourself out to be such a dolt in a story of your own invention. I have recounted the tale to several acquaintances, and they are of one mind with me: t...

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“A Field Sown with Grief Mines” by Anne Shillingsburg

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #194

CW: Child loss.I shifted my weight a little to straighten an uncomfortable fold in the plastic against my skin. With my fingertip I could feel where it left a crease in the skin at the meeting of my thigh and private regions. Thinking the words “private regions” pushed a mirthless snicker through my nose: as if anything is private.“What is it?” Jacob asked, pulling back a little and tilting the laptop to a dangerous angle. If the nurse came in, she’d tell him to get off the bed, but we had to get this done and side-by-side looking at the cho...

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“Black Bear, Russet Hen, Brown Dog, White Elephant” by Anne Shillingsburg

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #193

“The bear just thinks it’s tame and we feed it chickens at this point,” Uncle Rog says, smiling, over his beer, all gap teeth and white whiskers. He won’t say it to Aunt Lucy, of course. Her voice would get all high pitched telling him it was an awful thing to say. But she would also just quietly stop replacing the chickens, and they make her so happy, each brown egg a source of as much pride as if she’d laid it herself. She often watches through the bay window with hands wrapped around her coffee mug as they scratch in the yard. Uncle Rog w...

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