In the middle of October, 1972, our mother left. “Finally,” said our bald-headed, bull-shouldered father. We couldn’t tell whether finally meant she’d been planning or he’d been hoping. She left the house with all its windows, china cabinets, kitchen cupboards, French doors. She left Albert the beagle, full of woe and joy; Pan the striped cat; the three of us, ages nine through fourteen. She left all of Halloween, her favorite holiday, her wigs and dirndls, her false mustaches, the papier-mâché Statue of Liberty torch that resembled a caveman’s club: she wasn’t good at props. She left a half-constructed Henry VIII costume, meant for an . . .
She must read a third of all the entries, more than five hundred stories. When she agreed to judge the prize, she’d assumed the Foundation would have interns cull the submissions and send only a manageable selection, but then a link to download her allotment
arrived, and she cleared the calendar.
She reads stories about mothers and children separated and struggling to reunite, which always end with hugs and tears. Stories about teenage longing and epiphany. Stories about artificial intelligence turning the world into candy-colored sludge, stories about cloning and sex cults (several of these), stories about future dystopian . . .
Think she’s faking it? was the first thing her son, Onyx, said about her being there like she was, almost dead in a hospital bed, said that to his sister, Bev, about their mother, bandages wrapped around half her head, having been stabbed there, in the temple, through that thinnest-skinned place, that membranous stretch, sending her deep inside the impenetrable walls of the mysterious and storied state called comatose.
Would be like her though, huh? Bev said flatly.
Faking it? A coma? She might have been offended if she didn’t know better. When Onyx asked something, he meant it. Which meant he was asking sincerely if she were faking being in . . .
You have autonomy.
Your personality is your own.
To be honest, I was never much interested in it, in all the lives I’d lived before this ridiculous one, in the cosmic parade route I’d walked prior to arriving in this particular body, despite the fact that it is now, I suppose, a scientifically proven fact that we did live them, those other lives. But my seventieth birthday was in only a few weeks, and Tess thought it would be fun for us to do this together, mother and daughter, and so off we went to the Living Past.
“Are you on any medications?” they asked . . .
As a special online supplement to the Fall 2025 issue, the editors present the prizewinning story from the 2025 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition, as judged by Jamel Brinkley.
The three of us had a few hours before the event began, so the man to my right pulled a deck of cards from his back pocket and held up the deck and raised his eyebrows. Sure, said the woman to my left. OK, I said, sure.
We had arrived very early because they did not allow latecomers access to the event, and we did not want to miss it. We did not know each . . .