Five of ten study subjects demonstrated a drop in blood pressure in a month, so that was enough for Mom.
“Would you pet your kitty already, Dale?” she’d pester my stepdad when he was popping off at the TV or a robocaller. You’d think he wouldn’t have much to get upset about, retired at that tax bracket, but a person finds a way.
Despite her entreaties, Dale mostly ignored his kitty, eyed it warily as it stared at him from the other end of the couch, tail twitching in a . . .
Emma Zenobia Dickinson married Edward Pulaski on February 7, 1900, in Burke, Idaho, the few guests attending aware both that Emma was older than her husband by eight years, and that each had been married before. The morning of the ceremony, Emma listened as two friends tiptoed around the floor below, and thought, They’ve heard bad news.
This intimation of dread haunted her throughout the childlessness of their first six years together. Following the deaths of two relations on the Crockett side of Edward’s family in Missouri . . .
Unlike my husband’s family, the self-called “Roys of Sausalito,” I do not love tennis—to my mind, it is the very definition of elitist. Sure, there are public courts, where my husband cut his teeth, although very shortly he graduated to the Sausalito Gentlemen’s Club, which did not admit women members until 1977, having been built in the 1950s as a masculine redoubt where important business could be smoothed over between sets, as well as visits to the bar and to the gym. To fund the many tokens of a middle-class life, which included . . .
They tested all of us, everyone who worked at the lab, including the custodial staff, including the parking attendant, but it was me who had the strongest and clearest connection with Sweet Johnny.
Sweet Johnny was a 147-year-old Galapagos tortoise, and what a tortoise he was! Biggest I’d ever seen. No ordinary tortoise, that’s for sure . . .
As a special online supplement to the Summer 2025 issue, the editors present the prizewinning story from the 2024 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition, as judged by C Pam Zhang.
The night before Lucky died, I had a dream that an intruder was in our house. He shot me twice in the chest and then left. Nurses came and removed the bullets but told me to keep the holes open. For healing, they said. When I ran into my . . .