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 classmates and showed them the wounds, nobody cared.
I stayed in bed for a while after I woke up, trying to guess how late it was from what I could hear outside my window. Summer mornings in Los Angeles always sounded like someone else’s pool motor running and someone else’s lawn being mowed. I could tell it was going to be hot out just by the way planes were whirring by, loudly, as if their propellers had no weather to slice through. I was twelve, wearing triangular cotton bras and still kind of fat in the knees. I heard distant radios and the opening and closing of car doors. I heard my mother sobbing in the driveway and my first instinct was to wait it out. But then I heard my grandma’s voice, and she was speaking Spanish, which she never did.
A week or two passed and I received a letter from my seventh-grade teacher introducing herself. Incoming students were asked to write a personal essay about something we’d learned that summer. She had added as a postscript: There are no rules! Just have fun! Her name was FrancesKay—one word—and her handwriting looked like it had been processed through an eyelash curler, all upturned letters and exclamation points.
It was strange that an adult woman could be so happy and it made me feel a little seasick, honestly. I may have even grasped the countertop while reading. I don’t know that I did, but that was the feeling anyhow.
I do know that I had been the one to get the mail that day and not my mother.
Ever since Lucky got hit by that car, I hadn’t seen much of anyone. Our kitchen and all its quiet machinery now felt like some carnival after closing, haunted by what was no longer there. Even the household noises had been reduced to doors softly closing, echoes of someone just turning a corner or shutting off a light.
The truth was, I didn’t like seeing my mother when she was on her grief circuit. In the mornings, she would take our cat, Pisser, into her room and close the door for hours. If I got close enough, I could hear her television tuned to the Soundscapes radio channel, playing the fluted music of fossil shops. If her bedroom door was open, then her bathroom door was shut and it was silent, save for a drip/pause/drip from the bathtub that somehow managed to eclipse all other sounds, especially since she never looked clean.
If I could be honest with FrancesKay, I would tell her that I’d spent most of August standing in front of the open refrigerator, staying cool and waiting for better food to appear. Every day it offered less and less, until one day I had to eat a cold tortilla, and it had been the last one, and it had been corn.
I stood outside my grandma’s bedroom for a while before finally knocking.
She’d moved in years earlier when it was decided that her retirement home in Surprise, Arizona, was too far away, too isolated, in my mother’s opinion. I understood better after she’d settled in and I’d seen a notepad on her desk and written in my grandma’s script: This is my new pen is my new pen my new pen my new my. It was like watching a fly crawl into a horse’s nose and never come back out. But, I didn’t really know what made adults do the things they did, and I always doubted the reasoning that my grandma had come because she needed our help.
Still, it took her longer than I felt comfortable with to open her door that day. When she finally did, the room, like a feverish child behind her, breathed out a pungent humidity.
“Jeepers!” She laughed, holding her robe closed. “I wasn’t expecting visitors!”
She’d been running a bath, and her upper lip was spackled with bleach, which had cracked in such a way that I knew she’d been laughing to herself. When I told her why I’d knocked, she laughed again.
“Nothing to eat! My god, don’t let them hear you in India.”
She went on talking like that for a bit, about how a person just needs an egg or two to survive. What one could do with rice alone. I regretted knocking. But then, somehow, she said, “OK, let your old Nini get some clothes on, Chicken.” And in ten minutes, she was downstairs, in her nicest outfit, the loose black pants and the yellow tunic that made her look like a boxy Mr. Peanut.
I couldn’t remember the last time she’d driven anywhere, and there was a part of me that wondered whether she was actually still allowed to. Her tiny car had sat in our garage for so long that she had to move her seat forward when she got in and I had to move mine back. As she pulled out, we both watched her mirrors vigilantly, cautious now for any living creature who, like Lucky, had stubbornly avoided adaptation. But the only one that caught my eye was off in the corner of our dead lawn. I was surprised to see my mother out of her room, arranging rocks or something on Lucky’s grave.
I could tell she was crying again, and I could have punched her, I don’t know why.
“Your poor mother,” my grandma said, leaning to stare out my window. She was quiet a moment. “You know, she’s never dealt with the demons of her past. Take a lesson from your old Nini and don’t you let those things follow you through life. They’ll rot your insides.” She ran her tongue over her teeth, maybe to be certain they were still in place, or maybe to show me that life takes no prisoners. And she left it at that.
My grandma had worked as a secretary for thirty-five years and didn’t really have a lot of great stories, but there were details of her life that could have been stories if she knew how to tell them that way. Like how she’d been born left-handed but was forced to write with her right until she became right-handed. Or how she put Vaseline on those hands every single night. Years ago, when my dad took his life and my mom seemed to break in half, my grandma was the one who kept asking me how school was and did I like art or history better. She would cry sometimes, but she never stopped using the Vaseline or brushing her hair or writing with her right hand. She could still get excited about a new pen.
There was one morning, a few months after his funeral, when my mom said her tongue felt furry and she just wanted to sit in a chair all day, so my grandma took me to the zoo. She’d heard there was a special penguin exhibit that was ending soon. I was five and she was seventy-nine. Neither of us had seen a penguin before and there was concern we might never get the chance again.
“This could be it for us and the penguins,” my grandma told me. “Make sure you pay good attention. You kids move so friggin’ fast these days. Criminelly.”
But it was last Sunday of the exhibit and so crowded that paying attention did nothing. All around us, people were shoving and moving in a big, human knot. Parents were encouraging their children to go on go up to the tank. Some had put toddlers on their shoulders, or told them to crawl beneath the sea of legs, and some were huffing at one another like elephant seals, barking and brutish, with no necks and black eyes and bodies not wholly suited for the upright world.
My grandma held my hand tightly and we kept to the back of the throng, waiting for an opening that never came. Within a few minutes, I started to cry. I wanted to go home. She said she did, too.
We followed the exit sign out of the penguin room and into a much colder room with another tank but no crowd.
It was one of the saddest places I’ve ever been.
Everything looked old and forgotten. The carpeting was scattered with straw wrappers and flattened popcorn, the tank water the color of cataracts. It likely all inspired a terrible nightmare I would have years later about finding a farm that had been abandoned with all the animals still locked in their cages.
My grandma sat me down and tried to calm me. She had me wrap my arms around her neck, so that I was looking straight into the tank, at these strange almost-penguins. There must have been eight or nine of them—puffins, though I didn’t know that then—pushing up against the glass, their orange feet tangling and trying, with all their might, to peddle a way out. My grandma turned and looked at them and, after a few moments, turned back.
“Good grief,” she said, and again, “Good good grief.”
And it didn’t seem so weird that she would say that then. It reminded me of the game we played in school—Duck, Duck, Goose—where you patted the heads of your friends in a circle, saying, duck, duck, duck, and nobody knew when goose would come, but when you got goose, you had to get up and run or else you were out.
Seven years later, I ate a cold tortilla and we were heading to the market.
When we arrived, my grandma immediately read off a list she must have been secretly keeping. Every item on there, she inspected: shook, squeezed, put her ear up to. I was thinking all the while about what to write for my essay, because I really wanted FrancesKay to like me. It would be so easy to write about Lucky and have her thinking I was a brave young student of great maturity, the kind she’d want to see movies with after school. Or I could write about grocery shopping with my grandmother and have her thinking I understood the immensity of the everyday.
I’d grown three hairs around my belly button that my mother begged me not to pluck. Not yet, she’d said.
I could write about that.
A woman with a blow-dry and strong arms had pulled up to our house. The dog ran right in front of the car, she told my mom. She’d wrapped Lucky’s body in a yoga mat.
I could write about that, too.
There were no rules.
“Jiminy Christmas!” my grandma said, running a finger along the price sticker on a bag of beans. “Is this right?”
“Nini,” I said. “I need your help.”
She stopped her finger.
“I have to write a personal essay,” I said.
The loudness of her laugh startled an even older woman, standing nearby, who turned and stared—her purple updo nearly all oxygen, and a tiny cylinder of capers shaking in her hands.
Within seconds, a young nurse was at the woman’s side, taking her by the arm and glaring at us, everybody looking at one another with mouths agape, trying to find some sort of meaning in any of it. Nobody said a word. Four holes tied together with a thread, but it didn’t make a net.
“How are you ladies doing,” the nurse finally said.
I smiled at her and put my hand on my grandma’s shoulder, hoping to show that she and I weren’t really so different. She just snapped her gum and smiled thinly, and I decided not to tell her that her necklace was twisted even though the girls at school were always fixing each other’s necklaces and it always seemed so nice to me.
“We’re good, thanks,” I said, and then, “take care,” which was stupid, because it’s what she did for a living.
As they walked away, my grandma leaned in to me. “Life certainly has a bad habit of going on, doesn’t it? Why don’t you write about that?”
I didn’t like the question. Something about it made me feel queasy, like my stomach was filling up with cold, milky puffin water. I tried to push right past it.
“What’s next?” I asked.
She was glancing around, at lights and freezers.
“Nini, what’s next?”
“Let’s see, Chicken.” She peeked at her list and raised a finger. “Ah, to the butcher!”
There was a line at the counter—tired young mothers and rich widows with yanked faces waving numbers on paper arrowheads: 61, 64, 59. We took one, too.
“The year we landed on the moon,” my grandma said. She may have said more about this, about conspiracy or not trusting men. I wasn’t really listening.
Behind the thick, curved glass was an array of brown and bloodied meats. Customers leaned over and shuffled around the case like it was nothing. They shouted at the butcher, What’s that? and pointed. OK, and what’s that? All the while, the meats just sat there, helpless and trembling on their doilies. There were piles of organs and red, marbled loins. Skins and thighs and what appeared to be an entire rib cage. Knuckled bits and fatty bits. Chicken sternums hiding wishbones. Lucky bits. I gagged.
“You know, I think I’d like a little liver,” my grandma said, plotting. “I just love it on a cracker.”
I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up. I thought about my dad and wondered if this was how he’d felt, too, like he wanted to throw everything up, until there’d be none of him left. Maybe, if he’d stuck around, life would have been better. I would have sat on his shoulders that day and seen the penguins. But instead, my grandma told me what was becoming more and more obvious—that some people never see a penguin at all. My stomach heaved again. The thought of her never seeing one. The thought of her.
“Goodness,” she said, grabbing my arm. “You’re going to get pneumonia. Where’s your sweater?”
“I didn’t bring one,” I said.
She shoved the list into my hand.
“Well, go on and make yourself useful. Find us some pickles. I can wait here.”
The women ahead of us were getting louder as they crowded the glass.
What’s that? They pointed at the meats.
“No,” I said. “I’m gonna wait.”
And what’s that?
“Well then, I’ll go and you stay here.”
OK, and what’s that?
“Just wait. Just wait a second.”
And the butcher called out, 67? 67? 68?