Read the Winners of American Short Fiction’s 2024 Insider Prize

Stories live through their readers. This year’s winners of American Short Fiction’s Insider Prize were brought to life by dozens of readers—by my friends, colleagues, students, two former high school teachers, and our guest judge, Peter Orner—generous individuals who donated their time to a bounty of incredible submissions. ASF’s partnership with Huston-Tillotson University’s Department of English and Institute for Justice and Equity has made sharing and celebrating the winning stories and essays with you today possible.

Launched in 2017 in collaboration with writer and American Short Fiction Advisory Board member Deb Olin Unferth, the Insider Prize is an annual award that recognizes excellent work by incarcerated writers in Texas. Over the past seven years, our celebrated judges—including Lydia Davis, Joyce Carol Oates, Justin Torres, and Lauren Hough—have selected winners and runners-up in the categories of fiction and short memoir, whose pieces we’ve proudly co-published alongside our partners at Lit Hub. We’ve awarded these gifted writers thousands of dollars in cash prizes and each year eagerly await submissions from around the state to share with the world.

“Memories are a nuisance,” Peter wrote to one of our writers after reading his short story, “but nonetheless they seem to make us who we are, as this story confirms.” This year’s submissions told many stories burdened with memory, but just as many stared bravely into the face of hope, satirized the state of politics, speculated on the future of the world, or else built entirely new worlds to inhabit. In short, the stories written on the inside reflected the stories we wrote this year on the outside. Stories of human toil and dreams and everything in between.

Thank you for joining us on this page, dear reader, and for giving these stories life.

–Adam Soto, Insider Prize Director

*

First Place, Nonfiction: Kenneth Andrus, “The Difference”

An original and harrowing piece of work. Wonderful use of language throughout the piece. Structurally interesting and I appreciated the way that Andrus not only defined the slang in a unique way but the way the words were deployed throughout the piece was also quite deft. There’s great momentum in the piece as well. And on a sentence level, again, very strong: “I’m just a background character.” “Snow White was purple.” “As long as he had a push broom a.k.a. prison cadillac in his hand and looked like he was cleaning, he could be anywhere in the dorm and, in theory, the unit.” Etc, etc. An engaging and, as I say, original piece of work.

–Peter Orner

The Difference

by Kenneth Andrus

I read the dictionary for fun. That probably tells you more about me than you’d like to know. But I can’t help it. I like words. So much so, in fact, that while incarcerated I designed my own dictionary of about one hundred and fifteen plus slang words that we use on my unit.

Some examples are:

Chava noun: a usually weak person who serves as another’s slave because said person is unable to defend himself or afford protection.

Hard timing verb: to spend one’s time in incarceration in a way that makes the days seem longer [Putting tally marks on the wall is a classic example of ________ ].

Overstood adjective: (1) having or sharing the feelings of another (2) having gained knowledge from the process of coming to know or completely understand something.

Politics noun singular or plural: (1) the act or science of gangs, of guiding or influencing gang policy (2) gang affairs or business; especially competition between gangs or individuals for power and leadership.

Stomp down adjective: the quality of being willing and able to fight for one’s beliefs, consequences be damned.

Tune noun: a substance with the ability to make someone lose all his motor skills, gain impossible abilities, read minds, or see into the future.

Now, tune is stiff (adjective: formidable or tough), a bad motherfucker (noun: something that shows formidable strength or skill). It’s bad for you, and that’s overstood. The unit posts signs about it in high-traffic areas, like the dayroom sink, except they don’t call it tune on the signs. One red, black, and green poster framed with caution tape informs us that it is “100% ILLEGAL”, “100% DANGEROUS”, and provides several different nicknames for the drug. “Green Giant”, “Bizarro”, “Geeked Up”, “AK 47”, and “Smacked” are the examples they give. No one’s ever called it any of those things, especially no one cool. The other name for it is K2, which is mostly used by people who don’t smoke the stuff.

Me? I call it tune. I don’t smoke it, or anything, for that matter. Never have. Here’s why:

For one, I make enough stupid decisions while sober and would rather not get the extra help.

The second reason, here’s a quick story: When I was four and my nephew was six (my sister is twenty years older than me and had a son before I was born), he stole a pack of my mom’s cigarettes and tried smoking them in the backyard. I remember thinking, Well, if he’s doing it, then I should too. But then I took a step and stopped in my tracks, and I recall thinking, Oh, wait. I have asthma. I probably shouldn’t. Since then, I’ve never had the desire.

But, yeah. Drugs: not my jam.

Others, though… Well, you know.

Tune is a synthetic drug, sprayed on paper and cut into strips, rolled up in a thinner paper, and then smoked. Because of it, I haven’t had a birthday card in three years. The thing is, tune is easy to smuggle in through the mail. So, to mitigate that, store bought greeting cards were banned along with anything that’s not a photograph or written or printed on white paper.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

According to the caution poster, tune can cause “severe anxiety, heart attack and stroke, paranoia, hallucinations, brain damage, organ damage, nausea and vomiting, aggression, and even DEATH.” Not to mention smoking it will get you smoked (verb: caught in the act of doing something wrong, illegal, or immoral). In other words, a case. The easiest way to tell if someone is a tune head is to check their fingers. If the tips of their index and thumb are orange, and they haven’t been eating Cheetos, chances are it’s tune. Despite these warnings, and potential major cases for possession of a controlled substance, some people are attracted to the allure of a tune stick.

I had this neighbor once. They called him Snow. When he first moved in, he introduced himself as Stone. However, there was already another Stone, so he informed us that he also went by Snow. It was an accident how he received that nickname. Apparently, someone had called him Snow Bunny and he had turned around to see who had called him that. The name stuck. Kind of.

As I got to know Snow a little longer, I started giving him my own nicknames. I called him Snowman, Snowflake, Snowstorm, Snowshoes, SnowRemorse, Snowtoriety. His favorite nickname: Snow Biden. My favorite nickname: Snowmo.

My other neighbor was Country, a white guy like Snow. Both of them were six-foot-something, had tattoos, some form of a beard, were hetero, not city boys, and they smoked. In other words, we had nothing in common. Still, I liked them well enough.

We lived in cubicles, separated from each other by three-foot walls. Most of the time, I sleep and sit on the floor because it offers the illusion of privacy. Standing up, I can easily see what either of my neighbors are doing. Most of the time, it was getting high.

They would always be in the trap house, and it was only the trap house because that’s where Country lived. More often than not, Snow was over there getting smacked on that bizarro green giant and freeworlding (verb: reminiscing about one’s life before the penitentiary). As long as I couldn’t smell the smoke, I wasn’t bothered. So, I stayed in my lane.

One spring night, at about 8:30, I had just gotten out of the shower. Snowmo, Country, and some guy named East were at the trap house. Country and East were sitting on the bunk, listening to Snow, who was lying on the floor freeworlding. Usually, if those three were together, assume they were high, about to be high, or talking about getting high. I sat down on the floor and pulled my socks on when JJ stopped in front of Country’s house and said, “Man, they outta there.” Curious, I stood up to see what he was talking about.

Country and East were still sitting on the bunk, their backs to me, and Snow was still on the floor in the corner to the right. Unlike the other two, Snow was obviously uncomfortable. His eyes were shut tight, he was sweating, and he was writhing around on the floor face up like a snake with a bellyache. Then he started rolling over like he was trying to get away from himself. I watched him wriggle around like that, and I honestly was judging him. Is this the type of stuff you do to relax? Is this what you want to do for the rest of your life? I remember thinking. I shook my head, disgusted, and was about to mind my business when I noticed that Snow had stopped groaning. Instead, he lay supine, face contorted in anguish, and he began to twitch and buck.

The few people gathered to watch the spectacle began to laugh, but it was no joke. “Oh shit,” I said eloquently. “Yo, he’s choking!” At that, everyone quieted, and we could hear Snow trying to clear his airways and breathe. I looked to JJ, who was closest to him. “Get him on his side!” JJ ignored me, enraptured by Snow’s face changing colors like an ambulance’s emergency lights: white, red, blue. “Yo! Get him on his side,” I repeated. Still, nobody moved. “What are you doing? Help him.”

The thing that I wrestled with later on was that I was literally inches away from him, separated by a three-foot-high wall that didn’t take Olympic training to hop over. What irked me was that I could have easily walked a few steps down the run right into Country’s house and helped this man myself.

Yet, I didn’t. I didn’t think so at the time, but I was afraid. I had never encountered this before. I only know what to do because of cop shows. I’m no hero. I’m just a background character. I mind my business, stay out the way.

Despite my paralysis, I told JJ, “Dude! Help him.” By now, Snow White was purple. JJ snapped out of his fascination and did what I should have done immediately. He stepped over Snow and rolled him onto his right side. Instantly, a stream of green and orange and brown liquid spewed from his mouth like a busted, rancid fire hydrant. Snow gasped, drawing in a shuddering breath, and I released the one that I had been holding. JJ let the man go and leapt over the pool of vomit back to his vantage point, and the unconscious Snow began to wallow around in the throw up like he was trying to make Snow Angels.

He almost was a Snow Angel.

At this point in the putrid display, I remembered Country and East, wondering what the hell they were doing. They were still in the same positions from minutes ago, despite the commotion. Shit, they’re gone too, was what came to my mind.

While I was calmly panicking, many of the other attendees were dapping each other up and laughing.

“Man, I need whatever he was on. Shoot me some of that shit.” (Shoot verb: to put something into the possession or safe keeping of another).

“Stone, fool, you can’t hang with the big boys.”

“I used to see this shit all the time in the trap house.”

There was a chorus of agreements to this last statement, and in these moments I hated all of those people. Two thoughts occurred to me at that time. One: Many of y’all will overdose one day and not wake up. Two: If y’all have seen this all before, then why the fuck did no one know what to do?

Some others had chimed in as well.

“You’re a man now, Stone.”

“Let me have your radio when you die.”

“Hell nah, don’t touch him. If he die, you getting a murder charge.”

Then one of the spectators, Kilo, another tune-head, spoke up. “Country, bitch (noun: a term of endearment for males), you gotta get him out of your house. It’s almost Count Time.”

I looked at the clock. It was indeed about nine. Time for the officers to come in and make sure we weren’t lying supine in another man’s house covered in our own bile and the remains of cheesy beef casserole.

When Kilo came to the same conclusion that I did, that Country was MIA, he appealed to Snow. “Stone, bitch, ay, look, you gotta shake back (verb: to regain normal health, poise, or status).”

He responded by turning blue again.

“Kilo, look!” I said. “He’s choking again. Flip him on his side.”

By now, the crowd had dispersed back to their own cubicles to avoid an out of place case. But Kilo was acting as SSI that night as the custodian. As long as he had a push broom, a.k.a., a prison cadillac, in his hand and looked like he was cleaning, he could be anywhere in the dorm and, in theory, the unit.

“C’mon, bitch, you gotta get up.” But of course, Snow was going to do no such thing. So, Kilo took action.

Setting his cadillac aside, Kilo squatted and grabbed the driest and, therefore, cleanest part of Snow: his ankles. Then Kilo began to drag Snow back to his house, a feat that was only made easier by the puke coating Snow, reminding me of some gastrointestinal Slip ‘N Slide. However, Kilo wasn’t the strongest of us, nor did he have much wind. He wasn’t weak either, but him dragging this man across the floor was like someone pressing pause, then play, then pause, then play on the world’s most tragic comedy or most comedic tragedy.

“Kilo, don’t let him choke,” I pleaded.

“Just chill. I got this.”

There’s an unspoken rule in the penitentiary, or maybe it’s just one I made up: if someone tells you to “just chill” because he’s “got this,” he lying through his fucking teeth. He may not think he’s lying, but he is. I looked up at the camera on the wall, aiming down the run. I’m going to have to go to jail.

Kilo and his charge rounded the corner into the cubicle, Snow’s head banging once into the wall. Then Kilo deposited him and went back to the broom to “make it look good” by pretending to sweep. Red, another smoker, appeared. Again, it didn’t register to me that I could be more than a witness, that I knew what to do, that I could help this dying man live. Instead, I did what I had always done in my then twenty-two years: relied on someone else.

“Red, help him please. Roll him on his side.”

“Why? What’s wrong with him?”

“What’s wrong? His face is purple!”

“Oh!”

Red had been a witness to the entire thing. It occurred to me then that he was either stupid, high himself, or both. Still, despite these potential shortcomings, Red acted. He knelt, rolled Snow over, and Snow promptly hurled.

“Ugh! That’s nasty,” Red complained, but, to his credit, he didn’t leave him.

Again, Snowmo gasped, and, unconscious, began to make sobbing noises.

“Hey, are you crying?” Red asked him. “It’s okay, don’t cry.”

He sounded like he was trying to comfort a kid who had just dropped his ice cream or Snow cone, not a man who had been drowning in his dinner. I shook my head.

“Hey, if he’s making noise or talking, he’s good,” said Snow’s other neighbor, Dizzy.

“Oh, yeah? Cool,” said Red as he left, letting Snow fall again onto his back. Any respect that I had gained for Red in those few minutes left with him.

I glanced at Snow, the vomit, the camera, and Snow again. Fuck it, I thought, and stepped into my shower slides. I walked the three steps around the wall into Snow’s cubicle and knelt on his left, careful to avoid any throw up. Thinking he’d be pure dead weight, or, at least, almost dead weight, I used a decent amount of power as I rolled him over. Too much power, really, since he smacked into the wall. I grimaced but still held him like that.

Kilo was back.

“Hey, it’s almost Count Time. You gotta get back to your house.”

“Man, fuck all that. I’m not leaving him until I know he’s fine.”

“Damn,” Kilo muttered, knowing that I was right, though he was perhaps still more concerned about the officers seeing me babysitting and inquiring how this situation came to be.

After a few minutes, though, Snow, albeit filthy, no longer looked in pain. Deeming him alright for now, I made sure he stayed on his side and retreated to my cubicle after washing my hands. If he started choking again, I knew I’d be able to easily get to him. Not to mention it was almost Count Time. Granted, I really felt like it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for him to go to medical, I was also still wearing white (adjective: a phrase denoting brotherhood and camaraderie in inmates [as in the white uniform we wear]), so I also left to avoid drawing heat.

Not much later, maybe a few minutes, we heard the door open and the boss lady (noun: a female officer) shout “Count Time.”

East got up and shuffled back to his cubicle while Country stood and simply laid his jumper over the puddle of throw up before sitting right back down. Meanwhile, Kilo jumped back into action. He grabbed Snow again and dragged him further into the cubicle and threw a sheet over him and another sheet over the vomit before going back to the broom. Now, to the casual observer, Snow looked like he was simply sleeping instead of shaking back from a tune attack. Still, I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t see Snow’s face and was even more bothered when Snow started inching underneath his bunk. I shared these sentiments with Kilo and he told me to chill because boss lady was almost upstairs and that he’d check when she leaves. Begrudgingly and fearfully, I chilled.

She arrived about an hour later and took another hour to count. At least that’s how it seemed. The seconds seemed like minutes, and I knew it took only four of those to suffocate. The whole time, I was resisting the urge to run in there and snatch the sheet off of his face, but I stayed put.

Kilo stayed and swept the run, telling the boss lady his cubicle number when she walked by. She marked it on her clipboard and walked down the run and back, glancing in Snow’s house long enough to verify that someone was in it. Then she was down the stairs again, and true to his word, Kilo checked on Snow. He was awake and breathing. Kilo pulled him from under the bunk and sat him up, and Snow looked like a frightened animal, wide-eyed and nervous. Again, a small crowd gathered, everyone talking to him at once.

“You good, Stone?”

“Shake back, bitch.”

“Hey, welcome back.”

Dizzy tried to hand him a bottle of water, and Snow recoiled from it as if it were a snake.

“Stone, you alright?” I asked him. “You good?”

He looked at me as if I had just pulled a gun on him. Still, we attempted to pacify and reassure him.

Soon, by 10:30, he was coherent enough to drink the water, put the sheets into a bucket to wash, and go take a shower. That night, I stayed up a little longer to keep an eye on him. In the morning, I asked if he remembered anything. The last thought he could recall before waking up to what he thought was a bottle of bleach water in his face was, I shouldn’t have smoked that second stick. He also said that he had an out-of-body experience, that as we all gathered around him, he was floating fifteen feet up watching us ask if he was alright. That and his lungs hurt.

I told him how it all went down and he thanked me for “saving” his life. I shook my head and told him that I really just supervised, thank JJ and Red, but he wouldn’t hear it. Then I told him, “Stone, you really could have died last night.”

“I know.”

“Man, for real. If you had been in a cell with Country, you’d be a corpse right now. Nobody would have been able to get to you and Country was too far gone. You can’t do this anymore, dude. These people don’t care about you. While you were choking and dying, they were laughing at you, calling you stupid. These people aren’t your friends.”

“Yeah, I know. Man, I’m not going to smoke that shit anymore.”

Three days later, he relapsed.

I had just gotten out of the shower and there were two people in his house with him. “C’mon, Stone. Shake back. C’mon, go take a shower.”

I looked over the wall to see Snowmo sitting up, a glazed look in his eye, and vomit down his shirt like an old Eminem song. I shook my head, disappointed and disgusted. Callously, I said, “Nah, leave him alone. He knows what he’s doing.”

After that, I cut him off. When he asked me later on why I wasn’t talking to him, I informed him that it was “because you have no self-respect. If you don’t care about yourself, then why should I?” For weeks, I ignored him, and, eventually, he stopped trying to chop it up and talk with me.

After maybe two more weeks of not talking, he pulled me over one day and said, “I’m done. I’m not going to smoke anymore.”

“Yeah, right. It sounds good.”

“Nah, I’m forreal. I’m eight days sober.”

I’m a firm believer in second chances and the benefit of the doubt. He looked sincere, and, obviously, it bothered him that we weren’t cool anymore. So, I gave him another shot.

He’s gone now. No longer with us. In a better place.

He went home.

In the year plus since that incident, he hadn’t smoked tune again. At one point, I had asked him why he had smoked in the first place. “To get out of prison for a little while,” he replied. I suppose I could understand that; that’s one of the reasons I write, after all.

In that time, Snow had become one of my closest friends in here. Man, I told him so much, and he was there for me when it felt like a lot of other people weren’t. I kept my tears in check as I shared this with him the day he was leaving and told him that I loved him.

I’ll miss him.

Despite everything ending well, I still chide myself for not acting faster and just expecting the next man to handle it. Snow never blamed me, but I could just have easily been the difference between life and death. Snow thought I was too hard on myself.

Who knows? Maybe he’s on to something.

Maybe I was the difference.

*

First Place, Fiction: F. M. Martinez, “Third-Person Shooter”

Strong voice from the evocative first sentence: “I told him not to go out in this weather.” That says it all right there. And the story catapults forward. Action well rendered, and the piece has very good flow and movement. And humor, too. Strong descriptions like this one give the story a vivid sense of place. “The only way to tell the edge of the road was the lamp posts, the snow fluttering like confetti in the beams of copper light.”

–Peter Orner

Third-Person Shooter

by F.M. Martinez

I TOLD HIM it was a bad idea to go out in this weather. When we left it was just starting up, just a few snowflakes, and he said this ain’t nothin’ and he barged on ahead and what choice did I have? The car was cold as an icebox and the engine turned over twice before it caught. Before we pulled out of the driveway he checked the guns, made sure the clips in the Glock and the AR next to him in the passenger seat were secure and the safety… I’m not sure he checked the safety. What if we get pulled over? What do you tell the cops? We’re not gonna get pulled over. Twelve-year-old SUV, fire-engine red, with dents on the side and a bashed-in rear bumper—we’re not exactly gonna blend in. Fricking car is an eyesore. Ah, stop your bellyachin’. We go in and do this and get out. What are you gonna do, park at the guy’s doorstep? Don’t be an idiot. We’ll park a block down. You saw the map. Straight shot to the freeway from there. In and out. Motherfucker’s gotta be stopped. Well, I didn’t argue with that. Hanwell’s politics were… Well, we didn’t disagree about that. Hanwell had to be stopped somehow. I mean, letting kids read those dirty books and teaching kids how they should be ashamed to be Americans and letting all those immigrants take over everywhere. I mean, they were everywhere. Damn Walmart was full of ’em speaking their gibberish and laughing at the stupid gringos who let them in to sell drugs and traffic women and kids. I agreed Hanwell was slime and needed to go but I never thought… I mean, I might have thought… but he was the one that bought the guns. It was him. And what choice did I have? Hanwell was running for the State Senate and the papers said his chances were good—and not just the papers we disagreed with but pretty much all of them. The slimeball had big numbers in this city, probably all his illegal immigrant friends. They’d put him in power and then we’d all be screwed. Next, he would run for the U.S. Senate and then what? President? I knew he had to be stopped but… I mean, the guns. I didn’t like the guns. Daddy taught us to shoot guns and he was a loser. I was less like daddy than he was. Maybe we were s’posed to be like fraternal twins but it all just got blended into one fetus. I was more like Mom, who rarely said anything and got yelled at and beat. They’d died and left us that shitty house and a few bucks in the bank.

By the time we’d gone a couple of miles and got on the freeway, the snow was coming down serious and the wind was whipping it everywhere. We could barely make out the highway lines. It had snowed two days earlier and the city hadn’t bothered to clean it up. Laziness and ineptitude everywhere. That’s what you’re dealing with. Now a whole new layer of white was gettin’ put on. Look, man, I said. This is really nuts. This is like the WRONG night for this. He ignored me. He usually does. The only way to tell the edge of the road was the lamp posts, the snow fluttering like confetti in the beams of copper light. We’re gonna do this, he said, grim-like. We’re doin’ this tonight, come hell or high water. He was pissed cause we’d lost our job that week at the warehouse. Piece of shit job anyway. I couldn’t blame him for punching out that floor manager. He deserved it. I mean, there’s only so much crap a man can take. There’s a breaking point. So, that night we’d been watching the news and eating what might be our last takeout pizza for a while when the report on Hanwell came on. There he was in front of city hall stirring up all the perverts, the “LGBTQ community”. They were all carrying signs bitching about some law the city council was trying to pass that would “discriminate” against them. Change the channel, I said. No, he said. He was scary mad, spoiling mad. I ain’t gonna change the channel. I’m gonna change the situation. I knew what he was thinking. How could I not? Hadn’t he bought the guns and hadn’t he been dragging us to the shooting range every Thursday for the last two months? It’s going down tonight, he said. He was full of the acid that the TV report was oozing, the perverts, the lefties, the parasites that were taking over our country. It’s s’posed to snow bad tonight, I said. Maybe we should wait. It’s going down tonight, he said again. And I knew it was. What choice did I have? Like when he made us get those stupid Aryan Brother tattoos all over. I thought we looked ridiculous.

We almost missed the exit to Cromwell Road, Hansen’s exit. We’d looked up his address on Google. He lived in a posh frou-frou neighborhood where all the streets had tree names: Spruce, elm, pine. He lived on Cedar Lane in a cul-de-sac. I didn’t see it as an easy proposition. I worried about the logistics. In and out was what he’d said. That’s how he said it was gonna be. Well, in this weather and in a fricking snowed-in cul-de-sac? I just didn’t see it happening that way. He caught me thinking my doubts. Just leave it to me, he said. Stop thinking. You think too much. Yeah, well, the old man was one that didn’t think at all and look how he ended up. Yeah, he said, and Ma thought and worried herself to an early fuckin’ grave. What’s it matter if we do this tonight and not, like, next week? It’s going down tonight, he insisted. It has to. It’s like screwing. You don’t just have some chick layin’ there with her legs open and say, Uhm, I’ll come back next week, honey, right? Yeah, I said, but she wouldn’t be layin’ there in a frickin’ blizzard!

It’s just weather, he said. I knew arguing was useless.

Coming off the freeway exit and into the neighborhood, the snow was already as thick as mud on the road surface and the SUV slid around, fishtailing on every turn. He wasn’t exactly going the speed limit. Slow down! I said. Jesus. We fishtailed out of a left turn and sideswiped a Volvo. Fuck it, he said. We could barely see the street names on the poles. Jesus, I said again. He laughed out loud. Don’t you sissy out on me, he said, and he sounded just like the old man. Just like him.

The houses were hard to tell apart, all covered with snow. Impossible to read any numbers on the mailboxes or front doors. They were nice houses, not like our neighborhood. But now in the blizzard they all looked the same, some bigger, some smaller, but, I don’t know, like the white boxes in the warehouse we used to work. I felt like I was trapped in a damn Christmas card. Reminded me of a long time ago when we were kids and Christmas was still a thing. Anyway, Ma tried to make it a thing but it never really got off the ground. The old man was always drunk, angry, or passed out. One Christmas we stole a bicycle from the bed of a truck downtown. Another year the house almost burned down when Ma cooked a ham and forgot to turn off the oven.

The SUV was chugging through almost three feet of soft slush and crunching on the ice underneath. He stopped at a corner and tried to read the street sign and said, Fuck it. Let’s just walk from here. It can’t be that far. And he put the Glock in his coat pocket and picked up the AR. So, now we’re walking up this suburban street carrying a military weapon. Great. There wasn’t anybody around, but somebody might look out a window and see this Rambo shit. It looked like it was nice and warm in those houses. There was a golden yellow glow from the inside lights, the flicker of television screens. I would have given anything to be in there, playing Call of Duty on my PlayStation and smoking a joint and not out here freezing. His trench jacket was Salvation Army. We had nothing warm to wear, had sneakers on our feet, socks with holes in them. He had his stupid do-rag on his head and snow pelted our eyes and cheeks. We went for two blocks and no Cedar Lane. Back there the SUV waited, engine running, lights on, in the middle of the street. I hoped we weren’t blocking somebody’s driveway, something that might get the cops called out. Stupid move to leave the car. Whatever, he said. This is going down. And then the next street was Cedar Lane and the five houses were at the end of the cul-de-sac just like the Google map had laid it out. He started walking faster and what choice did I have but to follow? Hand was numb in the pocket. The hand carrying the gun was like an icicle.

And there was Hanwell’s house.

And then a couple of things happened at once. A squirrel shot out of nowhere from behind a hedge and skittered right over our feet. A big clump of snow blew off the roof of the house we were walking by and splattered us. Blinded and startled, he jerked up his arm and the AR went off (the safety was off), sounding like a bomb, and echoed in the cul-de-sac. The round blasted the squirrel to pieces, kept going, and hit a mailbox post and ricocheted back. A tongue of fire tore across our heads. He dropped the gun. We sank to our knees, maybe on the sidewalk or in somebody’s yard, blood in our eyes. Last thing I saw clearly were people in the windows and doorways. People looking. Somebody coming. And then we toppled over and for a while it was all dark.

It was me that came back. He was out.

Hanwell was crouching over me.

“What were you doing?!” he grunted. “Are you crazy?”

He was wearing a bathrobe and expensive loafers. His hands were on my chest, one palm pressing down, the other pumping. CPR. I’d seen it done on TV. He was doing it right, but I could barely feel it.

“What were you doing with that gun?”

Up close, I could see why he hated Hanwell. The guy looked like this high school do-gooder that made fun of us and became, like, class president or some shit before we dropped out. Sleaze like you don’t belong in this school, Delwitz, the high school smartass, used to say. Go back to where you came from. But I knew Hanwell wasn’t mean like Delwitz. Delwitz would never have been out in front of city hall defending a bunch of perverts. But still, Hanwell just looked like that, some asshole do-gooder who thinks his shit don’t stink. Some rah-rah social climber, I guess. Not a loser like we were.

I couldn’t answer Hanwell’s question because I couldn’t talk and he… he was out, or gone, or maybe dead. For right now, I was on my own.

I saw blue and white flashes on Hanwell’s face and then two cops and then four cops and then a whole mess of cops and an EMS van and I still couldn’t talk and he was gone. Silent.

“Guy had a gun.”

“Idiot shot himself.”

EMS guys closed in and Hanwell backed off and I was on a gurney. Blood was dripping into my hair and neck. They tore my jacket off and started rolling me to the van. Our trench coat lay in the snow in a blood puddle. The cops had the rifle and the gun. Two of them got in the van with me.

“What were you doing with the guns? Were you going to shoot somebody?”

I couldn’t talk and he, the other, was gone, but I wanted to say:

It was him… not me.

I was looking at the cop and watching his mouth move, but the words no longer mattered because everything was going pale, fading. Just outside the doors of the medvan, behind the cop, snow was falling in waves. It stuck to the cop’s dark jacket and his cap, so he looked like he was covered with powdered sugar.

He was the Sugarman, come to take me to heaven, like Ma used to say when she used to put me to bed.

Sugarman gonna come. Take you to heaven. Sweet dreams, my darling boy.

And he would always fall asleep before me and then, always, I would follow.

What choice did I have?

*

Runner-up, Nonfiction: Steven Perez, “The Life and Mind of the Texas Prisoner”

Vivid details and descriptions throughout the piece. A strong, beautiful moment captured on page 3 when there’s the transition into the memory of teaching a daughter how to walk. Interesting and effective integration of personal experience and policy. Emotionally affecting ending.

–Peter Orner

The Life and Mind of the Texas Prisoner

by Steven Perez

Waking up in this prison warehouse at six in the morning, it’s dark. One-man cubicles with bunks everywhere. Inmate workers wait on benches. The air is thick and soggy. The smell of mildew lingers. The concrete is cold and smooth under my bare feet. A sparrow cheelips from a vent in the ductwork on top of the showers. A chug of water from my Gatorade bottle soothes my dry mouth and throat while it fills my empty stomach.

I gotta give Mom a wake-up call, so I put on my tennis shoes and go downstairs in white gym shorts and a wife beater to the phone. My daughter kept my mother up last night till two in the morning, lost in a world of Klonopins, Xanax, crystal meth, and fentanyl. Mom says, “My back hurts.”

Three and a half hours later, the mirror shows my eyes sinking into their sockets. Black half-moons swell up underneath them. I see crow’s-feet on the outside corners of them. My brown skin is pale. My shaved head shines in the sun from the windows ten feet above the sinks and toilets. Particles of dust float in the sun’s rays all around and above me.

I wanna hit the punching pads, but I can’t because four days ago I pulled a muscle in my lower back doing jump squats. I try to straighten out my back, but it hurts. It feels like I ruptured a sciatic nerve. I can hardly walk. I can hear Coolio’s “Gangster’s Paradise” playing on someone’s headphones.

I remember when I caught my first case, one hundred and seventy-four grams of cocaine. Federal correctional officers transported me and other inmates from the federal detention center in downtown Houston to federal prison in Beaumont in 2004. They moved us from a van to a bus at the airport in Houston. We wore shackles on our wrists and ankles with locks and chains around our waist down to our feet. I was twenty-five with a bald fade and a goatee.

It was like being in a movie. Buses and vans lined up side-by-side. Airplanes big enough to fit eighteen-wheelers lowered their stairs from two stories up at the rear.

The day was bright. The air was dry and smelled of jet fuel.

Everywhere I looked, I saw men in chains and shackles in orange jumpsuits and blue shell-toe slip-on canvas shoes scratching along the pavement. Bearded Banditos and Outlaws with long hair. Latinos, Blacks, Asians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Africans, Columbians, Cubans, and Chicanos. Trudging single file from buses and vans up the stairs and into the asses of the airplanes. Armed correctional officers and U.S. Marshals stood by coordinating the transport. Gangsters, drug-traffickers, coyotes, and undocumented migrants everywhere.

Twenty years have passed since then, and I’m now in state prison. Razor wire fences, gates, doors, windows, and concrete surround me.

At ten in the morning, I’m sitting at the infirmary in a cage full of Black and brown men in white uniforms shoulder-to-shoulder. The bald-headed Black man sitting next to me says, “They got my sister believing I blew that man’s brains out. I ain’t blow nobody’s brains out.”

On the way back to the dorm from the infirmary, I see black iridescent great-tailed grackles, pigeons, sparrows, and European starlings crowd the grass and dirt of the volleyball court and throughout the expertly manicured prison rec yard. Their beaks and necks and bodies attack chunks of bread scattered across the yard.

Three-story high square concrete buildings holding cell block after cell block after cell block stand like project housing within the compound. Buzzards soar in the sky above me. The sun smiles down upon me. Cool air breathes into my prison uniform. Cheelips and clacking and cuk cuk coos announce their presence. The grease trap behind the chow hall stinks like a city dump.

I get back to the dorm and call my ex-mother-in-law. She tells me my daughter hasn’t slept in days.

I say, “She needs treatment. I thought y’all were gonna put her in Bayview?”

She says, “She won’t go… they don’t have any facilities for people like her. For the mentally ill.”

I say, “They wait for them to commit a crime and they put ’em in here.”

She says, “I don’t know what to do.”

I look around the dayroom and see Black and brown men in white sitting on benches and at stainless steel tables watching the news. Buildings and homes in Ukraine crushed to the ground. Dead bodies all over the streets and neighborhoods. Soldiers everywhere.

I remember me and my cousin JP teaching my daughter how to walk in the kitchen on Pennington Street. Her light-brown skin. Her black hair tied up in a bow. The smile on her face. Her whispers. “Dada. Dada. Dada.”

I bent forward and held her soft little hands above her head with her arms reaching up, walked her forward, and released her. She wobbled and frolicked, her arms and hands swinging, laughing and releasing shrieks of joy while taking four or five steps forward on her own and into his hands. He turned her around and did like I did.

“Go on, Mamacitas. Be strong. Walk.”

I can still hear her tiny feet stomping on the hardwood floor of the pier-and-beam house. She was a year old. That was twenty-two years ago.

Today, at one in the afternoon, I’m standing in line waiting to go into the law library. Fences, gates, doors, windows, and concrete under my feet. An elderly white man in blue jeans staggers by, stooping as he wanders through the prison’s outdoor hallways. He’s dragging the balls of his feet one after another. The screeching sound of his shoes scraping the concrete taunts the silence.

I ponder. Probably a chapel volunteer. They think they’re helping us, and in a sense they are. But far more help is needed for getting a college education and in the fight against these draconian sentences and trumped-up charges, one-writ rules, procedural bars and time bars, and political agendas in our courtrooms, our state capitols, and in Washington, D.C.

Most, if not all, of our state prison systems don’t have enough officers to keep the prisons safe and secure. The Texas prison system doesn’t have enough officers to feed us three hot meals a day. People in the free world line up by the thousands to come in here. And they wanna keep us locked up forever. Meanwhile, the Russian military murders thousands.

Ms. M is working alone in the law library today. Ms. B, the supervisor, called in sick. And Ms. R didn’t show up. Ms. R has a beauty mark between her nose and upper lip. And another one on the side of her face. Someone said Ms. B rocks Gucci shoes. Ms. M smells of sweet expensive perfume and always has her hair and nails done.

The law library is rearranged today. All the tables are turned sideways. Everything else is the same. Shelves full of law books and filing cabinets against the walls. Paintings of sunflowers and horses above the bookshelves.

I think about Ms. R. Her olive and rose-colored skin tone shines like rose gold. I think about her bronze-colored teardrop eyes, her skinny jeans that wrap around her legs like duct tape, her checkerboard Vans with sunflowers on ’em, her beauty marks, the golden highlights in her dark brown hair. Her gold wire-rimmed bifocals that cover half her face. Her lips small like the heart of a dove. Her beautiful smile.

In another life, I’d take her to dinner and share raw oysters and grilled steak and shrimp with her. King crab legs and lobster tails dipped in butter sauce. I’d open the door for her. She’d sit on black leather interior behind black-tinted windows in a black mint condition 2001 Harley Davidson-edition truck on black twenty-eight-inch rims. I’d walk with her and talk with her at night on the shoreline under the downtown city lights while gazing at the sparkling water. The smell of the bay, fish and shrimp, jellyfish and barnacles. The sound of calm waters splashing against the concrete seawall. The gulf breeze running through our clothes. Salt water in the air.

Or maybe I’d fly her across the Atlantic Ocean to visit Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, and all the splendors of Rome. Receive communion with her at Mass on our knees from the hands of the Pope. The smell of incense and candles burning. Church bells banging. The taste of the sacred bread on our tongue.

I’d take her dancing on the Caribbean Islands, where pinks and purples and reds and dazzling blues and yellows flutter around us in magical birds, flowers, and butterflies. Fireworks at midnight booming in the sky. Our bare feet in the sand.

But in this life, behind concrete walls and razor-wire fences, locks and chains and cell blocks in the rain, I look away from her and daydream. Lest I stutter when she looks into my eyes.

On the way back to the dorm from the law library, legions of sparrows perch up together shoulder-to-shoulder on top of the SUV-sized generator waiting for us prisoners to feed them. Buzzards soar above our heads and scavenge the slop barrels on the concrete dock behind the chow halls waiting for us to die. So they can pluck out our eyes and carve out our guts with their icepick snouts and razor-blade claws. The sparrows sing love songs to their spouses.

Days go by and Mom says in a phone call that my daughter kept her up all night till seven in the morning yelling and screaming and tearing her room apart.

Mom says, “It looks like a hurricane in there.”

I say, “She’s looking for the drugs. That’s what they do. They tear everything apart looking for drugs that aren’t even there.”

Mom says she had to call the cops. The cops came over and told Mom she needs to get a mental warrant.

Mom says, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Nobody wants her. She’s so skinny. She hasn’t eaten or drunk anything in days. She hasn’t slept in days. I offer to cook her something. Bacon and eggs. French toast. She doesn’t want anything. I gotta go to work tomorrow and I don’t wanna leave her alone with my sister.”

I think about the day I was transported to state prison from the county jail, twenty-eight months after I was released from federal prison. The judge ordered the jailers to drive me alone in the back of a van six hours upstate to intake.

I lay down in a khaki uniform with black shoulder-length hair. My back on a rubber mat. The hum and itch of the purring road underneath the tires reminded me of where I was going and where I had been. Limo-tint windows with cage metal isolated me from the world.

We stopped at a store. The jailer bought me a carne guisada taco with a Dr Pepper on ice. He opened the back door to give me the taco and soda and the sun was blinding.

Before we reached the highway, I said goodbye to my city, not knowing when I’d come home. A sixty-year sentence. A murder conviction for something I didn’t do. It’s been almost twenty years since the day they locked me up.

I wanna save my daughter’s life, but I can’t because these people won’t let me outta here. I wanna teach her how to live the way I taught her how to walk. But I’m trapped in this graveyard in chains and shackles and bondage. So, I write.

*

Runner-up, Fiction: David Snyder, “Parenthetically”

Mikey here is well characterized, nuanced, the story of a life. The big things, parents and childhood combined with the more mundane but still important details that emerge in sentences like “This was way cooler than flipping your score in asteroids” help the story achieve a kind of intimacy that draws a reader in. Memories are a nuisance, but nonetheless they seem to make us who we are, as this story confirms.

–Peter Orner

Parenthetically

by David Snyder

Mikey found a magic pen. It did not look like much. An ordinary pen you found at the store—ten for a dollar and some change. But, holding it, you felt the Potential, just Waiting. They say, “When God closes a door, He opens a window.” Mikey figured it out.

In the chasm that exists between cosmic debits and credits, the desire to achieve balance, however transient, lies entropy. It is cold. Perhaps it is only proper, considering. Mikey’s dad was murdered shortly after his fourth birthday. Mikey’s grandma said He needed him more. Mikey was four; how was he supposed to feel about that? Didn’t some other kid need their dad less? Perhaps the pen was God’s way of saying sorry.

His love for his dad was as it should have been: pure, taken for granted. Nature demands that some things are certain ways. Mikey was cheated out of the liberty and privilege to grow indifferent to or even like his dad. For a time, he remained in a suspended state of residual reverence. It was probably the least he could do.

When Mikey’s dad abandoned him, he left behind ten brothers and sisters and a mom and dad. Mikey’s mother was loosely affiliated with four sisters, one brother, and her mother. Mikey’s mother ripped him and his two half-brothers away from them all.

They were taken far away, a little too quickly for good taste, to Texas. There was a lone uncle, his dad’s brother, who followed shortly thereafter. Likely, he was driven by convention. Religion. Family. Duty. He wanted to look out for his nephew in his brother’s absence. He valued fidelity.

Mikey’s mother may have been a prostitute. He never actually saw money change hands. “Mother” renders a disservice to all the real Mother’s everywhere, even those who loved their children enough to beat them with a coat hanger. Love defies Reason. Kathryne. That was the name attached to the uterus that spat Mikey out. This had dire consequences.

Mikey was the last of Kathryne’s children. Her third. On his dad’s side, he was First Born Son of First Born Son of First Born Son. In a different day and age, this distinction may have impressed upon the family, on Mikey, a moderate sense of nobility, the duty to perform. She had cancer while he was in utero. This was not the source of him having been poisoned in the womb. Her crucible of darkness. No. Mikey’s defects came from her black heart and rancid soul. The doctors advised terminating Mikey, but she needed him. Mikey and his brothers had a dollar value.

Later in life, Mikey heard in a movie, “Mother is the name of God on the lips and in the hearts of children.” Amen to that. Calling her anything but Kathryne would be blasphemy. If children were indeed born innocent, washed clean in the blood of the Lamb, what did Mikey have to atone for?

Kathryne was mentally ill. She hated people but more than tolerated men. Her two Mantras were, “I can’t wait to go to sleep and not wake up,” and, “Tomorrow is another day.” What kind of shit is that? How do you reconcile that? Mikey was taught early on about impermanence. People were disposable. Curiously, he would eventually gravitate to the practice of delayed gratification. Maybe it was an act of self-preservation. Such was his legacy of schizophrenia.

Mikey had a lot of “uncles.” There was a litany of names. Ray. Rex. Chester. Once, in second or third grade, “Uncle” Bob bought Mikey a remote controlled motorcycle for his birthday. A cheap Radio Shack toy got you into Kathryne’s pants. She grounded him on his birthday, sent him to his room, and Mikey watched Amy Elliott play with his new toy.

Mikey grew up isolated in most respects. Moments of appearing normal occurred here and there. He had Legos, an Atari, and no dreams to fail at. Sometimes, he and Greg would wallow in mud. Mikey was happy to be lost. At school in February, his paper bag, decorated somewhat for Valentine’s Day, remained empty at day’s end. The kids next door failed to make it to a another birthday. No one showed up to watch him place last in the school’s track and field events. Not even an “uncle” to watch Mikey receive the black consolation ribbon. Black is the color of death.

You can’t make people care. About anything. Oblivion is intoxicating. There was no sustained external influence that provoked Mikey to do more than get by. Or to present to the kid the concept of self-actualization. Those thoughts arose much, much later, once deprived of spiritual anesthesia, and he had wrought much damage and heartache. Mikey’s uncle tried, but Mikey was an ungrateful little shit.

Maybe Mikey was only half-ruined. Maybe the part of him his dad had contributed would help to minimally offset the despair Kathryne fostered. Mikey was at the age when he had not entirely grown past his need for the traditionally contrived love of his parents. It remained a vestigial reflex that infrequently resurfaced.

Any kid in elementary school has a natural propensity to use a magic pen. Mikey was no exception. Kids operate largely intuitively, tapping into a higher state of consciousness they slough off as they mature. He was at the kitchen table, alternating between doing homework and doodling random things.

The magic pen was in Mikey’s hand. He did not remember picking it up. He paused over his school book and his eyes fell on a passage about World War Two. He found the hand attached to his arm inserting a comma between two words. Instantly, there was a deep explosion in his mind, the totality of the idea, of the battle described, contracted and then expanded with unbridled energy, imprinting itself into Mikey’s consciousness.

He was there. He heard the guns. He heard the screams of the wounded. He tasted Death, abound. Those present could not see Mikey; he was a spectral observer. He was enraptured. This was way cooler than flipping your score in Asteroids. Mikey was so consumed with the enormity of it all, he did not notice that the panoramic view had dimmed and then disappeared entirely.

He was left sitting in the kitchen chair. His system was in shock. Reality had been turned upside down and inside out. But kids have a higher threshold for extremes and he quickly recovered. Of course, the thought immediately arose: What else can I do? Mikey put another comma in another passage and was again transported back in time.

He repeated this over and over, in all types of books. Spider-Man was particularly cool. Days later, he found himself in Kathryne’s bedroom. It was unoccupied. It was too early to ply her trade. He found himself inexplicably drawn to the little cabinet her TV sat on. Family photos and other mementos sat forgotten inside.

Mikey pulled out the green photo album and opened it. People were vaguely familiar, if not so much specifically, then by deducing their identity by their position to others. There was one of his brothers. The other one, Kathryne. Guy with mustache. Is that “uncle”…? Oh—Dad. Mikey found in the photo album two of the little memorial cards from Dad’s funeral. Not much left. The flag that had covered his casket had been relegated to the garage a long time ago. Memories are a nuisance.

Mikey sat, holding the little card. He read aloud his dad’s name, the day and year he was born, and when he was killed. Twenty-eight years old. Mikey did further calculations: six weeks to the day after his fourth birthday, dead. Eight weeks to the day before his dad’s twenty-ninth. Stupid math. Kathryne had eradicated most holidays from Mikey’s childhood, but somehow, St. Patrick’s Day, the day after Orphan Day, survived.

Mikey sat. He struggled to recall mythical Dad. His dad. If anything, he mourned an idea, a mental construct, not the man. A symbol of what his dad should represent. He had become an abstraction; a diminished phantasm of the past. What once was will never be. He thought he recalled jumping on Dad, one early morning, trying to rouse the paterfamilias for some oatmeal. A vague notion of playing ball with his dad and Aaron, the neighbor’s kid with whom he went to daycare at the Air Force base. It seemed he bit Aaron, blamed it on the ball, ran away from Dad into the house, and locked the door.

It did not amount to much. He took the card and sought out his magic pen. He took both into his room and shut the door. This formality was not necessary to maintain privacy. He read over the scripture on the card. Yeah, more God. He seems to get around. Mikey punctuated the Word. He was back at the funeral. The casket should have been closed, but Grandma needed to see her boy once more before the earth swallowed him.

It took a moment to recognize people. Kathryne was actually standing up front. He saw his two sometimes half-brothers. And himself. He bore witness to him giving his dad his Most Precious Thing, his Big Bird stuffed animal. His brother Mathew would later confess it was the most heart-wrenching, unselfish thing he had ever seen. The vision lapsed, echoing with the miserable sound of a twenty-one-gun salute.

Mikey was dumbfounded. He tried to process the totality of things. To be so close, yet so far. Farther than wherever his dad was then. Heaven, perhaps. As a Catholic, Purgatory was an option. Emotions, forsaken, buried deep down, atrophied, started to slowly slip from their shackles of contempt. They coalesced into one large, overwhelming need to be complete.

Mikey needed more, suddenly. A primordial longing for validation—for needing that connection that can be given exclusively by one’s progenitor consumed him with a fury. Mikey took the pen and attempted to make another mark. Resurrect Dad once more. The pen had run out of ink. Mikey took it for granted, as he did most things, that the magic would last. He of all people should have known better.

Tears ran down his face. He was cheated once again. This time, it was his fault. It did not ease his burden; it made it worse. There is an irreverent ebb and flow to emotions. It was good enough. It would have to be. The glass is not half full. There is no finger pointing at the moon.

____________________________________

Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of two novels published by Little, Brown: The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, and three story collections also published by Little, Brown: Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. Peter’s essay collection/ memoir, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Reading to Live and Living to Read was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Peter is also the editor of three non-fiction books/ oral histories for the McSweeney’s Voice of Witness Series: Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives, and Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-Au-Prince.  

Kenneth Andrus believes that “fiction is lying to tell the truth,” and he has been writing since the age of nine, when he discovered it was the only time he could lie and get away with it. His work can be found on the websites of Minutes Before Six and The Justice Arts Coalition, as well as A.B.O. Comix’s Queer Prisoners Poetry Anthology Vol. 2.

Cuban-born Fernando Rivas (AKA F. M. Martinez) is an award-winning music composer and writer. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music and is the recipient of one Grammy and two Emmys for his work in television. He has worked with Gloria Estefan, Cindy Lauper, Tito Puente, and Celia Cruz among others. As a writer he has recently received awards and recognition from PEN America and American Short Fiction. In February of 2024 one of his essays was included in an exhibition of art by incarcerated persons, Presidential Portraits Reimagined, which took place at the Lincoln Cottage in Washington, DC, and was reviewed on NPR. His poetry, essays and short stories appear on The Minutes Before Six, Justice Arts Coalition, Prison Journalism Project, The Marshall Project and Evening Street Press websites. One of his short stories, “Contraband”, was also included in a recent Pen America anthology. His poems have also been featured in the Mend Journal published by Syracuse University, and the Beyond Bars journal published by Georgia State University. Mr. Rivas is currently nearing the end of a federal sentence at Seagoville FCI in Texas.

Steven Perez is located at the Connally Unit Texas State Prison. He is an inmate creative writing teacher for the UT Austin English Department. His memoir work has been published by American Short Fiction, PEN America, the Texas Observer, and in the UT Austin English Department’s 2017 Pen City Writers Literary Journal. He is currently working on his debut book.

David M. Snyder is originally from Upstate New York but moved to Austin, Texas when he was four. He has spent the last sixteen years striving to improve the quality of his life and that of his cosmic community. On November 15, 2011, he took formal Refuge, or shelter, in the Buddha. He took vows to “Do no harm” and to “Liberate all sentient beings.”

Adam Soto is the author of This Weightless World and Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep: Ghost Stories (Astra House 2021/ 2022). A former Michener-Copernicus Foundation Fellow, he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives with his wife in Austin, TX, where he is a teacher and a senior editor at American Short Fiction. He is currently working on his second novel.

*

About HT’s Institute for Justice and Equity

Huston-Tillotson University’s Institute for Justice and Equity (IJE) is dedicated to advancing and applying justice and equity knowledge. IJE aims to infuse equity principles and practices into what we do at HT—teaching, learning, research, administration, service, and community engagement.

About Huston-Tillotson University

Huston–Tillotson University is a private historically black university in Austin, Texas. Established in 1875, Huston–Tillotson University was the first institution of higher learning in Austin.