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SmokeLong Quarterly

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Tiny Shadows

Story by Maryanne Stahl (Read author interview) June 15, 2008

Art by Robinson Accola

When he got home, she was gone.

At first, he wasn’t aware of anything amiss. The dog snoozed in the yard; the mail lay on the dining room table. The furniture, which he had inherited, stood in place.

He made himself some coffee (French pressed) and carried his cup into the living room. That’s when he began to intuit something off in the air, to sniff the delicate absence of her scent.

His eye was inevitably drawn to one of his earliest prizes. The Fire Prevention Week Essay Award had tilted in its frame, so he moved to straighten it. Then he saw that the Certificate of Excellence in Punctuation lay crooked. Further, his letter of selection into Volume XXXIII of America’s Poets on Either Side of the Mississippi had fallen, and the actual tome ($19.95; $22.95 with a gilded frontispiece) had been shelved upside down!

Something was noticeably different about the light.

Then he saw the letter, propped against the photograph of him accepting his Trophy of Good Standing (luckily his misspelled name was out of focus in the shot), written in her inimitable (but somewhat larger than usual) hand:

She had had enough; she spelled it out for him: I can no longer bear to live beneath the twenty-seven tiny shadows of your accomplishments.

About the Author

Maryanne Stahl has published two novels and a bunch of other stuff. She’s a contributing editor at Ink Pot/Lit Pot. Check out her website at http://www.maryannestahl.com.

About the Artist

Robinson Accola creates artwork for SmokeLong Quarterly as needed.

This story appeared in Issue Twenty-One of SmokeLong Quarterly.
SmokeLong Quarterly Issue Twenty-One
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The SmokeLong Grand Micro Contest

Deadline November 15th!

The SmokeLong Grand Micro Contest (The Mikey) is now an annual competition celebrating and compensating the best micro fiction and nonfiction online.

The grand prize winner of The Mikey is automatically nominated for Best Small Fictions and any other prize we deem appropriate. In addition, we will pay the grand prize winner $1000. Second place: $500. Third place $300. Finalists: $100. All finalists and placers will be published in the December ’25 issue of SmokeLong.

Previously published as well as previously unpublished work will be considered.