The first time I saw Lake I was sitting on the bench between sets, waiting for the burn in my chest to subside. She walked past me to the big cage and slung her duffel to the floor. I watched with idle interest as she wrapped her wrists with soft black straps and wrangled her hair into a high loop. Her rose-colored Alphaletes came up well above her hips, and she wore a long-sleeved crop top that announced in block letters
NO TIME FOR RATS.
NO TIME FOR SNAKES.
When Nayana came out of the garbing room, Noah forgot all about the pinworms. He forgot about the perianal tape test he’d just done on the sentinel mouse in Room 8, and he forgot about the disinfecting he’d have to do for the rest of the week. He forgot about the yellow paper gown, elastic hair bonnet, and rubber gloves he was wearing. He knew only the ray of Nayana’s smile, her scent of lemon and ginger.
“There’s a pinworm issue in Room 8,” he said, floating down the hall behind her. “But don’t worry—your mouseys are fine.”
Excerpted from Fairfield County
When asked what number Pal O Mine should run under, Moses had said, “Number seven or number three. Them’s divine numbers, alright. God made this whole world in seven days. And He’s a trinity: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Cain’t go wrong with three neither.”
It wasn’t often that a Negro at the racetrack was asked his opinion such as this, but Moses was respected by the horse’s owner, so when it came time to prepare for the 1938 Carolina Jessamine Invitational, Mrs. Pynchon-Grant went right up to Moses and told him to pick the number.
The number seven would have put the stallion too far right of the field and closer to the stands of crowds, and so would have caused further distraction that would have leaked through Pal’s blinders and earplugs. That far out in the field and the thunder of the spectator’s cheers would drown out the footfalls of Pal’s competitors, and so the number three would put the colt closer to the center of action and increase the odds of victory—should he be able to run.
The dog is crossing a circle. Dawn light catching silver strands on a gray coat, saliva on a panting tongue, a red collar. A lost dog.
For an instant, we lock eyes, then I continue around and take the north exit. I’m in a hurry to get to the meet-up point. My first time running with others and I’m dreading it, but doctor’s orders and all that. Besides, I’ve promised my husband. I will be late, I will be late, I will be late, I say through my teeth, then pull over to look for the dog.
By EMILY NEMENS
She was running along the Manhattan side of the East River—this was in the bucolic “before” times, prior to when the city tore up the East Village’s riverside park, chucking its eighty-year-old trees and modernist amphitheater and ebullient perennial flower beds in the name of future flood mitigation—when she felt a curtain being snapped up the back of her left calf, krrrrrik! More lightning than pain. At first. Then, it became very painful. A hot pain that ran an invisible line down the meat of her calf, like those sexy stockings with seams, but the seams had turned carnivorous and were nibbling at her flesh with tiny razor teeth. Running farther, even slow-jogging the 1.3 miles home, was out of the question (her mental math: more pain multiplied by less time in transit, or less pain times more minutes; the latter had the lower sum), so she slowly limped back from the river, putting as little weight on her left foot as possible. She wondered what she would do.
Dead Man’s Association meets every Wednesday evening at Padiyappa’s Tea Stall & Smoke Shop. I am the president and the primary focus of the club. There is only one table at Padiyappa’s, but at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesdays, no local would dare take my spot. It’s been this way for the past fifteen years. The tea stall boy, a new chap, hands us stainless steel tumblers of piping hot tea and then hangs around to stare at me.
“Po da,” I say to him, eyeing his hairless chest, visible because his top two buttons are not fastened. “This is not a circus. Let me be.”
Reggie pulled his truck up the driveway and past the old goat pasture, a field of knee-high brome that now fed only a rusted tractor, not a buck or a nanny in sight. The only good thing about his wife’s death all those years ago—he could finally let go of the shaggy herd she had loved so much, fill the freezer, and focus on the more agreeable ruminants.
Reggie killed the ignition next to the house. One coal-colored cloud floated like a top hat above his yellow lopsided rancher. Past that, the afternoon sun painted the foothills a fiery mauve. In the distance a trio of bluffs gave way to an abstract canvas, just cattle and rust-red desert smudging south to New Mexico and on into the Navajo Nation.
By LIZ DEWOLF
The buzzer rattles the empty room. Nearly empty—there’s the bed behind the wooden screen, the couch where Laurel sits in her underwear. Since Arda’s text that afternoon, she’s waited restlessly for him to arrive, imagining his route from where she lived with him on the Asian side of Istanbul to her new apartment on the European side: the narrow streets down to the ferry station, the boat churning through silver water, the near-vertical climb to her sixth-floor walkup in Beyoğlu. She presses the button that unlocks the building’s entrance and decides not to get dressed.
Arda enters her apartment without knocking. “Mutlu yıllar,” he says, though it’s now several weeks into 2013. For the first time since Laurel’s lived in Turkey, they didn’t celebrate the New Year together.
By JULIANA LEITE
Translated by ZOË PERRY
Reviewed by JAY BOSS RUBIN
In the opening chapter of this subtle epic, the centenarian narrator Natalia confides: “At this point in life, I’d say that going on forever or for too long is a bad decision, a very bad one; what’s nice is to exist and then stop existing, to exist for a while and then be able to change the subject.” In other words, if the transition between life and death is an abrupt one, then so be it. “[L]et’s be done with it,” she says, “though it would be nice to have the time to spritz on some perfume beforehand.”
When I first encountered this sentiment in Juliana Leite’s Exemplary Humans, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry, I took it be a bit of a bluff. It reminded me of a bumper sticker I saw a couple of years ago in Portland, Oregon, that read: “I ♥ AGING & DYING” (which I interpreted as an existentialist rejoinder to proclamations of commercial allegiance—“I ♥ Mr Plywood” and so on—so common in my hometown). But by the end of Leite’s novel, which takes place primarily in Rio de Janeiro and Petrópolis, Brazil, and spans that country’s lengthy dictatorship, I was convinced that Natalia’s breezy acceptance of her own mortality was absolutely serious. It is not only possible, but strongly advised to love aging and dying. It isn’t easy, though. To transcend dread, and transform it into something more palatable, a unique kind of emotional intelligence is required, and so is a talent for adjusting one’s perspectives. Natalia is the novel’s exemplar of both these qualities.
We are thrilled to announce that “The Hare,” written by Ismael Ramos and translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers, and “Inês” by Joāo Pedro Vala have been selected for the O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction for 2026. Both stories were originally published in The Common Online in 2025. An anthology of the winning stories, edited by Tommy Orange, will be released this September from Vintage.
In the prize announcement, series editor Jenny Minton Quigley writes, “Many of this year’s O. Henry Prize winners manifest a youthful, new way of seeing in their stories. If our world is to be saved it will be by the genius of the next generations.“
View the full list of winners and read more about the prize at LitHub.
Congratulations to Ismael Ramos, Jacob Rogers, Joāo Pedro Vala, and all the winners!
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