Contest

The Easiest $14.25 a Word You'll Ever Make?

The literary magazine Opium has just announced the Shya Scanlon Seven-Line Prose Award, a $1,000 prize for the best story written in, well, seven lines. Here's a sampling from Scanlon's published work, a short-short called "Killing, riding, II":

"We weren't quite there yet but you knew to look behind us, and this seemed to matter. What did you see? Something pressed, is pressing, will not let comfort strip and enter us, bend us inward. Still, I took you forward and a leaning overtook me. Another kind of expectation. You said put it down and I did, but within moments I was not the same and you noticed, changed your mind, looked back and entered something I did not recognize, but made a name for, and forgot."

They say you have "an 8.5-inch margin" to play around in, but that's right up against the edges of the paper, isn't it? Better put a quarter-inch on each side just to be safe... The entry fee for the contest is $7.