May 2026
Ten stories picked by Ani King
Ani King (they/them) is a queer, gender non-compliant writer and artist from Michigan. Most recently, Ani is a Monarch Queer Literary Award recipient, with work on the Wigleaf Top 50 Long List, in Best Small Fictions 2025 and coming soon in Best Microfiction 2026. Ani’s first full length flash collection, Family Night, will be available from Mason Jar Press in Fall 2026. Find out more at aniking.net.
Find them on social media:
https://bsky.app/profile/aniking.bsky.social
https://www.instagram.com/aniking_author/
Find out more about their upcoming flash fiction collection:
FAMILY NIGHT (Mason Jar Press, October 2026) is by turns a lyrical celebration of queerness and an exploration of family and loss, often through a lens of magical realism. Ani King’s collected flash fiction stories explore relationships and connections: a teen girl attempting to summon her missing mother home with cigarette smoke and yacht rock songs; two sisters disputing how to care for an unhealthy elderly unicorn; a woman accidentally raising two daughters from the bones of her long-dead pet rabbits.
If you aren’t familiar with their work, here’s one of their pieces to start things off:
Nervous Thing (Ani King | Pithead Chapel)
Why I like it (MK): This piece pulls its reader deep into the central relationship between the narrator and the girl they love. It’s full of such startling specific details and I love the rhythm of it. When I talk about breathless sentences, I often talk about how they can be used to bring real emotions to life, and the effect for me here is so powerful. I feel this deep inside myself. I feel like I need to hold my breath as I read. Then there’s the image of the horse, how we weave between real and surreal, how the image progresses from one paragraph to the next. Such a rich and spellbinding piece.
For this month’s collection of stories, Ani has picked the theme “embracing the animal as a way to bring out the human.”
Do You Want to Become a Wolf (Elena Zhang | Emerge Literary Journal)
Why I like it (AK): I love this story so much that apparently I have bookmarked it three times in the same browser, included it in two newsletters in one year, and have sent it to the same people multiple times saying “you HAVE to read this!” This is a story that uses transformation in a way that I think lets the reader name that transformation: for me it hits hard as a metaphor for letting your true self come out, and inviting others to do the same, and the call for the transformed wolf’s sisters to “come and see, come and pray” gives me goosebumps every time I read it. I was also raised in a strict Pentecostal environment for the first half of my childhood, so the church details used are so relatable, I feel like I can see and live this moment.
Prompt: Take a mundane moment and add the intrusion of something animal for your point of view character. Maybe it’s physical, maybe it’s interior, but try focusing on the small, sensory details.
Changeling Bramble (Myna Chang | Fractured Lit)
Why I like it: One of my favorite things in writing is when an author entirely uses accessible, known words chained together in a way that reads and feels like they are new, as if revealing some secret combination that amps up the sense of mystery and oddness. The combination of specific, shared animal transformation and poetically arranged language bring this moment between mother and sisters out with so much tension. I really feel the confusion and urgency and urge so fully through this whole piece, and for me I think that’s because the body tells so much of the story through sensory experience: tasting death, briar thorns sprouting from fingertips, for example.
Prompt: Take a work in progress (especially if you have one that feels like it’s a little dry) go all in on poetic, sensory description with it—stick to what your character feels with their body, their senses and not what they think; to make this more challenging, try to tell the moment in this way entirely through the body itself.
The Wife Hunters (Lindz McLeod | Twin Pies Literary)
Why I like it: Like “Do You Want to Become a Wolf”, McLeod uses the animal to create a sense of kinship, of sisterhood, and brings in a layer of description of the sisters as if they are fruit to be picked or plucked, and I think this is done in a way that pushes the animal+human even further into its unique liminal space. The language is lush and, while the imagery is centered on a hunted prey animal, there is this beautiful sense of resistance and I think the metaphor is so elevated by this approach. This is another one I re-read and re-connect with regularly.
Prompt: Write a story where animal characteristics are used to convey a sense of pending danger for your main character(s).
Fox (K-Ming Chang | Vestal Review)
Why I like it: K-Ming Chang is one of my favorite writers, especially when it comes to girls, women, the body, and letting the female body be messy, unsettling, gross. In this story, there’s a layer of pending first menstruation, boys taking and not returning names (the implication is anything can be thieved away), and again, we meet a sense of unwillingness and resistance on the part of the girl. But this isn’t quiet, the narrator summons a fox demon, and in a way that’s tied to Megan Fox’s name, to the time in life the narrator exists in—the fox demon offers up violence in response to the boys and their taking, and the narrator opens up and lets the demon in, and unlike getting a period, this doesn’t hurt the girl at all.
Prompt: Write a story where someone reacts to an everyday evil or hurt by summoning something malicious. Consider this an opportunity to dig into your own cultural background for relevant options, or thing about demonizing an everyday object for use.
Full On Badger (Gill O’Halloran | SmokeLong Quarterly)
Why I like it: I love the use of the badger costume and tutu as these permissive vehicles for upending expected gender behavior. There’s something very relatable as a gender non-compliant person for me around the way people react to the costumed narrator who has shed the usual trappings of femininity, and I am such a fan of the overtness of the voice:
You love the thrill of lacy frills around your sturdy man-thighs; I love the incognito intimacy, the unbegged attention. Guys pat me, awkward but fond. Women stroke my stripey snout while confessing their furry fantasies.
Prompt: Draft a piece where your character says exactly what they want or like about something happening in the story, and then write around whether or not that statement is true. Bonus points for your character coming to a revelation about themselves by the end.
Dolphins (Shell St. James | Claudine Literary)
Why I like it: Human beings really like to use animal metaphors and behaviors to explain or justify our own actions and I love how in this story the dolphins have a presence from the start (because of the title), so when we get to the end, to the fact that dolphins don’t actually mate for life, the relationship between the narrator and the lover (or ex-lover) they are addressing has been touched on with detail that spins out so much more story than is on the page. It’s incredibly emotionally effective.
Prompt: Describe a relationship between two characters by using untrue statements about an animal, or animals in general.
Rabbit Heart (Aime Keeble | Split Lip)
Why I like it: I think this is one of the most effective, devastating uses of the animal as heart I’ve ever read. The rabbit is a prey animal known for it’s vulnerability, so I love how it works as a stand in for the heart. The detail of the rabbit’s softness in the story, plus the layer of what we collectively know about rabbits comes together here to give the effect of an even larger story within a small space. I also think one of the most brilliant things about this story is how the rabbit hearts exist in their own part of the story, that they aren’t just contained inside a body.
Prompt: Write a body part as an animal. Consider a less well-known or even less critical-seeming part of the body.
The Office Siren (Katharine Tyndall | Hex Literary)
Why I like it: I think using a mythical creature story may be a little bit of a thematic cheat, but I love how it offers an opportunity to alter and explore the marriage of human and other animal characteristics in a way that separation might not. In this case, I think the office siren is representative of experiences a lot of people have, especially women, and she acts as a vehicle for going further in response, in this case literally devouring the terrible boss. And the imagery of the office siren doing so as well as returning home is so fantastic.
Prompt: If your character were a mythical creature, especially in a mundane setting, what does that open up for them in terms of reaction behaviors? Try exploring this in free writing or a new draft.
The Geometry of Unicorns (Melanie Maggard | Ghost Parachute)
Why I like it: Oh look, another slight cheat, and this time we have mythical animal as possibility, and I especially love a unicorn! I am also impressed with how relatable Leslie Abbott’s boredom is, how I feel it in my own body, and how Maggard spins out from there in such a physical way—even though so much of this is internal, it’s active, it is constantly moving through the way Leslie interacts with her drawing, her body, and on the whole, this story is utterly magical.
Prompt: Write a scene where one of your characters imagines the freedom they would have if they could transform into an animal, and make it as active as you can.
The Coconut Crab Ate My Baby (Melissa Llanes Brownlee | Tiny Molecules)
Why I like it: This story travels to the dark side of using animal nature to explain humanity, and I think this is a masterclass in misdirection as a storytelling device to tell us something far far larger than the moment as described.
Prompt: Free write for at least 15 minutes from a starting point where your character(s) blame a tragedy on an animal. See where it ends up!
What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?
Next month’s selection will be chosen by Cole Beauchamp and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 16th June.
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Wow! The wolf piece is fantastic...love the use of anaphora.
😍😍😍