Yasuko Thanh: Fiction Contest Editorial
The delicate interplay between past and present, what we carry with us, what we leave behind, and what others take from us is rendered in pitch-perfect prose in “The Makeweight Piece.” This story is set during a distant war in which the starving and the dying cling to art as prayer. As worship. As a way to define who they once were. So much heart is packed between the lines of a story whose tone is at once tightly focused and expansive that my own heart staggers and cracks open. As a reader I’m dying to be touched and amazed.