Shortlist – 2026 Gooseberry Pie Annual Writing Competition
by Kathryn Kulpa
You were nineteen. Stage age: 18, same as it had been three years ago when you lied your way into a job in the chorus, and there you still were, but out front at least, in the prologue at the Biograph, and he gave you a ride home and said you were too good for the chorus, you should go to Hollywood and be in pictures, and you told him about the modeling agency man who measured your face with a metal triangle and said you weren’t pretty enough and Dillinger said, Let him say that in front of me, Dillinger said, I’d shoot both his eyes out, and his car was so clean, even the rugs on the floor were clean, and you heard the crash and felt the car rock but it was like being underwater, there was blood on his face and a woman screaming from the other car but you were all right and he gave you a dime, told you to get on a streetcar, you didn’t want to get mixed up in any scandal, you were a swell kid, you were going places, and you stumbled away while the woman kept screaming and somewhere a police siren started to howl, but you kept out of it, stepped up on the streetcar like Little Miss Go-to-Meeting, clutching that dime in your hand, never even looked in your purse until the next day, and you never knew if he was hiding stolen loot or giving you a nest egg but that bankroll took you all the way west. By the time you dipped your toe in the Pacific he was shot dead. Even all those years later you’d never hear a word against him, and you told that reporter the same; he may have robbed banks, but he helped a lot of people. Like Robin Hood, the reporter said, and did you know Robin Hood was killed by a woman? She was a nun, and you said, Mister, I’ve been a lot of things, but a nun was never one of them.
Kathryn Kulpa is a New England-based writer with stories in BULL, Fictive Dream, Flash the Court, Ghost Parachute, and Milk Candy Review. Her work has been chosen for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Wigleaf longlist.
Photo by Vitaliy Shevchenko on Unsplash
