by Amy Clark

The hypotheticals started maybe six months into the relationship. My boyfriend and I were at the new square-shaped pizza place on Valencia when he swallowed his bite, cleared his throat, and asked, “What would you do if we walked in here and all your ex-boyfriends were sitting around a table together, staring at you?”

He held his Coke at his lips, his eyes on mine. “Would you cry?”

“I’d probably have a panic attack,” I said.

“Would you talk to them?”

“Why are you asking?”

“I’m just so curious about how people respond to weird situations,” he said. He had always been curious. It was something that had drawn me to him—he peppered our time together with open-ended questions, ones that gently shone a light on parts of my interior world I found too boring or shameful to share uninvited. But in this question, there was no gentle light, no reassuring touch of hand.

“I guess I’d probably still have a panic attack, and leave.”

“What if they weren’t sitting together? What would you do then?” he asked, leaning forward.

I looked away and changed the subject.

But the questions didn’t stop. In the morning, after our usual lazy kisses, he whispered, “What would you do if you woke up and your exes were just standing there, at the foot of your bed? And they were like, ‘we want to get back together.’”

“I’d be confused,” I said.

“Yeah, but what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, turning over.

I couldn’t escape. Over coffee: “What would you do if you were on an airplane and the safety video was your ex-boyfriends doing a cringey rap about you?”

Before I left for work: “What would you do if you get to work and your exes show you a petition they’ve signed to get your citizenship revoked, and when you ask them why, they say it’s because you’re so small?”

He was the kind of man who always brought me back a little pastry every time he went to get coffee, who could laugh off a missed bus or a dropped glass, something I’d never had before in a relationship. Everything else was good, so I felt I ought to just let him have his fun. I resolved to take the questions in stride, but each time he conjured one, I felt an unrelenting queasiness that could only be described as despair.

So I asked him to stop. We were on our way back from a new draft cold brew bar, cold brews in hand, and I said, “Hey, can we cool it on the hypotheticals about my ex boyfriends?”

He was silent, and I added, “I’m really happy, I just feel like—this one little thing between us is confusing me.”

“I guess,” he finally said, “I don’t see the harm in them. It’s not like this stuff is actually going to happen.”

“I know,” I said, trying to put the situation back together, “sorry. It’s just a weird thing for me.”

“Hmm.”

We sipped in silence. On the way home, I pointed out a colorful bird and he said nothing.

As we got into bed that night, he turned to me and said, “What would you—” and then he stopped. “Oh, sorry. I forgot I’m not allowed to do that anymore.”

“No,” I said, “You can ask.”

“Well, I was thinking. What would you do if aliens came down to earth and singled you out specifically to come aboard and be studied, and when you get on board the aliens point to these tanks and in the tanks are bodysuits, and they’re all your ex-boyfriends, and all your ex boyfriends it turns out were just aliens doing research on you?”

Before I could answer, I was crying. He sighed and turned back to his phone.

He stopped asking me anything else. Even when we were distracted, watching a movie, I could hear his thoughts churning, the world a theme park in which to install ex-boyfriend-themed rides. He sent relentless texts about aquariums and NBC sitcoms and jail, all featuring one or all of my exes, and sent follow up “?”s when I didn’t respond. When I said I didn’t want to answer he would just change the hypothetical. When I broke down, said I couldn’t do it anymore, said I felt like I really was going crazy, he put his toothbrush in a Ziploc bag and called himself an Uber. I talked him out of it, in the end. I apologized and he patted my head and agreed to let up on the questions.

And then one night, I stepped into a vegan ramen restaurant where he had asked to meet after work and saw them there: my ex-boyfriends. He was at the head of the table, beer in hand, and they sat around him, four of them, their arms draped over the backs of their chairs. He caught my eye and made a hook with his finger to beckon me.

I did indeed feel the sizzle of a burgeoning panic attack. It took effort to walk over to him, but I thought running away might be cowardly. He held my gaze, bottle at his lips.

Faltering, I took his beer from him and let it fall to the ground. It landed with a clunk and spun around, beer pooling out of its mouth. He continued to watch me.

I turned around and took off running. I ran up and up to the top of a hill and threw up on a tree, the wind and my blood howling in my ears. I wanted to go back inside and ask him a thousand questions: how he did it, what he’d told them, how long he’d planned it. But I knew there was no point, that he was done, that he already had his answer: this is what I would do, this is what I did.

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Review by Emma Greathead

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A mysterious painting left in the studio of a deceased artist throws a gallery owner’s comfortable life into turmoil. What begins as a quest for answers spirals into an all-consuming fixation, threatening to rip away Fairchild Moss’s sanity, his romantic endeavors, and the quiet life he’s worked hard to achieve. Set in 1970s Detroit, Peter Gooch’s SEREN is a psychological thriller that explores greed, desire, and a soul-sucking obsession.  

A former artist turned gallery owner becomes transfixed with a painting left behind by the late artist, Norris Bainbridge, just days after Bainbridge’s sudden death. While others barely glance at the painting, dismissing it as a picturesque winter scene, Moss’s eyes keep “returning to a spot six inches in from the left-hand edge where a small circular depression indented the thick impasto of oil paint. Barely visible from a distance more than six feet was the imprint of a female nipple.”  

Bainbridge had no reputation for affairs, public or otherwise, and he never allowed anything as personal as desire to surface through his artwork. The anomaly leaves Moss deeply intrigued. His curiosity takes him through the galleries of Detroit, to the secluded peninsula of Keweenaw, and all the way to Paris as he hunts for the truth behind the painting and the faceless muse who inspired it. His quest begins as a descent through self-discovery, awakening sexual desire, but ultimately leads to Seren—the human embodiment of greed.  

The reader encounters Seren only in small glimpses, though there’s an unmistakable sense of menace surrounding her: “She’s a ghost. No one will notice her haunting the galleries. Mayhap she’ll cross paths with another hungry painter? A sculptor?” … “Her anticipation tastes vaguely of copper, like blood in the lungs.”  

Moss’s eventual encounter with Seren feels like a long-awaited reward. Yet as the tension reaches its peak, that reward shatters into a catastrophic fever dream, disorienting the reader as completely as it does Moss.

For most of the novel, readers are left in the dark about who, or what, Seren truly is, which makes her character all the more fascinating. Moss’s eventual encounter with Seren feels like a long-awaited reward. Yet as the tension reaches its peak, that reward shatters into a catastrophic fever dream, disorienting the reader as completely as it does Moss. After inviting Seren to his secluded cottage in Michigan’s upper-peninsula, Moss experiences a vision, described with: “The beast’s head grew from the pale torso of a child dressed in a bathing costume. Moss recoiled in horror. Before his eyes the face of the animal transformed into that of a young girl, delicate features haloed by heavy black hair.” Gooch delivers a surreal combination of suspense, of horror, of dread. His precision with language and imagery lends to a reading experience that is as hypnotic as it is unsettling. 

SEREN is the closest I’ll get to time travel. Gooch’s ability to pull a reader into the 1970s Midwestern art scene is remarkable—I found myself in Detroit alongside Moss, schmoozing with arrogant art patrons on their expensive yachts, and sitting at the Midtown Café across from the magnetic Claudine, who stole my heart as quickly as she poured Moss’s signature Chartreuse. 

Gooch combines his studies and extensive background in artistry with his accounts of Midwestern art culture, making SEREN an immersive masterpiece with multidimensional characters, vivid scenery, and mysteries that had me glued to the page.

Gooch combines his studies and extensive background in artistry with his accounts of Midwestern art culture, making SEREN an immersive masterpiece with multidimensional characters, vivid scenery, and mysteries that had me glued to the page. I wanted to comfort Moss—and simultaneously to shake some sense into him. His inability to see his own worth (and to see Claudine’s, for Christ’s sake!) made this novel impossible to put down.  

SEREN is not a mystery about a man in search of answers, but a twisted exploration of how desire and ambition can spill chaos across the canvas of existence. Moss is profoundly lonely, unmoved by status, wealth, or sex. He turns down staggering offers for the Bainbridge panting, hesitates to pursue romantic connections, and retreats to the shadows of his own gallery where he allows his assistant director to manage the demands of the outside world. What drives him instead is a deep, aching hunger for meaning—a painful yearning to become the artist he’d once been. Even as his creativity is rekindled through the motivation of Claudine, Moss remains unsatisfied. He reaches for something beyond him, and gradually, the Bainbridge painting transforms into a mirror for that longing.  

Moss’s journey takes him beyond the Bainbridge painting, turning into a path of self destruction fueled by his secret artistic yearning. His relationship with Seren, the enigmatic muse who holds the answers to his quest for knowledge, explores the dangerous imbalance between obsession and creation. It poses a haunting question: at what point does fascination become so consuming that one is willing to forsake the people who helped and guided them?

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by Patrick J. Zhou

Cousin is either on the spectrum or is very Chinese. Or, like most men, lacks social skills. Maybe it’s the newness, the spectacle, the intimidating performance of it all. Whatever the reason, Cousin declares his presence to the surrounding pews when he asks out loud in Mandarin, “What do people taste like?”

Before I can say anything, Mother, who’s been quietly translating the worship service into Cousin’s ear, whispers, “Show lovingkindness.” Her jujube-wrinkled forehead tilts—a reminder that mothers know their daughters. Cousin, meanwhile, bumps my shoulder as he necks for a good view of the chancel.

But on our trudge to the table too white and chaliced for a good old-fashioned butchering, Cousin slouches; the symbolism and all the hidden meanings in this place get him again. To cheer him up—or something—I whisper little catechisms, teach him some secrets. I explain the sacrament, the eating of no-longer bread but Godmeat, drinking no-longer wine but the transformational blood of Triune God, and I tease a feigned grimace when I warn him how dangerous it is for non-believers to eat it. “You never know what might happen,” I say of the charade. Obviously, it’s all a crock. My prodigal presence was Mother’s idea, her first rule, or punishment, for moving back into her house at twenty-seven years old. The second rule: Be a good cousin.

But a little fun never hurt anyone.

As the pastor gives Cousin the host, his mouth open like a whale, Cousin clamps a callow hand in mine. The hunger pulses through his clenched fingers, this thirst for communion, for a substance he won’t find here and, suddenly, I see all the bitterness he hasn’t swallowed. It’s why they all come here don’t they, having been sold an idea of a better place, of refuge. There’s something free in his complete lack of contempt, some sweetness in that living. Is it really naïveté, or is it my cynicism spitting on the different world of his experience? Meanwhile, mother’s pithy religious truisms susurrate in my ears like a mosquito: “Love is patient” or “The fruit of the spirit is” or “Love covers a multitude of sins”, etc. My only revelation then though, the only sin I want forgiven, is being cruel to Cousin. So I let him hold my hand while he skips back to our pew.

Choir voices raise to the oak-beamed vault. Their haunting chant bounding off the stained glass and the old oak doors. That’s when Cousin’s face lurches, squelches. By instinct, my palms shoot out and quietly catch a teacup’s worth of his vomit. Cousin doesn’t notice, doesn’t mention what I hold. He’s too displeased at being made a new creation. “Disgusting,” he says, under the amens thrumming through the sanctuary. Then I feel something weighty in my hands; there, surrounded by a warm ferrous puddle of scarlet, a small chunk of flesh glistens, topped with a shred of flayed skin.

Mother leans over and across Cousin, who’s smacking the sticky taste off his tongue like an infant. She sees the horrific miracle in the hollow of my hands, and whispers with the smugness only mothers achieve, “Something strange will save you, baby.”

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by Sara Elkamel

for Huda Lutfi

Near the end
there are hands in the wind
and wind in the middle.

Because she demands it,
I pull the end of nothing
through the eye of nothing,

and hand nothing
back to her. Hunger
distends my tongue.

When we were young
we could never escape
the bare skin of our mothers.

Then strata of fabric
clocked them in the cold.
When I finally will say

I don’t think it’s true
my loneliness is something
I designed for myself

I’d like to imagine the wind
will run to turn back
the skin. In no time

time will eat what’s left
of the wind. I should keep
hidden from the light

the future of my hands.

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This spring, the 2026 Fiction Contest is judged by Dustin M. Hoffman. Dustin M. Hoffman writes fiction about working people. He’s the author of three short story collections: One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize), No Good for Digging (Word West Press), and, most recently, Such a Good Man (University of Wisconsin Press). He has published more than one hundred stories in journals including Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Witness, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and One Story. We asked Hoffman a few questions about how writing contests have helped shape his career, how to decide if a piece is ready to submit, and what piques his interest as a reader.

Third Coast (TC): How has support from writing contests helped to shape your career? What value do you see in submitting to writing contests? 

Dustin M. Hoffman (DMH): My first book, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, won the Prairie Schooner Raz/Shumaker Book Prize, and it was life changing. My weird stories about working people found pages and found readers thanks to the support of University of Nebraska Press. My wonderful agent, Heather Carr, contacted me after reading this first book, which started our partnership that I treasure. For a short story writer like me, writing contests present an especially important opportunity to support the form I love so dearly, a form that might find a harder time reaching readers if not for contests with small presses and journals. I’ve been so lucky to win a couple short story contests at great magazines (Redivider and Ninth Letter). The financial support is not insignificant, and I aimed to reinvest the prize money back into my writing by buying a ton of books and paying for submission fees and just affording some time to make more art.

So, there are very practical rewards, of course, in the financial support and audience. But let’s not neglect, too, how contests offer this incredible psychological boost. We’re all spending these countless hours rattling thousands of words into a computer, deleting most of them, reshaping the rest again and again, and it’s easy to slip into feeling like these efforts might be in vain. The validation contests offer from hardworking editors and generous judges provides that beacon writers need to keep at this, to write our next great story that might have remained undiscovered.

But let’s not neglect, too, how contests offer this incredible psychological boost. We’re all spending these countless hours rattling thousands of words into a computer, deleting most of them, reshaping the rest again and again, and it’s easy to slip into feeling like these efforts might be in vain. The validation contests offer from hardworking editors and generous judges provides that beacon writers need to keep at this, to write our next great story that might have remained undiscovered.

TC: What advice do you give to a writer who’s wondering, “Is my piece ready to submit?”

DMH: My students ask me this a great deal, and I do think this is a wonderful thing a trusted teacher or writer friend can offer: the confirmation that the work is ready to go out into the world. But I still ask myself this every time I write a story. I go through so many drafts, and that’s the place a story always comes alive for me, in the revising. Sometimes it’s twenty drafts and sometimes it’s ten years, and sometimes the stories come together like magic. I’m a fan of reading a work aloud to see if it entertains me after I’ve set it aside for a while. So much of what’s worked for me is getting outside my story, separating in some way with time or voice or audience. Failing that, I love the piece of advice from Noy Holland, “If I reach a point where I am glazing over, or replacing, one day, a comma I omitted the day before, then I let the story go, for better or worse, and move on.”

I want new. I want weird. I want the story I could never have imagined would be possible. 

TC: How does your life experience inform your reading and evaluation as you read contest
submissions?

DMH: Oh, it might affect me some. I come from a working-class background. I write about jobs and the anxiety of money a great deal, because this has been such a big part of my life, and I tend to appreciate when writers recognize this part of living in our world that works us too hard. But I don’t come to reading to relate to a work. I want to learn about people’s unique experiences and cultures and voices. I want new. I want weird. I want the story I could never have imagined would be possible. 

TC: As a judge, what kind of work do you find most often piques your interest? Is there anything in particular you’d love to see from entrants? 

DMH: I love work stories and the specialized language and secret details that only someone who dwells behind the “Employees Only” can know. I also love surreal and magical works. Maybe the secret to my readerly heart is humor. It’s the gateway emotion. If you can make me laugh first, I’m willing to go just about anywhere with you. 

TC: What book is on your bedside table right now? 

DMH: I’m always reading too many books at once. What I’m reading right now: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Two of my amazing colleagues’ books: Renée Branum’s Defenestrate and Allison Joseph’s Dwelling; I consider myself ridiculously lucky to be working with these geniuses. Adam Schuitema’s forthcoming novel Half a Million Minutes (it’s incredible!). And I just finished up Miranda July’s collection No One Belongs Here More Than You after loving All Fours. 

This spring, the 2026 Third Coast Poetry Contest is judged by Karyna McGlynn. Karyna McGlynn is a queer writer, visual artist, and educator, and the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande Books, including 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse (Lambda Literary Finalist) and Hothouse (NYT Editor’s Choice). They are Director of Creative Writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts. We asked McGlynn a few questions about how writing contests have supported their career, how to decide if a piece is ready to submit, and what piques their interest as a reader.

Third Coast (TC): How has support from writing contests helped to shape your career? What value do you see in submitting to writing contests?

Karyna McGlynn (KM): Writing contests have been genuinely formative for me. Not just in terms of recognition, but in helping me stay in the long, often quiet middle of a writing life. Early on, even being longlisted or shortlisted helped my work become legible beyond my immediate community: editors reached out, conversations started, doors cracked open. Just as important was the confidence boost—those small external signals that I was connecting with people across the page. 

Submitting work (imperfectly, bravely) is a muscle we have to build and maintain. To say “I’m a writer” is also to say “I’m willing to let my work be read and considered.” Contests create a focused, meaningful occasion for that practice, and they remind us that putting work into the world is part of the art.

Equally vital is the practice itself. Submitting work (imperfectly, bravely) is a muscle we have to build and maintain. To say “I’m a writer” is also to say “I’m willing to let my work be read and considered.” Contests create a focused, meaningful occasion for that practice, and they remind us that putting work into the world is part of the art.

TC: What advice do you give to a writer who’s wondering, “Is my piece ready to submit?”

KM: I usually say: it should feel finished enough that you’ve made all the decisions you know how to make right now, but not so precious that rejection would stop you from writing the next thing. If you’re mostly tinkering rather than discovering anything new, that’s often a sign the piece is ready to leave home.

I also encourage writers to ask a more useful question than “Is it perfect?” How about: “Is this piece doing what it wants/needs to do?” If the answer is yes (or even a confident “mostly”), that’s enough for now! Submission isn’t a verdict. Submit your work to things. If you receive a slate of rejections, come back to it later with fresh eyes. 

TC: As a judge, what kind of work most often piques your interest? Is there anything you’d love to see from entrants?

KM: Your title is basically the first line of your poem; it needs to be strong. Don’t waste that opportunity to situate the reader and/or establish the attitude or problem of the poem. Poets are supposed to be masters of evocative compression; prove it with your title. 

I’m deeply drawn to musicality—language that has sick textures and sonics and rhythms. I’m most excited when sound is married to voice, risk, and visual specificity. I want to feel the poem leaning toward something it doesn’t already know.

My biggest piece of advice is to be more specific. Too many poems are full of vague abstraction and emotional shorthand. Think of yourself like a film director. Are you giving your readers a world to inhabit? Are there enough sensory details for them to feel transported?  

I’m deeply drawn to musicality—language that has sick textures and sonics and rhythms. I’m most excited when sound is married to voice, risk, and visual specificity. I want to feel the poem leaning toward something it doesn’t already know.

I’m not looking for a particular subject or style. I read widely and eclectically, and I’m always surprised by what hooks me. What I love most is work that trusts its own strangeness, that doesn’t rush to explain itself, and that feels awake to the pressures that shaped it. 

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by Ingrid Wendt

The first time ever I heard your six-note chatter from deep 

           inside my palm-thatched roof, no more than five minutes past

                        lights-out, ping went the strings of attraction. No night passed 

            without your bedtime serenade, and when at last we met—your tiny feet

spread wide on the bathroom ceiling, your tender skin nearly translucent (between 

            your oversized eyes and mine, invisible lightning)—I finally grasped

                        the measure of your devotion: not a bug to be seen, you were shielding

            my skin from irritation, as you also do outside, under the naked bulb that attracts

even more of them, as does Maribel’s bulb, next door, though why Maribel had fifteen

            of you one evening, when I came to call, I cannot fathom. 

                        But that same night at bedtime, as if this were an elegant, grand

            hotel, centered on my pillow, instead of a candy kiss, your greeting:

a small, black grain of rice with a tiny, white hat. Look at that, I preened,

            and went to my desk to write it down. And when the sun again splashed 

                        the eastern horizon, there, on my desk, the second! Of all the umpteen,

            randomly scattered pages, you’d chosen “Yucatán Gecko.”  Who needs

fifteen suitors competing? Eat your heart out, Maribel. My Yucatán gecko has sass.       

   

“Ode to My Yucatán Gecko” appears in Issue 55/56 of Third Coast, forthcoming Spring 2026

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