FICTION
2025
NYC Midnight: 500-Word Stories
NYC Midnight hosts writing competitions throughout the year that I submitted to a couple times in 2025. The premise is simple: writers are placed into groups and have 48 hours to write a story based on an assigned genre, object, and location or action.
I wrote three stories for this one, and ended up placing 6th overall.
Inheritance in Green and Yellow, acrylic on digital, 2025
The daughter of a deceased artist puts on one last performance.
11/14-11/16/25
500 words max, Round Three 6th place
Genre: Open
Object: A business card
Action: Appreciating
The Posthumous Exhibition, the sign says, and I could spit, I really could. Mom’s body not three days cold and they’ve already circled, swooped, and tidied up the entrails in warmly lit white rooms.
He flicked his card to me in between handshakes and hugs, aunt-coworker-cousin-him. Flashbulb veneers, stomach growling, “she was a singular artistic force,” the cardstock pilled against my palm, “a lightning rod.”
“The lightning,” I said and he wavered.
“Right. The retrospective’s on Saturday. You’ll be on the list, of course.”
Mom once stood on a corner in the fashion district and let people write their names on her body for twelve hours.
“How?”
“Sorry?”
Liar. “The performances,” I said. “They don’t exist anymore.”
He laughed.
The screens take up the whole room. She’s stretched thin and pressed flat, a clump of pixels over whitewashed walls. Someone bumps into me on their way through the door and once, mom broke mirrors into shards and put them back into a human shape while her hands bled.
He’s here, a flicker of white, teeth and hands. A cousin watches mom recite a list of plastic surgery procedures naked. A coworker is circling my mom’s mirror, finding bits of himself in the angles, laughing. I shove my hands in my coat pockets while other people hand dollar bills to the doorman.
“I’m on the list.”
She read me bedtime stories and did all the voices. She was a bad cook and a worse liar. Once I tried to paint her a picture for her birthday and knocked all the bottles over, phthalo green and burgundy and marigold on the hardwood, and she cheered and we pressed ourselves wet to the walls. I don’t remember what I’d tried to paint. She ran her fingers over our cheeks until we growled like tigers.
“Sweetheart, this is the best present in the world.”
At her funeral, they talked about her work. Her impact. The sound she made when she left, the only thing I knew she would’ve loved.
No one mentioned the day covered in paint. No one else could.
“So glad you made it!” he says. Behind him, a line of people approach mom with slips of paper in their hands – secrets, shames, prayers. She stares at me, unblinking, and eats the pages one by one.
“Where’s the art?” I ask. He pretends not to hear me.
“Do you have a favorite?”
Once, mom won an award. She used the statue to break the windows of the donors’ cars and spent a month in jail. They stopped giving her awards.
“Yes,” I say. He watches me walk away in broken mirror shards.
They’ve left the center of the room empty, the only thing mom would’ve loved.
I remove my coat and empty my pockets. Two tubes of acrylic – phthalo green, marigold. He notices too late.
“Are you okay?”
I smear myself. I growl like tigers. Mom stares at me from every wall, every wall, every wall.
I paint.