Hello fellow strange pilgrims, our theme for this month’s micro challenge was Utopia and turns out y’all have a whole lot to say about that! We read over 600 entries for this challenge and present you the winner below. Aaand we’re also now open early for September’s challenge.

Drumroll please for the theme announcement (or a general cackling cacophony will also do!).

September Micro of the Month Theme is:

Marriage

Submit your micro

Send us your micros (300 words or less) before September 3rd midnight! Remember, it’s free to submit and the winner gets $30 + publication.

If you need a refresher on the details ↓

And now the winner of the August challenge!

Subscribe now

Today, they took me back to the river. I barely swim anymore. Sometimes they put me in a Tupperware container where I can dangle my legs. And I have to react to a music box. Sometimes they use a water gun on me. And I have to react to a plushie doppelganger of myself. Sometimes they put a crocodile head that moves by itself in the inflatable pool where the cat wheel is. And I have to react to a dancing squid toy. Sometimes I witness the hatching of a mystery egg. And I have to react to an octopus popsicle.

The mystery egg hatched a plastic penguin. They put half of the mystery egg’s shell on my head. I watch an anti-gravity water drop illusion. And I have to react.

Today, I heard a bird whistle for the first time. That’s what they said. They did an unboxing of merch. All the showerheads look like me. And I have to react.

Sometimes, there is a birthday sushi train. Sometimes, my bowl remains empty for a long time. I am on a diet, they said. So they show me a virtual fish on a tablet. And I have to react.

Sometimes, I turn on the faucet and get angry at the water.

Today, they strapped me into a harness and leash. The river looked different. I saw others like me. I strained at the leash, but I couldn’t go far. I strained for a long time. I got tired. When I woke up, they were gardening. They sprayed micro mist in my face. And I had to react.

Share

Contributor’s Note

I wrote OTTER out of an interest in the strange distance between care and control, and in the ways affection can become performance. I was thinking about captivity not only as a physical condition, but also as a relationship mediated by observation, entertainment, and the expectation to react. The piece grew from that tension between being cared for and being contained, and from the unsettling possibility that the two can begin to resemble each other.

Leave a comment

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, our Micro theme last month was CULTISH and we received hundreds of creepy, cool, hellishly funny, and also just plain pun entries. I hope you enjoy our pick as much as we did (how Aliyah packs so much in just a few lines is a feat to be witnessed).

We open for August’s Micro of the Month submissions in less than one week. The new theme will be announced via our newsletter sent out Sat, Aug 1st.

Subscribe now

The sound of the siren, and then girls were just meat. It was droning, like a firetruck, only made of her voice; her cigarette-singed lace-made melody. I’d been in line for eight hours when the frenzy hit. I was in red ballet flats, ribbon to my knees. Still, I ran. Beside me: carabiner bleeding keys, dye-stripped jeans, skinned shins, bleached pits, bloody nose; we ran, ran. We ran. Rapturous scrum, our bodies splitting like red yolks; one river, one thrum, one beat, one immaculate desire. We ran. The stage was gated off when we hit it, but the barricade was made of nothing but metal and men in hi-vis yellow who saw us and thought, perhaps: pigs. Or babies with pig faces, trick-or-treaters, witches. We stared at those men, and the men stared at our sequins, and we all played the same fairytale make-believe. That we were in our microwave safe-container, ready to be heated, to be squeezed dry like a tomato paste tube, tired out, depleted. That we would go home in our trains and on our phones, and we would unstitch our bodies from the burning, prophet-polished thrill of it. We were waiting for another two hours before she came on stage, and as soon as she did, it was done. She was our Diana, Artemis, and in our gin-sticky wilderness, we were her tree-free nymphs. She pulled apart like warm, moist pork in our fists, and as soon as we had her, we ran, ran.

Share

Contributor’s Note

The word cult is derived from the latin cultus; ‘worship.’ The word fanatic (from which the word fan likely developed) comes from fanaticus (also Latin), meaning ‘mad, enthusiastic, inspired by a god,’ which in turn comes from fanum (Latin again), ‘temple, shrine, consecrated place.’ So, worship. Then, who are our worshippers? Who are our idols? Who are our false gods?

When writing Fanatics, I wanted to dissect, dramatise, and poke fun at our cultural obsession with fangirls. In blessing a type of person that is perpetually at the centre of this conversation around idolatry, fanaticism and parasocial relationships with the literal traits and powers they are often perceived as having, I hope to offer an almost mythic look at young women who are imbued with ferocious passion; one that cannot be overlooked. When the concert stadium is a temple, and the popstar is a god, madness becomes divine intervention, song becomes ritual, and suddenly these ‘crazy fangirls’ are seers, oracles, prophets. And then, of course, when the switch flips, they are warriors and cannibals, armour made of friendship bracelets and tank tops and glitter. Either way, they are formidable.

Throughout Fanatics, our narrator refuses to stop moving. Yes, she runs, but she also evolves. When we meet her, she is one girl in a box-wine-dark sea of girls. She doesn’t stay that way for long. Swallowed by the crowd, our narrator becomes a voice of many. That switch is why I wrote Fanatics. I wanted to ask: what is there to fear in a collective of girls?

Leave a comment

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, June’s Micro of the Month theme was Love & Sex because June is stupidly hot (unless you’re in New Zealand and Australia…or I guess the North Pole…anyway). And well, boy did y’all deliver. Evan’s micro below rose to the top of our heated (pun very much intended) discussions because of just how wonderfully wild it was. By now, you might have picked up that we here at Strange Pilgrims love the outrageous and…uh…strange….Alright, get on with reading this fantastic piece and don’t miss out on the new theme announcement for July on Tuesday!

Subscribe now

The phone sex only starts to get interesting after the chainsaw comes into play. Months of long distance burns quick through the vanilla until all that’s left is the fun. It’s the last thing that Demi wants to wrap his hands around, but his boyfriend Arman whines about it, “want to hear the purr, honey. Taste the exhaust through the receiver. You wear it like perfume, y’know? When I’m there with you, we’ll hookup behind the sawmill, and I’ll lick the dust off your throat.”

So, fuck it.

In his moment of rest after jumping across continents, Arman sheds his flight attendant’s uniform and rests in the mess. He tangles the hotel’s landline between his fingers and presses the plastic to his ear until the cartilage is flat and flush. “I want the blades.”

Demi kneels in his bed, the phone laying before him adrift in a sea of white sheets. He holds tight despite sweat-slicked palms and hovers the whirring belt above the microphone. Veins throb as the two-stroke engine hums. He can’t hear his love from so far away, but he must be close. The blades are singing to him.

When his grip slips the choir crescendos as they cleave through glass and black plastic.

They don’t even get to say goodbye, goodnight.

Share

Contributor’s Note

There’s a certain romanticism to a desire left unsatisfied. It keeps us hungry. Demi and Arman are starved, and desperate to circumvent the barriers between them however they can. They each, in a way, em

body these specific sexual tropes and the elements that draw them together and keep them apart are derived from the professions that define them—the lumberjack and the flight attendant. That’s the kind of dysfunction that I find interesting, the kind that makes my mind spiral, and it works well for a micro. The form allows you to erect new barriers, and it invites the reader to linger in the lust alongside your characters.

From there, Arman brings the distance, and Demi the toys. Together, they make the phrase “fuck me with a chainsaw” into a nice fantasy.

Leave a comment

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you the winner of our second Micro of the Month challenge! The theme was Rabbits and you guys…I had no idea y’all loved rabbits so much, haha. Karan and I moved this month from the US to Canada and mostly what we were reading during that time was your micros on rabbits…it was a delightful experience and I’d have it no other way! I hope you enjoy the piece we’ve picked as much as we did.

Details for June’s Micro of the Month Writing Challenge

Opens: NOW!

Closes: June 3, Midnight

Theme: Love & Sex

Submit here →

Subscribe now

I lift the kit from her cage to cradle her lop-eared comfort. She knows my hands. She knows the dark. Light. Alfalfa, piss, droppings. Her mother’s teats, my human smell. To be so small, to be made airborne, placed on my long thighs. She doesn’t bite. Maybe she should.

We are entangled, this baby and I, two hearts beating. If it’s a race, hers is winning. Mine is in the running. She can’t know promises, the ones I’ve made, the ones I’m breaking—how hard it is to be honest to oneself. She can’t know the voice in my head and how it’s different from what I say to you out loud, how even the truth I tell myself is fiction, how everything I know is a story that I’ve shaped.

What can she know of story? So sits this baby with her translucent ears, her tiny brain of happiness, or anxiety, or indifference. She might know my cardigan is her relative. She might feel me shrink when you appear. She doesn’t know the splintered guitar, or where I’m bruised. I stroke the unearthly soft of her, or earthly, for what is she but of the earth. She doesn’t wear a watch. Or read the news. Better than the poet, she knows the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. She would eatthe flower. I will eat the roots.

Share

Contributor’s Note

What does a tiny rabbit, a “kit,” newly arrived on the planet, feel when I put it on my thighs and stroke it—it, with 40 million years of deep instinct as prey, knowing it is edible, and what that does to the heart—and me, as predator. I delight in its adorable self. Soft. Vulnerable. Safe in the knowledge it won’t bite. Does it feel safe? Or is its stillness an act of self-preservation? I have voices in my head about which it can’t have a clue. It knows what it knows, which we underestimate if we’re being true to form. I’m interested in how animals perceive their lives, how we perceive ours in that context. We are, as a species, egocentric, but each being, walrus, kit, scarlet mite, is equally as important to itself. I feel reverence for those unique lives. Here, the leap to fiction becomes what happens when you put these worlds and consciousnesses together, when the human is a different kind of vulnerable. Or is she? She is psychological prey. She is thinking that everything she knows is a construct in her mind. Maybe she’s thinking she should bite. She is thinking this rabbit knows something deeply fundamental, something important, something she doesn’t.

Leave a comment

LEAF SHEEP

Poems about animals. Poems about us (with animals). All the creatures, great and small, one poem at a time.

By D M Gordon

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you our first ever Micro of the Month! We received 473 entries for this call which was open for just three days and it was especially difficult to pick a winner. Ultimately, Meg’s charming piece emerged as the most delightful and also with a sweet spin on our April theme of The Fool.

MOTM submissions will always open the first three days of each month and the theme will be announced either the day before or the day of. For May, you’ll get an email on April 30 for the May theme alongside the submission link.

All submission call posts will have a dedicated section now and you can turn notifications for these posts and emails on or off here.

Subscribe now

That year Mr Potato Head became Anya’s changeable dad. He wasn’t a mad dad or a bad dad or a sad dad or a rad dad. He was kind, simple, mute. Wore a blue plastic hat and had flabby lips. His pets were sea monkeys and his friends were matchstick people and his eyes were round as moons as they stared straight ahead in a foolish way. As a nose, she screwed in a pink ear. He looked like a misunderstood dork, off-kilter but kind— the sort of person one might meet at the grocery store and feel sorry for, the kind of man her mother, once she grew nicer again, might invite over for a bowl of homemade vegetable soup. After a while, shoots grew out of his head. When Anya felt mad at him she poked in a villainous moustache and sunglasses, replaced his ear-nose with a bulbous orange blob. Then, she took him for a ride all over the neighbourhood, potato juice stinking up her fingers.

Share

Contributor’s Note

Write about a toy and expand into a bigger metaphor

There’s a good deal of unspoken backstory in “Mr. Potato Head”. It’s told from the point of view of a young character who was removed, when very young, from her unstable father and who now lives alone with her angry, divorced mother. The micro derives its strength from small physical details about what having “a dad” means from her changing perspective. It is a collage piece of imaginary masculine features and vague memories of a father, never knowing what to make of him in hindsight. It is also a story of how sad it is, to Anya, that her mother has become closed off and untrusting. The plot, if you wish to call it that, is internal, psychological. Anya is trying to make sense of it all by doing something active (ie making a changeable version of a dad by swapping his features) and she takes the reader on this exploratory journey. I love writing from a child’s point of view. Kids are highly creative and resilient, which balances the fact that they are also endlessly vulnerable and too trusting.

Leave a comment

Microfiction Workshops & More with Meg Pokrass

Meg's upcoming workshops posted here. Paid subscribers can participate in a private "submissions support group" on a bi-monthly basis, hosted by me. Subscribers receive $10 off of Meg's solo-taught workshops and editing requests per project.