Abbreviated and enormous, hand-held and vast, portable and rooted—the short prose piece seemingly cannot exist in nature. The form is essential because of this particular magic, this echo of the colossal in the diminutive. The world comes to us in shards of story and insight; any attempt to believe otherwise is pretense. “Nothing can be done except little by little,” says Charles Baudelaire, affirming the prose short’s isolation, and no form is too small for philosophy, argument, drama, voice, scene, lyricism, abstraction, clarity, or epiphany, qualities eternally sought in art. The dimensions of the short prose piece are apt and inevitable for twenty-first century compression and expansion. Call it an artful and humane ZIP file. Lucky for its readers, what’s on offer is the whole of experience.
Alarming and moving, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s “Animals Do Not Commit Delusional Acts” incisively essays the human propensity for self-deception. Though delusion has been around since the fifteenth century, Bertram suggests, in language both clinical and avid, that we’ve been deluding ourselves since the beginning of time: romanticizing, intellectualizing, rationalizing, lamenting. Meanwhile, animals—in their less-precious, sweet, perpetual realm of nose-and-instinct, “being-to-being”—trump our inward fallacies with dispassionate, bloody methodology. In this fabulous short Bertram asks, Who’s more true to the world’s brutal laws?
Joe Bonomo
Contest Judge
