Hanna Bahedry: 25th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Awards Winner

See the full list of winners here!

Pretty much from the moment I had the fine motor skills to grip a pencil and form letters. I started off in first grade writing elaborate fantasies in my journal about what my dog did when we left the house. As a kid, I’d write books to give as gifts to my cousins when we went to visit them over the summer. I wrote short stories and humor pieces for fun in high school, majored in English and Creative Writing in college, and got to work writing a collection of short stories after graduation. Basically, I never had a shot at doing anything else.

Half of good writing is editing. How can you say what you mean—no more, no less? The constraints of the short short form force you to get to the point and sharpen your prose until it’s precise and deadly. Plus: everyone’s attention spans are so dilapidated these days, you’ve got a much better shot of a reader actually making it to the end of your story if it’s bite-sized.

I was reflecting on a trip I’d taken to Vegas and just how surreal a place it is: the giddiness, the headiness, the buoyant feeling that something wonderful is about to happen at any moment—and also the griminess, the hollowness, the endless tease that never seems to come to fruition. I ended up exploring that double-edged feeling through the lens of a relationship between two people stuck in a toxic cyclical pattern with one another, a dynamic that keeps approaching what feels like love or connection or pleasure but never quite reaches it.

I got pretty much the entirety of the story down in one sitting during a writing session at a local cafe. (That’s another joy of the short short format: being able to hack up a full story in a moment of inspiration and then get straight to polishing it.) The version that won the award actually changed very little from that first draft—I made a few tweaks to tighten and clarify things after running it by my workshop group, but this one came out “fully formed, ready to run,” as Ada Limón put it. 

Absolutely—like any self-respecting writer, I’ve got an Excel sheet that’s a tribute to the dozens of “no’s,” “nice no’s,” and “shortlists” I’ve received over the years. This was my first real win!

I was flipping through the back of Poets and Writers Magazine looking for contests and submission calls that aligned with what I was working on (I’m currently revising a linked short story collection about a bunch of college misfits—think Overcompensating meets A Visit From the Goon Squad by way of Mary Gaitskill). I saw just how many outlets were looking for stories with low word counts (3,000 or less), whereas most of the stories in my collection are over 3K. So I set myself a challenge to write something shorter than my usual work so I could try submitting to some new places, and this story popped out at exactly 1,000 words—the word limit for WD’s Short Short Competition. It felt like fate so I submitted it, promptly forgot I’d done so, and was so incredibly shocked when I received the acceptance email, I was convinced it was a very elaborate phishing scam. 

Keep writing, even if it’s just scenes and fragments, because the more you do, the more random pages you’ll have to stumble back on weeks or months or years later and say, “Wait, I wrote that? That could be something...” Keep a journal; use it to keep track of interesting things you notice so you stay attuned to the world. (You will want to remember the jacaranda tree that exploded all over your car, the smell inside that dive bar you stumbled into, the precise color of the sky the day after it rained.) Form or join a workshop with other writers—share your writing with them even and especially when it’s scary; learn how to give good feedback in a way that’s honest, helpful, and kind; and learn how to receive feedback without spiraling, getting defensive, or losing touch with your own instincts. Also, remember that a creative process is as powerful, finicky, and irrepressible as an ocean wave; even if you’re in a creative “low tide,” trust the process and remember that high tide is always coming back around.

Any minute now, the pleasure is coming. Any minute now, around the corner, the pleasure is coming. Any minute now, you’ll be turning the corner and the pleasure will bump right into you or the pleasure will be turning the corner and you’ll bump right into it; any minute now, you and the pleasure will collide and send a tray of fluted champagne glasses flying; any minute now, you and the pleasure will collide and send one or both of you into the hotel pool and you’ll both be sopping wet and everyone in their deck chairs will cheer; any minute now, you and the pleasure will collide.

It’s Las Vegas, because of course it is. This is where the pleasure lives, but just around the corner always. Here is where the pleasure is circulating, but always away from you like a waiter on the casino floor. Here is where the hope lives, not just the hope but the absolute certainty that something magnificent is bound to happen, is right on the verge of happening, that all you need to do is close your eyes and stumble faithfully around the next blind corner to find it. The less you do, the better, actually. The magnificent thing is fated, it is on a course set straight for you, you are the Google Maps destination that the magnificent thing has plugged into the phone on its dashboard, and all you need to do is be here and wait for it to find you.

 Outside, it’s airless like a breath stolen straight from your chest. The heat and the diesel fumes combine in the city’s cocktail shaker like a drink no one wants, a drink left in a plastic-handled neon travel mug on the corner of an intersection wider than a pilgrimage. Under the sun, the asphalt cracks and the linoleum splinters and the paint peels like skin in long strips.

If outside is airless, then inside is all air, airheaded and heady, a balloon cresting a high ceiling like a tongue against a mouth’s roof, everything high high high, too high for gravity, too high for the earth to turn, too high for the clock to strike. Every watch stopped at 00:00, every pair of hands sky high and stuck there forever.

You don’t wear a watch. You wear black and not that much of it. You circle the casino floor like you are inevitable, and every flashing light, every winning shout, every tuneless slot machine jingle is for you. You wait at the bar. You are always waiting here, but that’s OK. Here you know that the pleasure is coming, that the magnificent thing is always already on its way to you. The bartender is making your drink, and then she is handing it to you.

When he arrives, he’s wearing black too: shoes, pants, shirt, jacket. No tie. He kisses you. He smells like the diesel cocktail from the streets outside. He has been working all day while you sat by the pool in the saline heat with a bright blue cocktail longer than your forearm. He takes a sip from your drink, takes your hand and presses it to his lips, to his heart, which you cannot see but which you assume is somewhere just under the black shirt, the chest hair, the silver chain.

He does not ask you how your day was, and you do not ask him how his day was. He asks you what you want to drink, and he orders two, and he looks into your eyes as if he loves you. It is the way he always looks at you, and it has always scared you because you do not know if what you are and what he is seeing are the same thing. When he looks at you like this, his eyes become bottomless, and you cannot tell where they lead.

He is smooth, so smooth, but underneath the smoothness, there is something spikey and ragged, something that sizzles like a live wire. When the smoothness wears away (which it always does), you know you will get burned. You are covered in these burns already, burns he kisses better once he’s done making them, covered enough to wonder if love is meant to require so much Neosporin. But for now, he is smooth, so smooth. His thumb is at home on your knee, and he is laughing when you laugh. You both have a second round and a third round, and when you get up, the room tilts on its axis like the whizzing eyes of a slot machine. His hand is at your elbow, your back, your waist, and the carpet is red and gold and everywhere.

He waits outside while you hack in the lobby bathroom, champagne and spit on the ends of your hair, which you wet clean in the sink. The mirror is huge, and you are inside of it, and you are gorgeous, even with your champagne and spit-wet ends, even and maybe especially with the hollow look in your eyes. When you are alone with yourself, the hollow thing inside your eyes you do not want to acknowledge gets louder and louder, and so you push back through the swinging door into the casino, which is always louder than your thoughts, the casino which always wins.

He is waiting there, and his eyes are sparkling with the bottomless thing that scares you. His arm is around your shoulder, guiding you through the lobby and into the elevator, where you watch both of your faces in the mirror on the ceiling. Sometimes you think you are always watching because you are waiting for what you are seeing to change into something that does not scare you. You watch for as long as you think it should take to change, and then you keep watching.

The hallway is long with many corners. An empty room service tray, there. You could order room service. You could do anything you want. That’s the whole point, that’s the whole point of coming here, all the infinite options for pleasure, all the infinite options. The door beeps red, then green.

You kiss standing up inside the room, near the door, away from the beds. He kisses your neck. You’re dizzy. You’re crying and you’re not sure why. He is kind, he is always kind when it happens, like a part in a script he knows how to play. Sometimes you wonder if you cry so you can get to the part where he is always kind. He’s running a bath, sitting on the white edge of the tub with one black sleeve rolled up, cuff wet like the ends of your hair. You know in the morning, he will be angry, that the bottomless tunnels in his eyes will close, and when you go to touch him, he will push you away like a punishment, but tonight he is kind. He undresses you and puts you in the tub and undresses himself and sits at the other end. You tell him you are sorry (which is true), and he tells you it’s OK (which isn’t). But he is tender with you now, and it is so easy to believe him.

When the water gets cold, he wraps you in a towel you wish was softer. You hold each other in the bathroom until your skin is sticky with dried soap. You always wish this part could last longer, but already his eyes are beginning to close in that way they do. In the morning, they will be all the way closed, and you will reach for him, and he will turn you away, so tonight you get under the covers and back your body up against his so you don’t have to watch it happen. Maybe it will be different this time when you wake. Maybe his eyes will be open, and when you look into them, you’ll see all the way down to the bottom, and what you see there will not scare you, and he will see you, and it will really be you. You think it should be possible. You think about it so often, sometimes you trick yourself into thinking it has already happened.

Any minute now, the pleasure is coming. Any minute now, you and the pleasure will bump shoulders at the bar, will reach for the same gilded button at the elevator bay, will beeline for the same blackjack table, and put your hands on the same empty chair. Any minute now pleasure’s car will pull up alongside yours on the highway with the windows down, any minute there’ll be a knock on the hotel room door and pleasure will be on the other side of the peephole, any minute now the lever will pull and the lights will flash and pleasure will come pouring out like dirty change right into your ready open palms, any minute now you and the pleasure will collide.