Spring Contest Winners

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of the debut novel The Five Wounds (Norton, 2021), as well as the story collection Night at the Fiestas, which won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for a debut book and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Quade has also received the Narrative Prize and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She is an assistant professor at Princeton.

Photograph by Holly Andres.


2013 WINNER



FIRST PLACE WINNER






Nemecia

A Story

by Kirstin Valdez Quade

Selected for the Best American Short Stories, 2013, and the
O. Henry Prize Stories, 2014

There is a picture of me standing with my cousin Nemecia in the bean field. On the back is penciled in my mother’s hand, Nemecia and Maria, Tajique, 1929. Nemecia is thirteen; I am six. She is wearing a rayon dress that falls to her knees, glass beads, and real silk stockings, gifts from her mother in California. She wears a close-fitting hat, like a helmet, and her smiling lips are pursed. She holds tight to my hand. Even in my white dress I look like a boy; my hair, which I have cut myself, is short and jagged. Nemecia’s head is tilted; she looks out from under her eyelashes at the camera. My expression is sullen, guilty. I don’t remember the occasion for the photograph, or why we were dressed up in the middle of the dusty field. All I remember of the day is that Nemecia’s shoes had heels, and she had to walk tipped forward on her toes to prevent them from sinking into the dirt.

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