"The Ant and the Grasshopper" / Michigan Quarterly Review

A lot of story in a small space.

Check out “The Ant and the Grasshopper” by Hema Padhu in Michigan Quarterly Review (1,500 words). In a very small space, Padhu tells a poignant, fully-realized story…and…through the judicious use dramatic tools, turns it into something chilling.

In the opening, an adversarial tone is immediately set. A child narrates. Her parents both work at the same bank. Her mother (Amma) is in management. Her father (Appa) is a union organizer.

“Your Amma,” her father says, “is who we strike against.”

From there we learn everything we need to know about the family. And the facts reliably toggle back and forth, between care and neglect, between ease and upset. Between the ant and the grasshopper.

Neither mother nor father is spared. Since the child narrator is reflecting back from adulthood, a clear perspective is taken. But that doesn’t stop Padhu from making a case for and against both.

And it serves the drama of the story well. As facts accrete—the gift of a stuffed animal from dad, a chosen bedtime story that mother prefers and child does not, a duffle packed with clothes for mother and daughter, but not father—we see where we’re headed. But when we arrive, Padhu gives us the best of all possible endings: one that’s different than what we expected, one that’s entirely believable, and one that knocks us sideways.

And as if that isn’t enough, when you finish the story, go back and re-read the first line again. It reframes everything. Even where the ending left us. Love that :)

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According to their Fiction Editor, Michigan Quarterly Review is looking for “stories that draw the reader into an intimate relationship with a voice, a consciousness—that give us characters who feel particular and alive.” She wants to “laugh, and cry, and marvel at how the writer has managed to capture truths big and small.”

Michigan Quarterly Review is open for submissions through April 1^st. They reopen on August 1^st through November 1^st for stories up to 7,000 words. All stories accepted for publication will be passed on to a judge as finalists for the $2000 Lawrence Prize.

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