Nellie Downer’s “Immaculate” offers a Texas-sized opening line—“It was a big goddamned land”—before zooming in on a little car on a lonely road somewhere between Wichita Falls and the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. Rancher’s daughter Mae has just visited her sick father; now, “she felt sick, certain it was the thing inside her that caused the cement to buckle as she drove over it, like little her and her little car were some broiling force of choler and dudgeon come to exact a price, and the ground itself split in submission.”
Winner of this year’s Observer short story contest, “Immaculate” checks every box on the list of attributes guest judge Bryan Washington appreciates in short fiction: “stories with distinct voices, a keen sense of place, and a palpable intimacy.”
As you’ll soon learn, intimacy is a concept that covers a lot of ground. A big goddamned land. —David Duhr, fiction editor
