Welcome to this week’s edition of Submit Your Stories Sunday. Every week I bring you a unique call for submissions to help you find a home for your stories or inspire a new one. Each call will contain a speculative element and will offer payment upon acceptance. Next, I’ll recommend a story to inspire your submission and help newer writers understand how to fulfill a call’s thematic elements.

This week Abyss and Apex is opening soon for flash fiction and we’re reading The Gifted Sommellier by Grayson Bray Morris from the Abyss and Apex archives.

Abyss and Apex Magazine

Eligibility: imaginative, character-driven, speculative flash fiction, defined as less than 1250 words.

Take Note: flash fiction submissions are to be included in the body of your email, not a separate, attached document.

Submit by: The flash fiction opening is vaguely defined as “the first week of August,” which suggests August 1st to 7th. I recommend submitting early to avoid disappointment on the 7th.

Payment: $0.06 per word

Click here to go to the original call for details.

A story to ignite your imagination:

Today’s story comes from Abyss and Apex‘s flash fiction archives, The Gifted Sommellier by Grayson Bray Morris. You can read it on the Abyss and Apex website by clicking here. TW for discussion of abuse.

The Gifted Sommellier introduces us to a wine expert (or sommellier) who serves the dead the perfect vintage to help them pass on. For reasons unrevealed, the Sommellier and the woman who asks for their help, have not crossed over. Instead, they serve the dead with honor and respect inside a strange hotel which hints at a much larger world in the ‘Divinika’. Throughout the story, the Sommellier collects clues from the woman as they narrow the possibilities of who she is and which wine will send her to the mysterious next.

This is a brooding, imaginative tale of considerable depth. Morris gives a single sip from the life of the Sommellier, a story told from their perspective and spurred on by their desire to solve problems. They thrive on finding the wine to release a trapped soul. The harder ones are the most fulfilling. As such, their character drives the story.

If you read through the other stories available in Abyss and Apex‘s archives, you’ll find the stories are written with a similarly lush prose as Morris used. Another fine example is the wonderful short story One Soul, Parchment Thin by Calder Hutchinson, which is a feast of delicious prose. Write your loveliest, poetic lines for Abyss and Apex, writers. Good luck.