Matt Kendrick
Writer | Editor | Teacher
WELKIN PRIZE 2026 - SHORTLISTED
Things My Brother Explains With Absolute Authority
by J.M.C. Kane
Ghosts don’t float, they lean. Rain remembers its shape. Trees have to rehearse being quiet or they creak too much. Our mother is not gone; she is between windows, and the wind knows how to hold her. I ask if that means she might come back, and he shrugs, like it’s math that’s already been solved somewhere I can’t see. Outside, the sky folds itself into smaller and smaller pieces. I try to believe in the kind of rules that save you. He says believing isn’t part of it. Things stay. Or they don’t.
J.M.C. Kane is an autistic writer from England, though now claimed by New Orleans, who has spent most of his adult life trying to fit long stories into short boxes. He has worked as a paperboy, a contracting executive, and an amateur cataloguer of human regret—none of which he was formally trained for. He was formally trained as a lawyer, but he is, frankly, a better cataloguer. His fiction has appeared in almost three-dozen journals that appreciate compression—and his willingness to obey word counts.
