Matt Kendrick
Writer | Editor | Teacher
WELKIN PRIZE 2026 - HIGHLY COMMENDED
Time for Tom to Go
by Emily Rinkema
I’d had Tom the Cat for two years when I started dating Tom the Man. I joked with my friends that Tom the Cat didn’t like Tom the Man, that jealousy made Tom the Cat friendlier, that Tom the Man slept with one eye open. Eventually, the modifier slipped into parentheses—Tom (cat) stopped eating regularly, Tom (man) started scratching himself, Tom (cat) spent too long in the bathroom—before it was dropped altogether. I complained to my friends that Tom stayed out too late, that Tom’s shit was all over my apartment, that Tom’s licking had become distractingly aggressive.
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, Best Short Fictions, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology, and has appeared in journals such as Vestal Review, JAKE, Flash Frog, and SmokeLong Quarterly. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).
Judge's comment:
There's a lightness to this piece that immediately drew me. It has a subtle humour to it, but there's also so much wonderful world and character building as well as a clear progression through several narrative stages. This is writing with so much skill despite its 'light' veneer.
