Blink-Ink: Coyote Stories

Overview
Blink-Ink, a magazine long devoted to the very short story, has issued a themed call for fiction concerning coyotes and tricksters. The prompt is deliberately porous: howling at a distance, trickery close at hand, shady dealings, fabrication and deceit, charming invitations and hidden motives. The coyote is invoked both as animal and as archetype—a figure of appetite, cunning, and boundary-crossing—and contributors are asked to consider it among friends and foes alike. The constraint is severe and exacting: approximately fifty words. Within that space, narrative must be implied as much as stated, and every word must earn its place. The magazine operates online and remotely, and the submission process is correspondingly direct. There is no fee to submit. Work is to be sent in the body of an email to blinkinkinfo@gmail.com; attachments, poetry, bios, and AI-generated content are explicitly excluded. The reading period is fixed: September 1 through October 15, 2026. The magazine describes its response time as fairly quick, a courtesy that respects the contributor's time and the brevity of the form. What is sought is not merely a joke about a wily animal but a compressed fiction in which trickster logic—deception, appetite, the unstable boundary between charm and menace—does real narrative work. The editors have set a frame wide enough for fable, noir, anecdote, and the uncanny, but narrow enough that only fully realized miniatures will survive it. This is a call for writers who understand that fifty words is not a limitation but a form.