The PATH Anthology: PATH Anthology Vol. 2 Short Story Contest

Overview
The PATH Anthology is a themed anthology series organized around a single speculative device: a vibrating technology that confirms whether a decision aligns with the user's life path. For Volume 2, the editors seek 25 short stories that engage this premise across a deliberately broad generic spectrum—Sci-Fi, Psychological Thriller, Dystopian Satire, Crime, Romance, and Literary Speculative. The anthology's curatorial logic is constraint as catalyst: by fixing one element, it invites writers to explore how a shared speculative mechanism refracts differently through distinct narrative traditions. The result is less a single-genre collection than a polyphonic examination of agency, certainty, and the technologies that mediate both. Selected contributors receive cash prizes and publication in the official PATH Anthology paperback and ebook editions. The call is open to writers at any stage, with no stated restriction on prior publication history. Submissions must be 1,000 to 3,000 words, and the PATH technology must play a meaningful role in the story—not merely appear as set dressing. The entry fee is $10 per story, a common model for independent anthologies that fund production and contributor payments without institutional subsidy. The editors' stated interest in genres from Dystopian Satire to Romance signals a curatorial appetite for tonal range and conceptual rigor over adherence to a single market category. Writers are effectively asked to treat the PATH device as a narrative instrument: a way to dramatize the friction between intuition and evidence, free will and prediction, intimacy and surveillance. The strongest submissions will likely be those in which the technology is inseparable from character and conflict, rather than a premise applied from without.