2nd Place Fiction: "Cities of Refuge" by Tanya Rey

Cities of Refuge centers on a young Cuban-American man wanted for murder in 1995 Miami, and the mother and sister who must wade through the family’s troubled past to find him.

"They hear it coming down the long hallway leading to the warehouse. It’s the same hallway the children had been led through, blind to their fate, when one of their mother’s new friends from the botanica—a woman with eyebrows penciled into upside down Vs—had taken them by the hand and told them they were participating in something special for their mother. A party, she said with her whole face. The most beautiful, funnest party they could ever imagine."

Bio: Tanya Rey (she/her) is a queer Cuban-American writer based in Oakland, CA. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Granta, The Sun, The Georgia Review, Roads & Kingdoms, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Catapult, among others. www.tanya-rey.com