The Leg in Question

What if the body, your own body, or someone else's, became the most unreliable narrator you've ever met?

From post-World War I New York to pandemic-era Savannah, from the quiet kitchens of Maine to the heat-soaked streets of Malaysia, THE LEG IN QUESTION unravels the strange, haunting, and often darkly funny ways our flesh betrays us. A young woman insists her healthy leg must be removed. A physician faces ghosts of the living and the dead. A mountain cabin turns feral. A debutante circuit shields a gay man on the cusp of a terrifying new epidemic. Across fifteen stories, doctors and patients collide in moments where the body's mysteries, its failures, obsessions, hungers, and grief, expose the fragile seams between sanity and longing. These are tales of medicine and mortality, yes, but also of the tender, reckless, astonishing human spirit trying to make sense of it all.

K.W. Oxnard's short story "Belle of the Ball" won first prize in the 2024 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, and her work has been a finalist for the Chester B. Himes Memorial Short Fiction Contest; the North Carolina Writers' Network Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize; the Conium Review Innovative Short Fiction Contest; and the CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest, among many others. Her fiction appears in Story, Mom Egg Review, Columbia Journal Online and Tahoma Literary Review and other literary magazines. A graduate of New York University's Masters program in fiction writing and a recipient of multiple residencies at Hambidge Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, she also won Honorable Mention in the 2021 december Magazine Curt Johnson Prose Awards in Fiction. Oxnard's work also appears in anthologies, including Draw Down the Moon from Propertius Press; and Desire: Women Write About Wanting from Seal Press. After many years teaching writing at the college level, in 2004 Oxnard moved back to her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, where she lives and writes surrounded by Spanish moss and childhood memories.