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Winner of the 2022 Fiction Chapbook Contest, selected by Isle McElroy Tucker Leighty-Phillips builds a series of mythologies; of childhood, of Appalachia, of seeing the world through the 3D glasses of poverty. The stories in Maybe This Is What I Deserve dip their toes between sentiment and surrealism-a whirlpool swallows a boy in a family swimming pool, a girl befriends the lice her mother can't afford to eradicate, a group of children form a secret society in the walls of a fast food play place. Using the logic of childhood across kids and adults alike, Leighty-Phillips builds a world filled with wonder and tells a new story of working-class, rural living. With prose that constantly surprises and pleases, Maybe This Is What I Deserve is the kind of flash collection that will make you rethink how you see the world. Beneath the arresting imagery of sweaty mashes of bills and noses flowing like gratitude is the heartbeat of an author equally invested in language as character. These stories shock, they entertain, and they stick in your mind.-Isle McElroy, author of The Atmospherians and People Collide I love Tucker Leighty-Phillips's wild imagination, his privileging of the emotions of childhood, his ability to find the magic that's ever-present in the messiness of community. In Maybe This Is What I Deserve, Leighty-Phillips delivers us a surrealism suffused with joy and generosity and wit, grounded in sincere love for Kentucky and for the irrepressible potential of its people.