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| Issue 33: | August 2026 |
| Cheribun: | 131 words |
By Tina Barry
One Raccoon Down
While the staff of a liquor store in Virginia were tucked in bed, snoring off their Thanksgiving turkeys, a raccoon dubbed the “Masked Bandit” skittered to the store’s roof, pried a tile loose, and plunged down, dragging a bunch of bottles with it—not the cheap stuff either: Johnnie Walker Blue. The Macallan 18-year-old Single Malt, and a bottle of organic, small-batch bourbon for $500 bucks. A video of the creature shows it momentarily stunned, then, like a hirsute, mini frat boy, pulling itself to its paws, moaning and squeaking, then rolling in puddles of booze and glass before collapsing on the floor.
What a shock for the store’s clerk, who switched on the queasy fluorescent light the next morning, to find the raccoon, face down, spread-eagled, still drunk.
—Short-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #4
Tina Barry’s
third collection, I Tell Henrietta (with art by Kristin Flynn), was published in August 2024 by Aim Higher Press, Inc. Tina’s first two books were released by Big Table Publishing: Beautiful Raft (2019) and Mall Flower (2016). Her writing can be found in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Journal, The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and TBSF 2016, The Fourth River, Gone Lawn, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Maryland Literary Review, Nasty Women Poets anthology, ONE ART, Rattle, South Florida Poetry Journal, Sky Island Journal, SWWIM, trampset, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
She has five nominations for the Pushcart Prize and several Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nods. Tina is a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.
Author’s website: TinaBarryWriter.com
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ I tell Henrietta that before I left my boyfriend and It’s Ed Sullivan’s Fault, microfictions by Tina Barry first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 18, April 2023), and reprinted in her collection I Tell Henrietta (August 2024)
⚡ Inside the amazing brains of Laura Rodley, Tina Barry, & Robert Slais by Big Table Publishing in Boston Literary Magazine (February 2023); includes Tina’s poem “Lilies”
⚡ Beautiful Raft: An Interview with Tina Barry by Hannah Grieco in Empty Mirror (28 February 2020)
⚡ “A Friend’s Daughter Dies” by Tina Barry in American Poetry Journal (Issue 14, Summer 2017)
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