Quail Who Wears The Shirt by Jeremy T. Wilson

Tuesday night is trivia night, a night for produce market owner Lee Hubbs to swing by the bar with his cop friend, a night to down a few shots and avoid all the folks who’ve mysteriously been turning into quails. It’s a night to kick back and maybe get some action on the side from his employee/girlfriend before heading home to his wife and kids.

But this Tuesday’s different. An argument with the girlfriend, a little unintentional vehicular homicide of an unsuspecting cyclist, and the next thing you know, Lee’s life’s upended like a bushel of rotten peaches. Well, mostly upended. Because when you’re a fine upstanding citizen, and your victim is a quail-human ne’er-do-well who won’t be missed by society, who’s to say what’s right, really?

Jeremy T. Wilson’s The Quail Who Wears the Shirt is a magnificent Southern-fried meditation on guilt and karma, a fantastic and truly memorable work about the lies we tell ourselves and the truths that seep through despite our best efforts, a darkly comedic satire as strange and surreal as an onion pie.

Jeremy T. Wilson grew up in the South but now lives near a great lake. He is a former winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and the Hessman Trophy, presented by legendary principal Durward U. Hessman to the fifth grade student who could eat the most corn. He is the author of the short story collection Adult Teeth; his work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Masters Review, Sonora Review, Third Coast, The Best Small Fictions 2020, and other publications. He prefers pie over cake, bourbon over scotch, and R.E.M. over U2.