The Hall of Sleeping Stories is Audrey Penn's Substack, a resting place for fiction and poetry, finished or unfinished, that was never meant to be marketed or explained. Audrey invites writers to submit their work to rest in the Hall rather than be lost. For each story she accepts, she creates original artwork as a title plate.
Both stories on this page were submitted elsewhere first and rejected. I am including the rejection letters in full, because I think it helps other writers to see that rejection is a normal part of the work and not a verdict on it. These two editors took the time to say something specific. Not every rejection does. A wall of silence is its own kind of answer. These were not that, and they were the better for it. The stories found a home in the Hall instead.
Sleeping Story · One
The Advancing
Short Fiction · Published July 2026
In a rented room in Manhattan at the turn of the century, Judith Alden measures everything. Rooms, streets, the distance between a man and a curb, the silence after midnight. The habit began in childhood, in Lenox, in 1885, when her uncle killed her brother by the woodpile and then himself. In the weeks that followed, the ground too frozen for burial, her mother began to mark the parlour floor in pencil. Not where the coffin was, but where it had been. Judith watched the marks multiply, counted them, and never asked. In Manhattan, fifteen years later, she still measures. Some habits are not habits at all. They are survivals.
Originally submitted to
Space & Time · Prepare to Advance
Angela Yuriko Smith, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
The Rejection
Thank you for trusting me with "The Advancing" and giving me the opportunity to consider it for "Prepare to Advance" of Space & Time.
This piece was among the finalists, and I returned to it several times while building the issue. I loved the way Judith's habit of measuring becomes both the story's structure and its lasting wound. The image of the coffin advancing night by night, marked in pencil across the floor, is terrifying, and the line about her fearing both that Sloane would reach Thomas's room and that he would not gives the haunting a powerful emotional complexity. The final realization that some habits are really survivals stayed with me.
Ultimately, the decision came down less to the strength of the individual work than to the larger narrative arc created by the selected pieces and how their themes, emotional movement, and endings worked together as one complete reading experience. As much as I admired this piece, it did not fit the final composition closely enough for me to include it.
I know a rejection can feel much larger than a single editorial decision, but that is all this is: one decision made for one particular issue. A pass does not define the value of your work or close the door on future submissions.
I sincerely hope you'll send me more of your work when submissions reopen.
Angela Yuriko Smith · Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Space & Time
Sleeping Story · Two
She Mended Everything
Flash Fiction · Published August 2026
After her mother's funeral, a woman sorting what remains finds the sewing box beneath the winter coats. Her grandmother's box, kept shut, the lining stitched down with black thread in her mother's hand. Under it she finds paper strips, pressed flat, with words that will not reassemble into anything innocent. Her grandmother left a note. Someone cut it into pieces and sewed it into garments, hems, linings, decent things the family had washed and worn without knowing what was inside them. Her mother must have known, or found them young. The narrator had told her own children there was little of their great-grandmother to remember. She had repeated the family mercy without knowing she was doing it. She picks up the needle to mend the lining. Her hands know the work. Then she puts it down and leaves the box open on the table.
Originally submitted to
Fractured Lit OPEN
Guest Judge: Pamela Painter · Tommy Dean and the Fractured Lit Team
The Rejection
Thank you so much for submitting "She Mended Everything" for consideration in our Fractured Lit OPEN, judged by Pamela Painter.
I am sorry that your submission was not selected for the longlist. We are also declining it for consideration in our regular submission queue. Unfortunately, we have to decline some good pieces, but we are grateful for the chance to read such high-quality work.
We wish you the best of luck with your writing. We hope you will consider submitting to us in the future.
Tommy Dean and the Fractured Lit Team
The contrast with Angela Yuriko Smith's note is instructive. Angela named the story, named the image that stayed with her, and explained the specific editorial reason it did not make the issue. The Fractured Lit letter does none of those things. It declines the story for both the competition longlist and the regular submission queue in the same breath, without explanation for either decision. The sign-off, Tommy Dean and the Fractured Lit Team, suggests the letter was not written for this story in particular. I wrote back asking for more. I received no reply.
